COLUMBUS, Ohio — Resurfacing of a short westbound stretch of Route 33 has been postponed while state crews reconcile their survey with traffic-camera records. The work was expected to begin after Labor Day. The eastbound contract, awarded under the same appropriation, remains on schedule.
The delay concerns 1.7 miles between a drainage channel and an unused weigh station. Contractors had already marked the shoulder and staged barriers when the department asked them to leave the pavement undisturbed. State officials say the road is safe to use and no change to the speed limit is planned.
According to a district review obtained by the Register, two cameras at either end of the segment recorded westbound trips that were consistently shorter than the times logged by roadside counters. On 14 of 19 trips examined, the difference fell between four and seven minutes. Eastbound records taken on the same days agreed within the expected margin.
The finding has several ordinary possible causes. One camera was serviced in August, the counters are maintained by a different contractor, and the files were pulled from systems that do not use the same format. The department has asked the equipment vendors to check how their clocks were set and how the records were exported.
“We are treating this as a records problem until the records tell us otherwise,” district engineer Paul Heller said. He would not say which set the department was using for its current travel-time estimates. A departmental spokesperson said a revised estimate had not been requested for the project.
At the site on Thursday, trucks passed a closed gate to the weigh station and a contractor replaced batteries in a temporary counter. Nothing on the road indicated why the work had stopped. Survey marks remained visible along the shoulder, some of them half-covered by dust from the harvest traffic.
The survey has produced a second, smaller disagreement. A plan filed with the original bid places the western limit of work several hundred feet beyond the marker currently used by the crew. Heller said this may reflect an older set of mileposts and that the department was checking the project drawings before authorizing a new layout.
For people living along the service road, the immediate concern is the detour. The proposed route would send grain trucks past a school crossing for three weeks. Trustees in nearby Union Township have asked the state to wait until the fall harvest is finished even if the measurement dispute is settled sooner.
Evelyn Morrow, who lives near the channel, keeps a small notebook of her father’s trips to Lancaster. She began it when he stopped driving at night and the family wanted to know whether he was taking the highway. Morrow said his entries now match neither the counters nor the cameras, although she does not consider her notebook a reliable clock.
“He writes down when he leaves the porch,” she said. “Sometimes he sits in the car a while first.” Her father has not changed his route. On the days she showed the Register, the difference between his departure and arrival entries was six minutes less than the family expected.
Daniel Seo, a physicist at Ohio State University who reviewed a summary of the records at the Register’s request, said it would be premature to draw a conclusion from devices that were never designed to provide a common time standard. He recommended a controlled test with a single clock before any attempt to explain the older entries.
The department said it would conduct one, but has not set a date. A request for the raw August footage is still pending. The inventory provided with the agency’s initial response lists three cameras at the site; the district’s public summary discusses two. Asked about the third, the department said the inventory may include equipment that was removed before the review.
For now, the barriers are stacked behind the gate. The township will receive at least a week’s notice before the contractor returns, according to the work order. The order does not say which of the measurements will be used.