Drive almost anywhere around Jefferson Hills, Clairton or West Mifflin and chances are good that you’ll run into construction for the extension of the Mon-Fayette Expressway.

A contractor for the Pennsylvania Turnpike is in its second year of building the $1.3 billion project that will stretch from the end of the current toll road at Route 51 in Jefferson Hills to Route 837 near Kennywood Park in Duquesne. With about $380 million of construction underway in the first two contracts, it’s hard to miss the series of bridge piers, some nearly 200 feet tall, and huge dump trucks operating like a conga line as they move millions of cubic yards of dirt around the construction site to create flat roadbeds.

But with five more contracts and about $900 million of work yet to be bid, more construction will be coming in the next few years.

Favorable weather

Generally warm dry weather during the past two construction seasons has allowed crews for general contractor Trumbull Corp. to make substantial progress on the highway. Trumbull was awarded contracts for the first two sections of the new road, $214 million for the first section from Route 51 to Coal Valley Road in Jefferson Hills and $165.4 million to build from north of Coal Valley to north of Camp Hollow Road near Curry Hollow Road in West Mifflin.

John Dzurko, the turnpike’s project manager, said it’s been a benefit that Trumbull submitted the low bid for both contracts.

“We know what to expect and what we’re getting,” Dzurko said during a tour of the site early last week. “They know our construction team, and we know them.”

Dzurko said favorable building conditions have the first section of construction slightly ahead of schedule and the second right on schedule. With almost no concrete pouring during the cold winter months, the number of construction workers will drop from about 200 to 100 over the winter. and work will shift to erecting steel for bridges and preparing roadbeds for thousands of yards of concrete to be poured beginning next spring.

For example:

  •  The five-span bridge over New England Road has all of the 200-foot piers in place, and crews were finishing the installation of reinforcement bars on the surface last week so it will be ready for concrete in the spring.
  •  Most of the excavation work for the first section has been finished just in time to shift to the second construction area over the winter.
  • The roadbed for a relocated section of Route 885 has been prepared and will be ready for concrete.
Crews install reinforcement bars to prepare the surface of the northbound ramp from the Mon-Fayette Expressway to Route 51 in Jefferson Hills on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024, for the pouring of the concrete surface next spring. (Ed Blazina/Pittsburgh Union Progress)

“That [first section] has progressed to the point where there isn’t much winter work left,” Dzurko said.

The highway is being built in order from south to north so that most sections can be opened as they are completed. That’s not true for the first two sections because there are no interchanges on the first section, which means both have to be finished before it can open.

That also means the first section could be done early and have to wait for the second section, said Craig White, senior associate with construction manager Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson Inc., who is overseeing construction for the turnpike.

“If they have a good year next year, we don’t have much to do in 2026,” he said. “Even if [this section] is done early, we can’t open it because there would be no way to get off.”

Career-ending accomplishment

For Bill Petrucci, seeing even some construction on the long-awaited new highway in the Monongahela Valley is a fine way to cap off his career.

Petrucci, a project manager with turnpike design consultant HDR, is retiring at the end of the year after 37 years with the firm. For the last 30, he’s worked on turnpike projects and has been part of the design team for the Mon-Fayette, a project that has had many starts and stops since the idea originated in the 1960s.

Petrucci’s team has worked on this project since 2004, when the first environmental impact study started. The scope of the project changed — there’s no longer a leg that goes to Downtown Pittsburgh, and medians were narrowed to substantially to cut the cost — but now it’s beginning to look like the highway they envisioned.

“It’s kind of a blur at this point,” Petrucci said at the turnpike field office after touring the construction site with about two dozen students from the Engineering Institute at his alma mater, Central Catholic High School.

“Over 20 years, there are a lot of landmarks along the way. We kind of went along in spurts. We’d kind of reassemble the band when there was more work to do and do our thing. My goal was to see this to fruition, and I got pretty close. It’s fantastic to see.”

Shaky future

If all goes well, the first two sections of the highway should open by the end of 2026 and the contract for the next section to McKeesport should be awarded early next year.

Beyond that, the future is uncertain.

In mid-November, the turnpike revealed that it had to adjust its capital budget to reduce spending because a consultant had projected that traffic on the toll road would not continue to grow as expected. That’s a leftover problem from the pandemic, when passenger traffic on most roads dropped dramatically and has been slow to recover.

The turnpike is building the expressway under orders from the state Legislature with its share of funds from the state oil franchise tax, a different pot of money than other capital projects. Because that also depends on the number of vehicles on the road, revenue there isn’t coming in as quickly as it used to, either.

Contractors moved millions of cubic yards of dirt to create this new hillside in Jefferson Hills adjacent to a new bridge over Route 885 because that is less expensive than hauling the material away and dumping it elsewhere. (Ed Blazina/Pittsburgh Union Progress)

As a result, the turnpike is holding off on final design of the last four sections of the southern section of the highway until more money is available.

The northern section, which would take the highway across the Monongahela River to the Parkway East in Monroeville, has been on hold for several years.

Petrucci, for one, believes in the project.

When it is finished, the travel time from Route 51 to Kennywood amusement park in West Mifflin would be reduced from about 30 minutes to 10 minutes. The full highway also would eventually join with the Southern Beltway at Jefferson Hills to provide motorists from eastern suburbs another way from the Monroeville area to Pittsburgh International Airport without delays created by two tunnels on Interstate 376, the Parkways East and West.

“There is definitely a need for this project because it is pretty difficult to get around in this area,” he said.

Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.

Ed Blazina

Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.