The risks of road construction work
Exploring the dangers faced by road construction workers, including traffic hazards and extreme weather conditions.
- Westbound lanes will remain open during construction.
- Eastbound lanes will be detoured south to the Davison Highway.
Jay Lee paused in the middle of a thought as a woman in a blue Ford SUV handed him some clothing through a drive-through window on his dry-cleaning business in Lathrup Village.
“Two pants, two jackets, one blouse,” he said, reciting the items as he prepared her order.
Moments later, Lee continued his interview with a reporter about the impact of the upcoming closure of eastbound Interstate 696.
“So it’s going to be bad. I don’t know how I’m going to survive,” he said Thursday evening, a short time before he would close for the night.
Lee has owned Munson Cleaners on Southfield Road, just south of 11 Mile Road and I-696, since 1999. The eastbound lanes of the highway are scheduled to shut down Monday for two years of reconstruction.
Count Lee among the affected business owners and residents who are concerned about the impact. Not everyone the Free Press spoke with along the approximately 10-mile construction zone from Lahser Road to I-75 expressed concern, but many confessed to some worries.
For Frank Kabota, business at his 7-Eleven on Lincoln Street in Oak Park could be better now, so the prospect of lane closures on a major highway nearby doesn’t thrill him.
“I believe we’re going to lose business for two years. Business is already down,” he said. “Who knows what’s going to happen?”
But he’s also worried about the effect on his drive home to Sterling Heights. The details of the project weren’t clear to him as he spoke to a reporter.
As Kabota considered what it would mean, how much time it would add, he thought perhaps that trip might take an hour. It wasn’t clear.
A reporter showed Kabota a map with the closure area and recommended detour. He considered his options and began naming other streets he’s likely to take instead.
Mike Greene, city administrator in Lathrup Village, said the planning and discussions for what’s ahead have been underway for some time.
“You’re as prepared as you can be,” he said.
It’ll be a big team effort to make sure emergency services aren’t adversely affected.
MDOT plans for 100,000 daily drivers on detour
“It’s going to drastically increase the traffic on our mile roads that run adjacent to and through Lathrup Village, and there’s no doubt it’s going to increase traffic on our neighborhood streets,” he said, noting that travel times will decrease as people learn cut-throughs. “A lot of our staff … they’ve all either been game-planning new routes to work or have tested out new routes to work.”
The Michigan Department of Transportation has been doing a decent job providing information in a timely way, Greene said, noting he hopes to see that continue. Closing traffic eastbound between roughly the Lodge and I-75 is a big project.
“As long as they hold their contractors to the standard that they need, we should be OK,” he said. “Hopefully, this is a good project, and the road lasts for a good 20 years or so.”
The project, according to MDOT, envisions maintaining westbound traffic “while eastbound and westbound I-696 are rebuilt between Lahser Road and I-75. However, eastbound traffic will be detoured for two years via southbound M-10 (Lodge Freeway), eastbound M-8 (Davison Highway) and northbound I-75 back to eastbound I-696.”
Work is planned for the area from I-75 to Dequindre in 2027.
MDOT spokeswoman Diane Cross said the department planned for an additional 100,000 drivers each day along the 25-mile U-shaped detour, although many drivers, particularly those heading north of the project area, are likely to find their own way.
This is part three of a project that began years ago with reconstruction of the area between Dequindre and I-94, Cross said. Although some might feel the roadway isn’t that bad, Cross said it’s important to move forward while money is available and before the surface deteriorates and becomes a danger. This piece is expected to cost up to about $260 million.
The decision to detour eastbound traffic rather than maintain eastbound lanes of travel on the highway during construction is a result of limited space. The concrete walls in this area don’t allow for the necessary “wiggle room” to adjust the shoulders, Cross said, noting that road capacity in some sections determined which direction would be detoured.
Among the major destinations directly affected by the project, the Detroit Zoo might be the biggest.
Spokesman Jeff Sell suggested visitors follow MDOT’s designated routes.
“We encourage guests to check for the latest travel updates and allow a little extra time to know before they go, but once they arrive, they’ll enjoy an unforgettable experience connecting with animals and nature,” Sell said in a statement.
‘People will have to get used to it’
Stepping away from the grill for a few minutes during the Thursday lunch rush, Eddie Hanna said he sees an initial shock for maybe the first couple of weeks and then people will get used to the change.
It’ll become a “routine thing,” said Hanna, who has owned Eddie’s Gourmet Restaurant at Greenfield and Lincoln in Oak Park since 1984.
Hanna said his customers come from the east side and the west side. People have been talking, but so far, no one’s said they’re not planning to come in during the construction. Most of his staff lives on the east side so the trip home will take longer, but they should be able to get to work on time, said Hanna, who lives in Sterling Heights.
He expects he’ll be looking for shortcuts for his own trip home.
As for the impact on his business, Hanna said Greenfield will probably see more traffic and he has a “feeling it’ll be more busy … more in the way” of all that extra traffic.
