The widening of a three-mile stretch of Apison Pike is still on schedule, even though a concrete bridge beam for the project was smashed by a train in December, causing the train to derail, TDOT officials said.
Joe Deering, the assistant chief engineer for TDOT Region 2, said, “We don’t expect a big major delay in the project because of it."
He said the manufacturer in Atlanta immediately began work to recast the beam. The contractor, Wright Brothers Construction Company, is ahead of schedule, too, he said.
The project should be complete in July 2025 and will cost almost $97 million. This section of Apison Pike will be widened to five lanes, with three new traffic signals and five new bridges.
In a speech to the Chattanooga Engineers Club, Mr. Deering also touched on Governor Bill Lee’s Transportation Modernization Act of 2023. He said Tennessee faces three challenges: Urban and rural congestion, workforce shortages and expensive and slow delivery of TDOT projects from start to finish.
Tennessee’s lane miles are not keeping up with the state’s population, Mr. Deering said. The population is growing with new industry and families. Cookeville, he said, just hit 50,000 people, earning it its own metropolitan planning organization.
On average, Mr. Deering said, it takes TDOT 15 years to start and finish a project. Instead of counting on a 4-5 percent inflation rate for construction, TDOT’s new numbers indicate a “ridiculous” 8-20 percent, he said.
Redesigning TDOT’s linear process, which is easily delayed, to a matrix model, will save time and money, he said.
Within the Governor’s act is the Build With Us bill, which opens road projects to partnerships with the private sector. Mr. Deering said the money Tennessee saves with these partnerships will go to projects in rural areas.
“Choice lanes,” he said, would be extra roads build with private companies to help people avoid traffic for “a few bucks.” These are not toll roads, he said. Choice lanes are built in addition to essential infrastructure, and they aren’t the only way to get to a place.
Mr. Deering estimated that choice lanes and other private partnership projects would be mere years away, not decades.
TDOT’s workforce shortage is already aided, he said, by the current sentiment that college is not for everyone. He and workforce watchers across the world are eager for more technical and vocational high schools.
Regarding electric vehicles, he said, “We’re becoming a hub of electric vehicles in the U.S. He said only two-tenths of one percent of cars in Tennessee are electric, but the color of local industry will have its say in the near future:
He referred to Volkswagen's electric vehicle production as well as the new Blue Oval industrial park in West Tennessee, and the new Piedmont Lithium battery-grade lithium factory in McMinn County.