The Oregon Department of Transportation will start work this week on a problematic section of the Beltline Highway at Delta in Eugene. The goal is improve safety and traffic flow.

ODOT engineer Steve Templin says if you are driving east on Beltline and you want to get off at Delta Oaks, the off-ramp can get “pretty hairy” with vehicles merging and yielding and sometimes not yielding for each other.

Templin: “It’s a pretty antiquated system up there, especially with the increase in traffic we have now. So we’ll be changing that ramp, some of the other ramps. You’ll be on a separate alignment that pulls everybody away from the main bridge over if you’re just staying on the freeway. So, it’ll help with the operations of that intersection quite a bit.”

Templin says the majority of the work will be done at night and on weekends so there will be negligible disturbance to traffic. He says they plan to finish up by August of 2021, in time for the Track and Field World Championships in Eugene.