The State of Indiana announced plans on Wednesday to extend ‘the end’ of the U.S. 20 Bypass in Elkhart County.

The four-lane divided highway now disappears at State Road 17. A project to widen and improve a three mile stretch of U.S. 20 to the east will essentially extend the bypass to State Road 15 (south of Bristol, and North of Goshen).

“The letting date, the projected letting date for this is October of 2012,” said INDOT Deputy Commissioner Robert Alderman. “It should be a one year’s construction project—total construction.”

In other words, the work should be finished sometime in 2013.

Next week, the state will take the first step when it advertises for an engineering consultant. Once the project has been designed, the state will have a better idea of how much it will cost.

While County Road 17 now marks the eastern end of the line for the bypass, much of the heavy traffic simply continues on to the two-lane portion of U.S. 20.

“Where it narrows down there the speed limit drops quickly, you’ve got the semis, you’ve got cars, everybody is competing,” said Doug Kay, of Obe Co. Inc. at U.S. 20 and State Road 15.

It’s arguably more than two lanes can handle. An average of 21,000 vehicles a day rumble by dozens of residential driveways that let out on U.S. 20.

“We have an unsafe situation coming off the bypass and hitting that two-lane road,” said Elkhart County Commissioner Mike Yoder.

While the road improvement project announced today will make things better, perhaps they won’t be ‘as good’ as they are on the rest of the bypass, in that they won’t be up to interstate standards.

“It’s going to be a five-lane, so it will be two lanes both ways, and center turn lane so it’s not quite the interstate feel, no, but still, nonetheless, it will improve traffic flow quite a bit,” said Yoder.

The fact that anything will be done is more than some bargained for. When the Indiana Toll Road was leased to a private entity, the contract contained a no-compete clause.

“We thought there was a legal problem with that, the way we understood it, that there was some contractual agreements with the purchasers of the toll road that you couldn’t have a parallel four-lane within so many miles of the toll road,” said Kay.

Deputy Commissioner Alderman was emphatic in his response. “This is not going to be a competitive highway. That doesn’t even fall into that category. We’re doing three miles of a roadway, 2.96 miles of roadway; it doesn’t make U.S. 20 any more competitive for commercial traffic or anyone else.”