Highways 23 & 10 Construction Project Ramping Up in St. Cloud

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- The second year of the Highway 10 and Highway 23 construction project is ramping up into high gear.

MnDOT Project Manager Rob Abfalter says they switched the Highway 23 traffic to head-to-head on Friday, so they can start working on the eastbound lanes. He says by the end of this week, Highway 10 will be head-to-head traffic on the southbound lanes, so they can start working on the northbound lanes.

By the time the project is done in early November, motorists will notice two new traffic lights on Highway 23 on either side of the bridge over Highway 10.

Yes, there will be signals there. I can say those signals will be optimized for traffic flow. There have been questions about how that's going to go. We'll have the best configuration we can to keep the cars moving up on the top there.

The new traffic signals are necessary because all of the on-and-off ramps will be on the south side of Highway 23 down to Highway 10.

Abfalter says there will have to be a couple of intersection lane closures this year with 14th Avenue Southeast by Kwik Trip closing for 28 days, and the east half of East St. Germain Street by Wendy's closing for 35 days. There's no timeline yet on when those will happen.

Abfalter says crews will be working on three big projects.

They are going to have three different crews here working on the various projects. The Highway 23 bridge, the new 4th Street bridge, along with the noise wall. So it's going to be quite a busy year.

Abfalter says they don't have a timeline yet on when the wall construction will begin, but the posts have already been built.

He says there will have to be some temporary closures on Highway 10 again this year when they set the beams for the new bridges.