Wayne County has broken ground on a project that’s supposed to reduce train delays in the Downriver area. 

The plan is to separate the railroad tracks from a section of Allen Rd. in Woodhaven. Crews will lower the road so that it runs underneath the tracks.

It’s a public safety issue

County Public Services Director Dayo Akinyemi says when it’s finished, trains will no longer delay traffic on Allen Rd. north of Van Horn Rd. He says it’s common for ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars to get stuck while responding to emergencies.

“This will make that problem go away,” he says. “Anybody that lives Downriver will know that this is a problem we’ve been trying to solve for a long time.”

Wayne County announced the grade separation project in 2020. Akinyemi’s predecessor, Beverly Watts, said at the time she hoped to finish it within two or three years.  

But in 2022, Watts estimated the job would cost about $28 million dollars. Rising expenses delayed the project and raised the price tag to $65 million. 

So, Akinyemi says county, state, and local officials worked together to come up with the money.

“There are several sources of funds that’s cobbled together to get us to where we are today,” he says. “There’s money in the state transportation department, some earmarks from the federal government, earmarks from the state Legislature.”

Another challenge was acquiring right-of-way to relocate utilities such as power lines, fiber-optic cables, and water mains.

How long will it take?

“We’ve started the relocation of the Verizon lines,” he says. “Once we finish that, DTE gas will come to relocate their own line.”

And Akinyemi says by fall, people will see a lot more activity in the area. 

“Next year, we’ll begin the real construction,” he says. “There will be a period of time when there will be a full closure and a diversion of traffic.”

More: MDOT aims to end Fort Street train delays Downriver

Akinyemi estimates it will take up to three years to finish the project. During that period, the Michigan Department of Transportation expects to begin work on a similar project on Fort St. north of Van Horn Rd. in Trenton. 

Michigan lawmakers are debating the best way to increase funding to maintain the state’s roads, but a new report from the Citizens Research Council argues that there are ways to make better use of the money the state already has available. 

Eric Paul Dennis, a research associate of infrastructure policy at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, says the biggest road block the state faces in distributing funds effectively for roads is Public Act 51.

“It was supposed to be a 15-year-long construction program. It was scheduled to sunset originally in 1967,” Dennis said. “And the idea was once we used these construction dollars to build out a road network, that law would be sunset and it would be replaced with something more appropriate for ongoing maintenance.”

However, instead of replacing the law with a more sustainable road funding approach, lawmakers have repeatedly amended it.

“I believe it’s now been amended over 300 times,” he said.

Dennis said one of the main criticisms of the current system is the outdated methodology used to distribute funding. He added that the state has better equipment and technology to assess the condition of roads, and can make better decisions on allocating funds based on that.

“We can automate data collection now, computers do everything. We send that data to a mapping server or something, and that can give us much more precise, much more usable information about what our road network looks like,” Dennis said.

A significant portion of that funding has been directed toward expanding highway capacity rather than maintenance.

“The money that we are getting, we’re spending a decent part of that putting down more and more pavement,” he said.

But Dennis said adding more roads will only increase spending in the long run.

“When you do that, you’re imposing long-term maintenance liabilities. Thinking about things like that, I think, would go a long way in assuring that we can get to a financially stable situation in our road funding,” he added.