Eric D. Lawrence

Detroit Free Press

If your daily commute includes driving south on I-75 from Detroit, mark your calendar for the weekend of Feb. 4 and maybe stock up on a few dozen extra audio books.

That's the planned date for the start of a two-year closure of the southbound lanes in order to rebuild the deck of the I-75 Rouge River Bridge, which is believed to be at the end of its useful life and has seen massive potholes open up in recent years. It was built in 1967 and, MDOT said it has spent $66 million on maintaining the bridge.

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This is a major project involving Michigan's largest bridge by deck area. (The Mackinac Bridge is longer, but with eight lanes at 8,675 feet in length, the I-75 Rouge River Bridge has a larger deck surface.) The Michigan Department of Transportation held a media roundtable event today in Detroit to lay out the details of the $149-million undertaking, which also includes several other bridge repairs and replacements farther south, such as at Fort Street and Goddard Road.

Northbound travel lanes will be maintained during the project, although they will shift in 2018 to the southbound side of the highway as the construction switches sides. The impact on traffic, officials said, would have been much greater if northbound traffic were to be detoured. The official detour will be I-96 west to I-275 south to connect back to I-75.

It's expected to add an extra 30-35 miles to the trip Downriver and will affect a huge volume of traffic because about 37 million vehicles cross the bridge every year. The tentative completion date is early October 2018, and the contractor is C.A. Hull of Walled Lake.

The complete closure of the southbound lanes and full detour will be for through traffic, but local traffic will be able to travel a bit farther on I-75. MDOT said its goal will be to maintain one lane for local traffic heading south to Springwells, where the interstate will be closed completely. The first re-entry point heading south in 2017 would be at Northline and in 2018 it would be the U.S. 24/Telegraph connected ramp toward Sibley.

Matt Chynoweth, MDOT's deputy region engineer, predicted that "like all of our big projects, it's probably going to be a little hectic" until drivers adjust to the change and find their preferred alternative route.

"People tend to react once they're faced with the detours. Will everybody be happy? Probably not," said Bill Erben, the official heading up the project and construction engineer at MDOT's Taylor Transportation Service Center. He noted that those involved with the project are trying to provide as much information as possible.

The project has been in the planning stages for the last five to six years, and MDOT sought to have other reconstruction and repair efforts finished beforehand — I-96 and I-275 for instance — to better manage the extra traffic.

Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence.

The project website is www.75rougeriver.com/