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Construction on several major highways in central New Jersey has recently been completed, but a slew of new projects -- some even on the same highway -- have taken their place.

Rehabilitation projects on Route 287, from the New Jersey Turnpike to Exit 5, and on Route 18 North in New Brunswick have wrapped up their improvement and reconstruction efforts, while bridge reconstruction at Route 36 and Route 72 continues and new construction on Route 287, from Exit 5 past Exit 10, and Route 1 in North Brunswick, recently began.

Tim Greeley of the New Jersey Department of Transportation told The Jewish State in a phone interview Jan. 11 that the recently completed Route 287 work included a roadway rehabilitation, which entails stripping all material down to the base of the roadway and repaving, and a bridge deck replacement, which replaces the steel and concrete structure of a bridge piece by piece instead of demolishing the entire bridge.

"The project began two years ago, and has basically wrapped up," Greeley said of the $40 million rehabilitation. "It came to final completion in December."

The rehabilitation of Route 287, which took two years to complete, took off more than the average two to four inches of pavement in order to level out the base of the roadway. After repairing the roadway's base, six inches of new asphalt was laid down.

"We leveled that out because one of the concerns that we had regarding Route 287 was that the roadway itself had deteriorated, so we had to go down and redo the base level of the roadway itself... to provide a much more level and safer roadway," Greeley said.

The second part of the Route 287 roadwork, from exit 5 in Middlesex County and extending past exit 10 into Somerset County, began in September 2009 and is expected to be completed in the fall of 2011.

Greeley said that the reconstruction of Route 18 North in New Brunswick recently wrapped up. The project, which started in August 2005 and at the time was the New Jersey's biggest reconstruction project at $200 million, divided that particular section of Route 18 into local and express lanes.

"If you want to access New Brunswick itself, you'd stay to the right, and Route 18 forks off into three different entranceways into New Brunswick at George St., Commercial Avenue, and New Street," Greeley said. "If you're going up towards Route 287 or Piscataway, you stay to the left, and those are the express lanes to travel right past New Brunswick itself. We did a ton of work on this project; it's been described as creating a whole new roadway."

Route 36 in Monmouth County is also undergoing a much needed repair: its Highlands Bridge was built in 1932 and considered one of the more unsafe bridges in the state. The $125 million full bridge replacement began in February 2008 and is expected to be complete by December 2010.

"The latest milestone is that in late October, we completed the first half of the new Route 36 Highlands Bridge structure," Greeley said. Currently, traffic is limited to one lane in each direction, on what will eventually be the two-lane eastbound side of the bridge.

A $24 million project to improve Route 1, both northbound and southbound, in North Brunswick, began last spring and is expected to continue through June 2011. Greeley explained that the construction involves a bridge deck replacement and connecting two roads over abandoned railroad tracks that run parallel to Route 1, Meriel Drive and College Farm Road.

"They would run parallel to Route 1 and horseshoe off where the abandoned rail line was," Greeley said. "They did not connect with each other before. We've connected them so now the feeder road runs the length of Route 1 on either side of the bridge."

The rightmost lane on Route 1's three-lane highway splits off into feeder lanes that go to businesses and a portion of Rutgers. Currently, there is a traffic shift both northbound and southbound as the improvements are made.

"That is going to continue on into the early part of the spring, and then we'll be able to shift traffic back up to the main structure," Greeley said.