BELLEVUE, K.y. — At rush hour on a Friday, Pete Rose Way looks more like a parking lot than a multi-lane road.
One week after a fire closed the southbound lanes of the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge, drivers’ patience is waning with a new normal that involves a sea of brake lights.
Even though Tevin Williams’ commute from Taylor Mill to Bellevue doesn’t involve the Big Mac Bridge, his commute has doubled from 15 to 30 minutes.
It’s “terrible,” Williams said. “I'm always trying to get around traffic.”
It’s the same story for Julia Ransdell. For her, avoiding bridge traffic is a bridge too far.
“I've seen so much backed up from just that one area,” she said. “It sucks. I mean, it really does.”
The new driver said she’s trying to take it slow and stay cautious: “We're just taking it day by day and keeping one foot in front of the other and hoping nothing bad happens again.”
At The Party Source in Bellevue, General Manager Micah Dennison is trying to build bridges for detoured drivers.
“We've been really aggressive with our social media, emails, things like that, to make sure that people understand the different routes that they can take to get to us,” Dennison said.
While he said business has been slower than normal for this time of year, he said as a whole, it’s been okay: “I think the message that we're hearing is that, you know, yes, it took a little bit longer, but it wasn't that bad.”
It's a message his team has been trying to communicate with customers. Dennison said The Party Source will soon announce additional promotions as a way to entice more people to make the trip.
In the parking lot, there were plenty of Ohio license plates.
“It wasn't bad,” said one woman. “Going through town was a little worse than going through the [Big Mac] bridge.”
On Friday evening, the Ohio Department of Transportation said work to build and install shoring towers arriving from New Jersey could begin as soon as Monday.
Once in place, ”inspectors will take a close look at the damaged sections of the highway to determine the full extent of repairs and quantities of materials needed to make them,” according to a press release.
ODOT said that information will help them develop a timeline for repairs.
