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Motorists on Highway 53 from the north end of Holmen to Interstate 90 will have to contend with a few more weeks of lane closures.

Work on a new high-tension cable barrier system along a 10.5-mile stretch of Highway 53 is expected to be completed by Sept. 19.

Josh Blum, project leader for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said the project is one of several in the state designed to determine which of five manufacturers of the barrier systems has the preferred system.

The two systems being installed on Highway 53 are very similar, Blum said, and all five are federally approved.

Wisconsin has stretches of divided highway in Madison and in Dunn and Fond du Lac counties where high-tension cable barrier systems are in use. Other states have used the barriers more. In fact, Blum said, 90 percent of the divided highways in North Carolina have such barriers.

Highway 53 was chosen based on the results of a Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory study of crash reports between 2001 and 2003. The study period did not include the July 2004 crash that killed Sarah Mullenbach, which involved a drunken driver crossing the median and hitting her car head-on.

The barrier system is designed to prevent cars from crossing the median into oncoming traffic, Blum said.

“The system’s pretty much designed to catch a vehicle and not send it back to the lane of travel where it came from either,” Blum said. “From what I’ve read, it has pretty much taken the fatality rate down to zero.”

Many people saw the asphalt strip being installed in the median and thought it was for some kind of bike lane. What it’s really for is to keep the high-tension cable barrier system free from weeds.

The $1.5 million project, which started Aug. 4, also involves replacing the ends of beam guards around bridge abutments. Instead of having the beam guard ends buried in the ground, the ends will have an energy-absorbing design that Blum said will be safer.

Through the end of the project, the left lane of three-mile sections of northbound Highway 53 will be closed. Sections of the left lane in both directions will be closed during replacement of the beam guard ends.

Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or (608) 786-6812.