Road construction set to begin today in downtown Corbin

Motorist in downtown Corbin should expect some significant delays until around mid June due to a $1.3 million road construction project — the completion of repaving on Kentucky Ave. and Main Street that began last fall.

 Work on the project begins today and will carry on through roughly June 12. Closures will be possible between Seventh Street and 15th Street from 8:00 a.m. through 4:00 p.m. on weekdays, with the exception of Memorial Day.

Originally slated to begin in April, Corbin Mayor Willard McBurney said recently the Kentucky Department of Transportation decided to wait until school was out of session before beginning milling and resurfacing of Main Street and Kentucky Ave.
Trouble areas on Fourth and Fifth Streets will also be addressed. Most of the spots involved areas of the roads that have begun to sink or that are uneven.

Local graduation ceremonies were held last Friday and over the weekend.

Initial work began last year. Crews dug up huge portions of the road on Main Street and Kentucky Ave., often up to six feet deep, in order to shore up weak spots in the road that were sinking or in danger of collapse. Over 100 handicap approaches on downtown sidewalks were also replaced at the time.

Kentucky Ave. and Main Street will be milled and resurfaced from the Overpass Bridge all the way down to 18th Street. A separate project is planned to resurface South Main Street from 18th Street to the entrance of the Corbin Bypass. It will happen at a later date.

On Tuesday, Jonathan Dobson, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet District 11 Office, announced that officials have approved the installation of a traffic signal at the intersection of Cumberland Falls Hwy. and Scuffletown Road.

“Over the course of the last six months to a year, the inquiry was made with the Cabinet to have a study done at that location,” Dobson said. “They did a study for a 12-hour period and it did meet the warrants to have a signal. It’s a long process. They always want to make sure they’ve exhausted every other means of traffic control before they resort to installing a light.”

“Warrants” are thresholds that must be met before a traffic signal can be installed on a state roadway or federal highway.

Typically, they encompass things like volume of traffic, average time motorists wait to turn off side streets, etc.

Dobson could provide no timeline for when the new traffic signal would be operational. It would likely coincide with another large road project in Corbin, slated for later this year, which will include widening of Cumberland Falls Hwy. near Exit 25 to accommodate turning lanes. It will also serve to reconfigure the exit and onramps to and from I-75.