Preferred design alternative for Sterling Highway safety corridor introduced at town hall

Just under a year after the Sterling Safety Corridor Improvements Project was reintroduced at community town halls in Sterling and Soldotna, project leads again held gatherings to debut their “preferred design alternative” for renovation of the stretch of the Sterling Highway between around Whistle Hill in Soldotna past Swanson River Road in Sterling.

Town hall meetings were held in Soldotna on Tuesday and Sterling on Wednesday. DOWL Design Project Manager Steve Noble said during a recorded presentation that the project is intended to redesign and construct improvements to the highway to reduce the number of fatal and serious collisions. Those crash rates, on that stretch of road, “remain well above national averages.” The safety corridor was designated in 2009.

Previously, a project to redesign the corridor was set to enter construction in 2022, then describing a four-lane highway with a depressed median. That project was shelved because of public response and concerns about access. The new design, showcased by Noble and other project leads this week, features “roughly two-thirds” of four-lane road with a depressed median and the remaining one-third a five-lane road with a center turn lane.

That design, Noble said, was informed by feedback received at previous town halls and at public appearances at events like the Kenai Peninsula Sport, Rec and Trade Show. Public comment described support for more access to turn lanes, a bike trail, increased winter maintenance and a desire to see work happen sooner than later. Noble said opinions were more divided about whether to add streetlights through the whole corridor, whether the speed limit should be reduced or whether the new design should have four or five lanes.

A five-lane design, with a center turn lane the whole length of the corridor, “would not meet the overall objectives of significantly reducing fatal and serious injury crashes.” That’s why the new design features more four-lane road than five-lane road. There are other modifications to improve access described in the plan shared this week, like expansion of side street networks aligning median breaks with larger neighborhood and creating new “restricted crossing U-turns,” with enough space for vehicles as large as buses to exit traffic flow and wait for a safe opportunity to make a 90-degree turn into the opposite roadway.

There are five of those “RCUTs” described in the plan. Noble said they also plan to reduce the steepness of the intersection of Mackey Lake Road and the Sterling Highway to improve sight lines in an area with “the highest concentration of serious crashes.” At Soldotna Creek, he said, the plan is to construct a new bridge in place of a culvert that is undersized for flood flows. The plan also calls for continuous roadway lighting for the full span of the corridor and a new paved multi-use pathway along its side. The project, Noble said, will even include redesign of the intersection of Sterling Highway and Devon Drive — the stoplight in front of Fred Meyer.

The project design still needs to be finalized, Noble said. He expects to see clearing of trees in the corridor this fall and winter, before construction is projected to begin next week.

At the town hall, large maps of the project area were strewn across tables, and project leads fielded questions from residents and business owners about how they might access their properties or be affected by the new road design.

A full map of the project, and the video presentation shared during this week’s town hall meetings, will be available at sterlingsafetyimprovements.com “in the next day or two,” Noble said Tuesday night. As of Wednesday evening it hadn’t been posted.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.