Jackson Road Project Turns 5-Minute Drives Into Los Angeles-Like Nightmare Commutes

A three-week-long paving project on a main town entrance is clogging the already-congested tourist town of Jackson, Wyoming, turning some 5-minute journeys into hourlong jaunts, delaying school buses by more than an hour and amassing unexpected overtime payouts for employers with workers on the road.

While the local sentiment on the Highway 89/Broadway Avenue paving project ranges from “idiotic policies strike again” to “I’m just glad the potholes are getting fixed,” a bit of motorist confusion sparked by a possible signage problem made the delays much worse Monday than they ought to have been, authorities say.

“While the far right lane northbound was being paved — in the five-lane section — crews shifted drivers two lanes over,” Stephanie Harsha, spokesperson for the Wyoming Department of Transportation told Cowboy State Daily in a Wednesday email.

“However, due to the fact that the drivers weren’t comfortable driving in the turn lane like a through lane, and (due to) the construction sign at the start of the project, most vehicles did funnel into one lane," it reads.

Jackson Police Department Lt. Russ Ruschill was complimentary of the contractor, Evans Construction, and of the operations generally in a Wednesday interview with Cowboy State Daily.

But he attributed Monday’s chaos to a lighted merge sign conveying the wrong message.

“They tried to run two lanes northbound to take care of traffic coming up from Pinedale, Bondurant and Star Valley. But they had an arrow sign, one of those merge signs, illuminated,” said Ruschill. “Everyone interpreted it (as) they were supposed to funnel into one lane.”

That merge sign has since been removed, said Harsha. But the pavers have also changed the lane configurations since Monday.

She confirmed that Jackson PD is now helping WYDOT with its “variable message signs” and helping with additional signage.

Ruschill said traffic flowed better Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I would applaud Evans Construction for fixing and adjusting when they saw a pretty bad problem,” he said.  

Evans Construction did not immediately respond to a Wednesday voicemail request for comment.

In The Light

Social media outrage erupted Monday and Tuesday, around the same time that Teton County’s WYDOT bureau made multiple posts explaining its choices, such as why the pavers were working at day rather than at night and why they were working at the start of the school year.

Crews could mill off the old pavement during the night ahead of the paving portion of the project because milling doesn’t send as many people onto the road surface to work amid heavy equipment, Hasha explained in a phone interview with Cowboy State Daily.

But they chose to pave during daylight hours for worker safety and to maintain the 40-degree-plus temperatures the pavement needs for “proper compaction,” the agency’s statement adds.

They chose September for this daytime work because it’s outside the town’s summer/winter tourist booms, the statement adds.

“I have lived in numerous states throughout my life and have never seen such poor planning and mis-management (sic) of road traffic in all my life, and I’m not a spring chicken,” one woman commented under WYDOT’s post. The woman did not immediately return a Facebook message request for further comment. “Even in more populated areas, they make it work. Come on, you are better than this surely!”

Another resident pervaded the post with comments urging others to be grateful for the repair and understanding of the work complications. That resident cut short a Wednesday phone call from Cowboy State Daily and did not return a subsequent voicemail.

Hasha reiterated the necessity of the repair.

“The work is pretty critical for this section of roadway to extend its lifespan. It’s a heavily traveled road, and its surfaces were in dire need of maintenance,” she said, describing potholes and asphalt deterioration.

The new pavement is expected to last another 10 years, “give or take” and not accounting for Jackson’s harsh winters, she said.

Some residents who spoke to Cowboy State Daily lamented the town’s lack of alternate routes.

“There really aren’t a lot of side streets in Jackson that take you where you want to go,” David Weingart told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.

Some roads lead into neighborhoods, but Broadway and Snow King avenues are the main entrances into the center of town, and they clog easily on a normal day.

Weingart said his main concern is for emergency responders and people in crisis.

“I worry, God forbid there’s an emergency, how emergency vehicles are going to get through,” he said. “So far we’ve been lucky.” 

