CLARKS SUMMIT -- Work is beginning on two and half year project to restore the main route between Lackawanna and Wyoming Counties.
Routes 6 and 11 will be revamped in that time and it will affect the way you drive on the road.
Crews hired by PennDOT resumed work on that $42 million project Monday. Routes 6 and 11 between Clarks Summit and Tunkhannock was put in the 1950s and hasn't had a major overhaul since.
The work that started on Monday won't be completed until November of 2017.
A contractor was out on Routes 6 and 11 in Dalton moving power lines. Over the course of the next two and a half years, PennDOT will spend $42 million restoring the main connector between Lackawanna and Wyoming Counties.
"We're going all the way down to the base and replacing the road, doing a lot of work on the bridges, we're going to be installing two new signals and upgrading the other signals, So it's a major, major project here that we're doing," said PennDOT official James May.
Over the next few days traffic on Routes 6 and 11 will be moved over to only one half of the highway with one lane going in each direction, for four miles out of the eight-mile stretch.
The four lane highway will be two lanes right in front of the Dalton DoIt Center.
"The roads need to be fixed but we think it's going to hurt the business going into our busy season here, in spring," said owner Scott Lacoe.
He says opinions differ about how the Routes 6 and 11 project will affect the business.
"My wife told me different, she said 'people are going to come to your store because they want to come to your store.' I'm hoping that's true but I think because the roads are going to be messed up, people are going to just pass on a project."
The contractor told Lacoe to expect restricted traffic until the project is completed in November of 2017.
In the next few weeks, drivers will notice more work away from that $42 million project, in the Clarks Summit area. There will be another $5 million project on part of Northern Boulevard.
As soon as the weather breaks, PennDOT will mill and pave the road through the business district of the Clarks Summit area until it turns into Routes 6 and 11.
"Essentially, what the public's going to see starting today is work beginning all the way from Interstate 81, all the way up to where (routes) 6 and 11 split up in Wyoming county," May explained.
PennDOT says this week, drivers will see crews out on Routes 6 and 11 building crossovers in the areas where traffic will go down to one lane. Expect those patterns to change sometime next week.
