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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Updating Zierdt Road has been a project over a decade in the making.

There are currently three ongoing projects:

Rebuilding and widening the southbound lanes Preparing the roadway to handle the opening of residential and retail space, as well as baseball games come this April at Town Madison Adding lanes at the intersection of Martin Road

All of these are different projects, with different contractors, who are all working on top of each other. That often causes delays in itself.

One Zierdt Road resident, Bill Aycock, said he doesn’t understand the city’s priorities.

“It seems like this side of Huntsville, on the Madison side, we get nothing,” Aycock said. “They did Cecil Ashburn in close to just a year, and this has been going on at least five years, some people have said up to 10 years.”

There are new subdivisions going up along Zierdt Road as well as apartments being built in Town Madison– and rush hour traffic is already a nightmare.

“It’s been backed up from 565 for three miles all the way back to Martin Road,” Aycock said.

The city says delays are due to weather, utility conflicts, and material delivery.

“We are trying to get a new four-lane divided highway through there with multi-use paths to serve that community, but unfortunately this is the pain between the progress,” said director of city engineering Kathy Martin.

One project, however, has been completed. The city added two northbound lanes on Zierdt Road, but they’re not yet being used for traffic.

“With the multiple intersections that tie into the current Zierdt Road we’ve got to make those new ties to the northbound lanes, and unfortunately that means setting up signals as well,” Martin said.

The city says the completed northbound lanes are expected to support traffic by the summer, and hopefully, by the end of March, some utility conflicts will be cleared. But completion on all projects isn’t expected to be over till 2022.

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