By Don Stacom, Hartford Courant
WATERBURY — Work may begin this year on a $400 million project to widen I-84 at the infamous bottleneck just east of downtown, part of an ambitious five-year plan for highway and bridge improvements across the state, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced Tuesday.
At a press conference at a park-and-ride lot along the busy interstate, Malloy and members of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation — all Democrats — cheered the plan to address what they described as long-overdue infrastructure work.
“Frankly, this project should have been started years ago,” said Malloy, who previously has said his Republican predecessors didn’t put enough priority on modernizing Connecticut’s transportation network.
I-84 narrows to two lanes between exits 23 and 25 in Waterbury, and rush hour traffic frequently comes to a standstill on either side of the 2.7-mile bottleneck, which is not far from the Route 8 interchange known as the Mixmaster. The highway has three lanes between Route 8 and Exit 23 through the city’s downtown, and has three lanes east of Exit 25A.
The state in June will seek bids to add a third lane in each direction in the bottleneck, Transportation Commissioner James Redeker said.
Read more at courant.com.