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If you haven’t cursed road construction lately you probably haven’t driven anywhere. The region and the state seem to be in a new era of infrastructure improvements, with a pipeline of future work that starts to sound too big to pull off easily.

Getting more work done on roads and other infrastructure is definitely a good thing. There has been endless evidence, both anecdotal and documented, that we as a state and nation let our roads, bridges, electric grid, water and sewer systems deteriorate dangerously. But when multiple big-ticket projects are done at the same time near the same place, they can cause a whole new set of avoidable problems.

This was demonstrated rather neatly in Wednesday’s paper with two loosely related stories. PennDOT held an open house to let the public see first hand the proposed reconstruction of four-miles along the Sans Souci Parkway. Immediately under that ran a story about a $3.5 million water main project by Pennsylvania American Water set to begin in Hanover Township.

The relation was revealed in the subhead to the latter story: “Goal is to finish work before PennDOT’s Sans Souci work begins.” Well, one would hope it is more than a goal. For many drivers, there are few things more vexing than to see a long-overdue road repaving or reconstruction finished, drive happily over the new surface for a few days, and then see a utility company tearing chunks of it up for their repairs or upgrades.

It behooves PennDOT and any other government entity doing major road work to coordinate closely with utility companies and municipalities. And the reverse is true. Utility companies or other planning major work should check with the entity that maintains those roads.

That’s just common sense, even if it doesn’t always seem — at least to outside observers — to be common practice.

There is a different but no less important potential problem regarding the planned Sans Souci project. As we’ve reported previously, PennDOT has a reconstruction of Interstate 81 in the works that includes adding a third lane in both directions within a 7.5 mile corridor, from mile marker 161.2 north of the Nuangola exit to exit 168, the Highland Park Boulevard exit.

An issue could arise from the timing of the two PennDOT projects. According to reports, both could begin in 2025 and take several years to complete. These are parallel arteries, and while there are plenty of ways to avoid too much congestion, even a casual look at a map suggests doing both at the same time could prompt a lot of drivers hoping to bypass the construction into a narrowed choice of alternative routes .

Traffic jams along U.S. Route 11 through Plymouth and Kingston or along South Main Street through Wilkes-Barre are plausible scenarios. Throw in all the “single lane ahead” and “road closed” signs that seem to pop-up for days at a time throughout the area and the odds of gridlock could grow exponentially.

We’re not predicting anything. Indeed, if forced to pretend we have a crystal ball, we would optimistically predict all the agencies involved have enough expertise to avoid any major problems.

But there’s a lot of work going on, a lot more planned, and a good deal more likely to move forward as money from the needed federal infrastructure law fully kicks in.

Federal, state and municipal officials along with utility companies and anyone else involved in road, bridge or streetscape work in the coming years would do their constituents a tremendous service by coordinating their various plans.

— Times Leader