Summit Motorsports Park questions roundabout project

Summit Motorsports Park is formally objecting to a $2 million roundabout planned for the intersection of Ohio 18 and Ohio 601, the intersection closest to the motorsports park. Officials from the motorsports park wrote a letter to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Jack Marchbanks, director of the Ohio Department of Transportation, asking that the project be delayed. Summit Motorsports Park's letter comes on the heels of another letter written by a local property owner who is also objecting to the project. "We understand that you have received another letter concerning this project from the Mahl family asking you to veto this project or pause it for further analysis and consideration of its impacts," the motorsports park wrote. "Summit Motorsports joins in asking you to veto the project or, at least, to pause it for further analysis." The motorsports park says construction of the roundabout would interfere with its operations. "Summit Motorsports has up to 18,000 cars and vehicles of its fans, employees and vendors parked for a given day's events," Summit's letter states. "This volume of traffic occurs daily on Fridays through Sundays (and at times on Thursday for national events). Nearly all of these cars and vehicles enter and leave the park near the corner of SR 18 and SR 601. Nearly all fans leave in a very short period at the end of a day's events." It also calls the roundabout an "unprecedented experiment in traffic flow that ignores critical traffic counts and relies on stale data." "The amount of traffic flow in such an imbalanced manner as presented with this project has never been studied," the letter continued. "The USDOT modeling of roundabouts does not model to this level of imbalance. Roundabouts can be an appropriate remedy of traffic conerns in many instances. However, that no one appears to have installed them at the corner of a large sports or music venue's main exit/entry point suggests such a roundabout at the SR 18 and SR 601 intersection defies common sense." There is a similar roundabout near the one planned at the intersection of U.S. 20 and Ohio 601. Kaitlyn Thompson, public information officer for the Ohio Department of Transportation District 3 - which includes Huron County - said ODOT has received funding for the project. Construction is scheduled to start on the project in August and is supposed to be wrapped up by December of this year, she said. Thompson said the time for feedback about the project has passed. She said stakeholder meetings were held in July 2022 and January 2023 and the additional public input period was from January and February of 2023. Thompson also said ODOT responded to anyone who submitted a comment or statement.