Circleville – Grade Separation to give options to how traffic flows around the city has been a hot button for City Council and Residents, now more locations have been identified.
During today’s meeting with Pickaway Commissioners and the American Structurepoint Project Development firm, several new options have been put on the table for this multi-million dollar project.
The original plans were for Court Street, Washington, and Crites roadways. Several other locations have been identified, including Progress Parkway, Pickaway, and Highland road area.
All options are aimed at several factors, development, safety, and Re-routing truck traffic from downtown areas.
Projects off Crites and Progress parkway would attach east Circleville areas to US-23, and property acquisition wouldn’t be as much of a factor, but safety would have to zig-zag through down if a train was stopped on the tracks. This option would open up East Circleville for development, including the GE building.
Three options have been proposed for overpasses over the South Court Street railroad, and seem like the most direct option, but all come with the purchase of several homes and businesses in the area for demolition. Those options would be better for safety but would not help divert traffic downtown, and would not help development as much.
Highland road area would connect directly to US-23 and it would divert traffic off US-23 and connect it to Northridge road (188) recently ODOT announced new construction off Progress Parkway, and they would move operations from the Highland road location when finished. This idea would allow almost direct access to US-23 for safety, would reroute truck traffic downtown, and may help development in that area.
Structure point in the meeting reported that they say 45 trains travel through the Circleville Downtown area every day, in 2019 they reported around 40, with an average of 6 minutes per train stoppage.
All of these locations come with complex factors that the City and County are looking at. We will report new developments to this as soon as they are available.