At the Book Beat in the Lincoln Center Plaza a short distance north, Zoe Lask was behind the counter Thursday.
Figuring how much impact the project will have is not easy, she said.
“It hasn’t started yet. It’s hard to say.”
One regular customer, who had recently stopped in to “say goodbye to all my businesses on this side of town,” was being a bit overly dramatic, Lask said.
But the project has been a topic of keen discussion at all of the businesses in the strip recently.
Colleen Kammer, co-owns the bookstore with her husband, Cary Loren, and they live in Southfield.
“Isn’t it crazy?” she said of what’s coming, and then began considering how it would affect her own trips east to Grosse Pointe for book events. “People will have to get used to it.”
Lask said she expects most regular customers will find a way to get to the store that has been in business for 42 years.
That probably includes Hannah Moss, who has lived in Huntington Woods for 45 years and was having a stack of books rung up for purchase.
Moss recalled the days before I-696 opened and the “time factor” of traveling on 10 Mile for all those years.
“It’s a very long time not to have that highway. It’s a major inconvenience,” she said. “It will be an adjustment.”
Next door, at Street Corner Music, customers flipped though records and CDs and store manager Aaron Anderson said he’ll use the mile roads and Coolidge to get to his home in Ferndale.
A concern is that the closure will undercut what those working at the store tell potential customers about the convenience of stopping in, that it’s just one block north of I-696. He’s already thinking about how it might affect business on Record Store Day on April 12.
“People will still come,” he said.
Still, he considered those who might be eager initially and then find it’s a hassle getting home, what that might mean for a next trip.
But Anderson said the impact won’t really be clear for some time, and “we made it through the pandemic.”
He doesn’t question the work though. With icicles and leaking water in the underpasses, “it needs to be done. I just wish it (wasn’t two years).”
State of repair
In the lobby of Discount Tire in Lathrup Village, a customer, who said his first name, John, would be sufficient for a reporter’s purposes, tossed a question and answer back at the reporter.
“Does that area need repairing? Probably,” he said, noting that he uses I-696 “quite a bit.”
He offered that he likes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, known for her “fix the damn roads” slogan.
She’s done “a hell of a job,” he said.
John lives in Detroit, but he has places to go in the area around I-696, noting with a few waves of his hand that his dentist is about 3 miles north on Southfield Road.
On Thursday, John was waiting to get two tires on his vehicle. Just regular wear and tear, he said, not a result of potholes.
In the parking lot, James Thomas, an assistant manager who lives in Southfield, was inputting some information from a parked car into a handheld device. The eastbound closure would add time to his trip to work and it would affect business, he said.
“It’s going to suck,” Thomas said, describing issues from previous highway work that cut business to the shop.
“We were slow,” he said, (but we’ll be) “even slower when this thing shuts down.”
Shawn Mckee didn’t hesitate when a reporter asked her about the I-696 project.
“Oh, hell no,” she said, pausing after putting some items away at a 7-Eleven/Mobil gas station at Lahser and 11 Mile. “We don’t need it.”
The state’s “spending money on crap” that it doesn’t need to. Whitmer can find other roads to fix, she said.
“It’s not like it’s all bumpy,” she said.
Mckee lives in Clinton Township and the addition to her commute home to Macomb County will add another 20 minutes, she guessed. She, like some other folks she’d talked to, had assumed the westbound lanes would be closing because they’ve seen barrels farther east on the highway along the westbound lanes. Taking a closer look at the map and the information in an article about the project showing it would be the eastbound lanes that would be fully closing didn’t change Mckee’s view.
Business, too, will suffer, she predicted, with affected customers finding other places to stop.
“Nobody wants to take an extra 15 to 20 minutes to get where they need to go,” she said.
Alicia Adams, of Detroit, was on her way into the main post office in Southfield, a short distance from the highway shortly after 5 p.m. as a light rain began to fall and a line of customers waited near the counter.
It’s a “necessary evil,” she said, when a reporter asked for her thoughts. “Is our opinion going to stop it?”
Still, the condition of other roads, the Lodge for example, seem worse to her. But Adams acknowledged that knowing which roads need repair isn’t her area of expertise.
She knows one thing. It’s a “big inconvenience.”
Back at Munson Cleaners, Lee, the owner, said he fears the project could sap some of the recovery from the pandemic that upended life almost five years ago. Business is still far short of what he remembers.
“Since COVID, it’s dropped about half,” he said. “Now you come to this. What can I do?”
Lee, who lives in West Bloomfield, said affected businesses could catch a lifeline with some assistance, perhaps from the government. He said a friend who also owns a dry-cleaning business secured what he believes was about $25,000 through a grant because of a different road project some time ago. He wouldn’t mind hearing about something similar here.
For now, he sees a project that will have a definite impact on this business, which employs five people. But Lee also knows something about his customers, answering with simple conviction when asked whether people would make the effort to come to the store.
“Absolutely.”
Free Press staff writer Duante Beddingfield contributed to this report.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.
