Some traffic flow to be maintained through work on Five Points

When work begins on the Five Points roundabout two years from now, traffic will slow down, but won’t completely stop going through the intersection.

Questions arose around the community, asking if the project would close the intersection completely during construction, similar to the work being done at Coleman’s Crossing Boulevard and Industrial Parkway. City Engineer Kyle Hoyng said that won’t be the case, adding that as design plans and other details have changed, there may have been some confusion around the plans.

“So, with Five Points, it was never the intent to completely close it. We know that’s not feasible just with the amount of traffic that goes through that intersection,” he said.

Initially, city officials discussed doing some roundabout configuration that kept all five spurs of the intersection as part of the design, but the current plan has the intersection at four legs.

The concept would close East Fifth Street, east of the roundabout, leaving Cherry Street, Delaware Avenue and Columbus Avenue open to traffic coming from the Uptown. Sale of the property currently housing Eda’s Italian Ice was announced earlier this year and the city agreed to purchase the land and convert it to green space with walking paths.

Current concepts now show a traffic signal on Delaware Avenue at the entrance to Sheetz to the north and a reconnection to East Fifth Street to the south. The new connector piece would run alongside the Taco Bell property and reconnect with the existing Fifth Street just behind Taco Bell and KFC. From there, the road would run to Coleman’s Crossing Boulevard as it does now.

“We’re not far enough along with the redesign of the four-legged roundabout to have a contractor look at it, but it’s probably going to be at least a two-phased project, if not a three-phase,” Hoyng said. “It’s going to be multi-phased.”

Doing it in phases like that allows crews to concentrate on sections of work while traffic still passes through. The engineer said the city is working with the consultant, Arcadis, on design specifics. Those should be finished at the end of this year or early next year, he said. From there, companies can begin the process of relocating utility lines near the intersection.

Hoyng said construction at Five Points will likely start in the spring of 2027 and take about three months to complete.

Before crews start on Five Points, Marysville drivers will see improvements to East Fifth Street, between Walnut and Poplar streets, starting next year.

Hoyng said when the city did its thoroughfare plan update starting in 2020, a large portion of the citizen responses dealt with making improvements to the Uptown.

“A big component of that is the pavement condition, the pavement condition is poor, so it’s time for those roads to get resurfaced,” he said, adding that the city already looked at that area for stormwater modifications. “The timing was right to look at how do we want our gateways into our Uptown to look and feel.”

The scope of the project will cover pavement resurfacing, curb replacements, storm sewer upgrades, traffic calming measures and other changes, similar to work being done this year on West Fifth Street.

Officials are also looking at how to slow vehicles down and how to make it safer for pedestrians, an overarching goal for the residential sections of town. With that will come some changes to on-street parking as well.

“We’re going to keep on-street parking in some areas and we’re going to restrict it in others. The areas where we do keep the on-street parking, we’re going to have some protected bump-outs,” Hoyng said. “We’re going to add some shorter pedestrian crossings with some pedestrian rectangular rapid-flash beacons, we call them RRFBs, which is basically just a pedestrian, push-button crosswalk.”

Another goal of the project is to better handle left turns on the roadway, notably at the intersection of East Fifth Street and Chestnut Street.

“That Chestnut Street/East Fifth Street intersection can get congested at times, so we’re going to add a left-turn lane for westbound traffic on East Fifth to turn south on Chestnut,” Hoyng said. “Right now, there’s not a turn lane so that’s going to help get vehicles out of the way so it doesn’t back up.”

He said drivers currently use the street as if it has two lanes already, with vehicles heading west often driving around those stopped to turn left. So making a permanent lane will organize that traffic flow.

Another change will be to eliminate left turns onto East Fifth from Chestnut so drivers heading north on the roadway will only be able to turn right onto East Fifth Street.

“That’s going to make that intersection a lot safer,” Hoyng said. “We won’t have as many cars backed up on Chestnut because anytime a vehicle tries to turn left onto East Fifth Street, it backs vehicles on Chestnut all the way back to Sixth Street a lot of times. So we’re going to eliminate that left turn.”

He said officials also want to limit the amount of traffic signals that appear in residential roadways in general and there are already traffic signals in places along East Fifth Street.

Some of the changes came from resident suggestions after the city held an open house at the end of June and also accepted submitted comments about what people wanted to see along the roadway.

Hoyng said the East Fifth Street work will start in the spring of 2026.