A few hundred feet of Thornwood Drive in Newark has sat unpaved for weeks, caught between a finished roundabout and a railroad crossing, because a petroleum pipeline buried six to eight feet under the roadway still needs work before the city can finish a $5.5 million rebuild, the Newark Advocate reported on November 8.
The unpaved stretch runs between the new roundabout at Faye Drive and the railroad tracks to the south, on a route drivers use between Newark and Granville and Heath in Licking County. Two petroleum pipelines run under that section, the Newark Advocate reported. Marathon has completed the work it wanted to do on its line, but Houston-based Enterprise Products has not yet done the work it indicated it wants to do on its line, Newark City Engineer Brian Morehead told the Newark Advocate.
“The short answer is that we’ve had some delays and we’re working to get at least one lane open – southbound – for the winter,” Morehead told the Newark Advocate. That southbound lane is the city’s winter goal: a usable route through the work zone even if the full rebuild cannot be finished before cold weather settles in.
The sequence matters, and it explains why the gap cannot simply be paved over. After the pipeline company finishes its line, the city still has to install storm sewers in the same corridor, and only then can crews pave, Morehead told the Newark Advocate. Paving first would risk exactly what the city’s notification process is designed to prevent — a utility cutting into new curbs, gutters and asphalt a few months later to reach its own line.
Morehead explained that process to the Newark Advocate: when the city plans road construction, it is obligated to notify utilities so they can make repairs and improvements while the road is already torn up. The delay, in that telling, is the system working as intended but on someone else’s schedule. “We are trying to motivate them to get in here and get their line taken care of, but we don’t know that it will be this year,” Morehead told the Newark Advocate.
For drivers, the practical effect is a familiar one in a growing county: a major north-south route that feels almost finished, with a roundabout at one end and open road at the other, and a short, rough gap in between. Thornwood is not a side street. Newark officials have treated it for years as a corridor, not a single project, and the current $5.5 million job is one piece of a much longer plan.
That longer plan is where the background helps explain the urgency. Newark officials have worked with the Ohio Department of Transportation for at least 15 years on the Thornwood Drive corridor, Morehead told the Newark Advocate. The vision is a natural north-south connector from State Route 16 at Thornwood Crossing in Granville to Interstate 70 near Hebron via State Route 79 — in effect, a bypass that lets through traffic avoid the string of traffic lights in Heath.
“We’ve always targeted Thornwood as one that would become almost a bypass from SR 16 to 79 so you don’t have to go through all of the traffic lights in Heath,” Morehead told the Newark Advocate. “We’re continuing on with that goal. This has always been a high priority to get this corridor completed in Newark and Heath and down to 79,” he told the Newark Advocate.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What we know: the $5.5 million Thornwood rebuild is stalled on a few hundred feet between Faye Drive and the railroad tracks; Marathon’s pipeline work is done; Enterprise Products’ work is not; storm sewers and paving still follow the pipeline work; and the city wants one southbound lane open for winter, all as reported by the Newark Advocate. What we’re still waiting on: whether Enterprise schedules and completes its work this year — Morehead told the Newark Advocate the city does not know — and a firm date for paving once the sewers are in.
Road work elsewhere in Ohio has carried heavier costs this fall, as NewsForce247 reported when a semi driver was killed in a closed SR 420 work zone and when a crash closed U.S. 20 in Fulton County. Toledo faced a different infrastructure call when a councilwoman sought a traffic light’s return after a teen was hit.
The next phase of Thornwood is already on the drawing board. The hill stretch between the roundabout at River Road on the north and the new Faye Drive roundabout on the south is planned to be widened to three lanes, allowing a turn lane, with a new roundabout where Thornwood meets W. Main Street on the east and James Road on the west, the Newark Advocate reported. Early engineering is under way to find a new alignment lower on the hill, with construction currently targeted to begin in 2029, Morehead told the Newark Advocate.
What happens next is concrete and sequential: Enterprise Products completes or schedules its pipeline work, the city installs storm sewers, crews pave, and the city works to open at least one southbound lane for winter. Until the first step happens, a few hundred feet of pipeline will keep deciding the timetable for a $5.5 million road.