Written by Neco Cockburn in the Ottawa Citizen

Roadwork is to begin this summer after a permanent solution was found to bumps in the road along a section of Highway 174, says Cumberland Councillor Stephen Blais.

A stretch of the highway between Montreal Road and an area east of the split with Highway 417 was well-known for its poor conditions. Last fall, workers ground down humps and sealed cracks in the highway as “interim measures” aimed at improving the road.

City officials have now settled on a permanent solution for the highway, which has problems stemming from how it was built. Inside lanes of the highway run over a concrete base, which moved at several joints.

Workers are to remove the concrete base from about 200 joints along a four-kilometre piece of highway and will replace it with asphalt before the entire stretch is repaved, Blais said on Wednesday.

Work on the “full-depth asphalt plug” is expected to start in mid- to late July and is likely to continue until late November, he said.

The city expects to spend about $5 million on the project, which has not yet been tendered, and money has been set aside as part of the Ottawa on the Move series of capital works projects, Blais said.

The roadwork is to be done during evenings and weekends in order to least affect traffic and some temporary ramp closures are expected, he said, adding that about 44,000 vehicles and 650 buses travel the stretch in each direction every day.

“One of the prime focuses was to ensure that we can maintain capacity on the roadway so that we weren’t negatively impacting commute times,” he said. The solution, Blais said, is “the most cost-effective and provides the minimal impact on commuters.”