APPLETON, Wis. — Ask who racked up the most driving miles for Security-Luebke Roofing last year and you’ll find Aaron Kane at the top of the list.
He’s a quality manager with the Appleton-based company who frequently drives Interstate 41.
“41 at certain times in the afternoon you would almost think there are always accidents because everything comes to a standstill,” he said. “Then you go further and there are no accidents. It’s just the volume of traffic on 41 with certain off ramps and on ramps, with so much volume coming onto the highway, it just shuts it down.”
As the pace of construction work picks up this spring, Kane and others have to make some adjustments.
“It slows stuff down,” he said. “You have to adjust for when you have appointments to be on time, trying to figure out how long that detour is going to be.”
The project is expanding I-41 to six lanes on the 23 miles of interstate between Appleton and De Pere.
“The major impacts that travelers are going to see on I-41 is… where we’re going to have traffic shifted, different patterns, narrower lanes, narrower shoulders, and (lanes) moved over to one side so we can reconstruct the other side,” said Bryan Learst, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation project manager for the work.
He said the project is expected to be finished in 2030.
“You’ll have increased capacity with the increase from four lanes to six lanes, three in each direction,” Learst said. “You’ll just have more room to move. There’s more capacity for vehicles to move more efficiently through the entire corridor.”
Kane is looking forward to a couple of extra lanes in the future.
“When we had our old shop off 55, every day coming back between 441 and Richmond I’d have to come to a dead stop every day,” he said. “Sometimes it would be like a couple minutes, sometimes it would be 10, 15 minutes at standstill or going a couple miles an hour.”