Weingart texted an update to Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday afternoon: southbound traffic was backed up and “terrible” on Highway 89/Broadway from Jackson toward Hoback, but northbound traffic was “actually moving nicely.”

Some roads in town also have ongoing construction and closures “which doesn’t help.”

Overtime

A business owner with a connection to Jackson, Todd Graus of Green Turf Lawnscapes, said he’s concerned for small businesses surviving on day-to-day income.

“It’s more than an inconvenience. It’s an economic hit to small businesses,” said Graus. For some businesses “if a company doesn’t bill out one day, that really puts a strain on them.”

As for Graus, he has crews traveling from Jackson to Alpine in a van full of equipment. If two workers have to sit in traffic for an hour, it can cost Graus about $80 in hourly pay, payroll taxes, Social Security matching or other extras — just for the delay headed one direction, he said.

“We don’t get to transfer that expense to our clients, therefore we just lose margin,” he said. “It’s a short-term thing, we just have to deal with it.”

If the crews can’t finish their work in the normal week, they may tally overtime as well, he said.

In Graus’ case, his crews can’t just bike or walk to their sites because they have necessary equipment. In the case of a hypothetical waitress who has no equipment and wants to bike into town to get to work on time, she probably can’t do that either since so many service-sector workers in Jackson commute from distant towns with cheaper housing.

The wife of one of Graus’ employees now leaves her home in Alpine at 4 a.m. and returns home at 10 p.m. to avoid the traffic, he said, adding that, “It’s burning her out.”

Weingart was apprehensive ahead of the last People’s Market of the season Wednesday evening, but once he arrived, he said business was just a little light and not massively impacted.

The School District

Construction crews originally paved from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., Peter Stinchcomb, WYDOT District 3 Construction Engineer, told Cowboy State Daily.

But after realizing that schedule “messed up” the school bus schedule, the agency spoke with the school district and shortened its hours, now reopening the roadway at 4 p.m. said Stinchcomb.

One teacher at Jackson Hole Classical Academy told Cowboy State Daily that her 3-mile crosstown commute home took an hour and a half — an 8-minute drive normally, maybe twice that in rush-hour traffic.

On Tuesday, better prepared for delays, school buses still ran late. After discharging the last of their passengers, a few drivers parked their buses 30 minutes south of town and sat at a picnic table at a defunct restaurant parking lot, waiting for traffic to clear before they dared return to the bus barn.

“Better to wait it out here than sit in traffic idling and fuming,” one driver said.

The new hours mean workers have to stop paving at about 2:30 p.m. to give the pavement time to cool before removing construction cones. The job is now expected to continue through Oct. 11, says a WYDOT post, but WYDOT personnel told an on-scene reporter they believe they will need just this week to finish the bulk of it — at least enough to get traffic flowing again.

The new hours are expected to help with commuter flow in the afternoon as well as the school schedule, Stinchcomb said.

Despite the misunderstanding Monday, the pavers have worked on just one lane at a time and are keeping one lane open going one direction and two lanes going open going in the other direction, he added.

Well, Yes

The sheer volume of traffic in and around Jackson during the morning and afternoon commute peak is stress-inducing at best on a typical day. Factor in a major repaving job at the town’s southern corridor has generated palpable road rage and some middle fingers extended from car windows.

WYDOT and Evans Construction felt the brunt of the public’s fury. Road workers said they have been on the receiving end of everything from “thank yous” to “f*** yous.”

Bad behavior from motorists Tuesday afternoon included driving on the shoulder and speeding down the center turn lane in frustration.

“People are getting pissed. I'm pissed. But we all have to deal with it,” one motorist told Cowboy State Daily as she sat in a bumper-to-bumper standstill at 5:37 p.m. Tuesday. “Except for a few of these yahoos who think they are above waiting.”

As for workers being flipped off, Stinchcomb said that’s nothing new.

“To be honest with you, that’s almost every project everywhere we go. We don’t notice it,” he said. “And there are a lot of people giving us thumbs-up because we’re getting rid of the potholes too.”

Contact Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com and Jake Nichols can be reached at jake@cowboystatedaily.com.