Martin K. Eby Construction finds a soil stabilizer to match the demands of Florida road-widening project.

Polk County, Fla. - Interstate 4, known as “Central Florida’s Crossroad,” connects the Tampa Bay area on the Gulf Coast with Orlando’s theme parks and Daytona Beach on the Atlantic Ocean. One can imagine that such a thoroughfare would be responsible for handling a huge amount of traffic. But for the section of I-4 serving Polk County, with average daily traffic levels reaching 63,000 vehicles - or nearly 23 million vehicles per year - this responsibility was becoming more than the Interstate could handle.

Knowing that the roadway was already operating above capacity and that these traffic levels were expected to increase greatly with time, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) created a master plan to ultimately transform the Polk County section of I-4 from its current four lanes into a 10-lane highway. Additionally, the plan includes the construction of a high-speed ground transportation system in the median.

Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and immediate traffic capacity requirements and budget constraints dictated a much less ambitious short-term solution. First things first, the Polk County stretch of I-4 needed to be modified to more comfortably handle its daily traffic load. Therefore, in June of 2002, FDOT began awarding contracts for the task of widening I-4 from Memorial Boulevard in the city of Lakeland to the Polk/Osceola County line. This $224.5-million project would span 29.5 miles, widening I-4 from its current four lanes, to six lanes, basically adding a lane to the outside of both the eastbound and westbound lanes.

Due to the overwhelming logistics of the entire project, including the requirement to rebuild five interchanges and replace three bridges along the way, and the fact that it all had to be completed in two years, FDOT broke the job into three main contracts - each to be handled by separate roadbuilding companies. Additionally, the contracts would be design/build, meaning each contractor would be responsible for all aspects of project implementation from inception to completion. A faster and less expensive method of contracting projects, design/build was the logical choice for this time-sensitive project.