Saw Mill Pkwy. Repairs to Bring Detours to P’ville Next Year

Motorists in Pleasantville should prepare for detours throughout much of 2016 as the state Department of Transportation (DOT) plans to close lanes on the Saw Mill Parkway to repair roadway bridges.

Representatives from the DOT recently presented plans to the village for the nine-month project, listing the possible detours that could be implemented while the work is done.

William Cromeek of the contracting group Echo III Enterprises of Yonkers said the bridges being replaced were not the vehicle overpasses on Bedford Road and Pleasantville Road that cross over the parkway, but the roadway that passes over water.

“The DOT calls a bridge anything that crosses a waterway,” he explained.

The project involves removing parts of those bridges, including the supports, where debris gets caught and leads to flooding.

Work on the Pleasantville Road bridge will start in late February and end in late October. The slightly shorter Bedford Road bridge will be renovated by September. Early work will be done with lane closures on the southbound side of the parkway.

Drilling and other work during the early phase would occur on the west side of the parkway during the day, while the eastern side would be done from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Part of the plan is a proposed 21-day detour that would take place next summer, sometime between July 10 and Aug. 26, where the new roadway bridges would be installed. During that time, the northbound side of the parkway will be split in half, with one lane open in each direction 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

All traffic will be prohibited from entering or leaving the parkway at Pleasant Avenue or Grant Street. There will be no pedestrian traffic at those locations.

“In rush hour in the morning, there will be one lane southbound,” Cromeek said. “During rush hour coming home, there will be one lane northbound. Because our job is from the middle of the Saw Mill Parkway to the west, the lanes get squeezed to the east. The existing two northbound lanes become one north and one south, so we wind up working on the west side of the southbound lanes.”

There is no bridgework planned in the northbound lanes, he said.

Some residents said they were concerned about the noise and bright lights for nighttime construction that would negatively impact quality of life. Pleasantville Avenue resident Steve Prizeman said work on the parkway last year made sleeping difficult.

“They had lights like a Broadway premier,” Prizeman said. “Are they going to have those lights again? I have two bedrooms that face that way and they had blinding lights on all night.”

Cromeek said they would try to divert the lights downward to avoid shining directly into homes, but said he would look into ways to mitigate light and noise pollution. He admitted that there would be noise through the night, but said it would be tolerable.

Cromeek also told village officials that work could be accelerated if the municipality allowed an additional three-month detour during the project’s first phase that would reroute traffic on weeknights off the southbound parkway and through the village. He listed several possibilities, with the most likely scenario being traffic turning left off the parkway onto Grant Street, then down Memorial Plaza to Marble Avenue, where it could then return to the parkway.

Left turns are currently prohibited from the parkway onto Grant Street; traffic systems would have to be modified to make that change possible.

“There will certainly be some hardships for everyone to endure, particularly the neighbors that live near that project,” Mayor Peter Scherer told residents during the Oct. 26 village board meeting immediately after the presentation. “A lot of the work will happen at night, (but) there certainly will be some noise.”

Scherer said the village could also benefit from the work in addition to getting a renovated parkway.

“The contractor has also expressed a willingness to make some improvements we would like to see happen, including much better pedestrian conditions over on the Pleasantville Avenue side of Grant Street, in exchange for having some detours through the village,” he said.