Driving through the west side of Bend will get a lot more complicated this summer because of major road projects on one of the city’s busiest streets.

Southbound traffic is already restricted on 14th Street between Newport and Galveston avenues: Work began at the beginning of this week on a 10-week Cascade Natural Gas project. Also, a $5.4 million city project reconstructing 14th Street between Albany and Simpson avenues and Newport and Galveston avenues will start Monday and isn’t expected to finish until September.

And the roundabout at Simpson Avenue and 14th Street will close for weeks beginning April 9 so contractors can replace its cracking asphalt with concrete.

The Simpson roundabout is one of eight built as part of an agreement between the city and a group of 13 developers, businesses and other local governments in the early 2000s, and it includes a fairly thin layer of asphalt over gravel.

It, like a lot of the older roundabouts in town, has degraded a lot over the years, said Ryan Oster, city engineer.

“Our roadway standard back then was nowhere near the standard we have now,” he said.

The city has started using concrete, not asphalt, for most of its newer roundabouts, and it’s replaced several older ones with concrete. Bend looks at each roundabout case by case for repairs, Oster said, but it generally uses concrete now.

Every vehicle exerts weight and pressure on roads, he said, but roundabouts experience more wear because vehicles using them don’t move in a straight line. Over time, cars driving on asphalt roundabouts push the asphalt, creating noticeable ruts and cracks. Concrete is generally more expensive to install than asphalt and takes longer to build because it needs time to cure before cars can drive on it, but it’s also longer-lasting and needs less maintenance.

“Concrete’s more of a stout material,” Oster said. “It’s built to handle more movements.”

Bend’s next planned roundabout replacement is at Mt. Washington Drive and Shevlin Park Road, one of the very first roundabouts built in the city, said David Abbas, director of Bend’s streets and operations department. It’s in a design phase now, and won’t be built until late fall or early next spring because the roundabout is part of a detour for the 14th Street work, he said.

The Simpson roundabout, as well as reconstructing 14th Street and adding buffered bike lanes, wider sidewalks, planter areas and improved crosswalks, should be done by July 1. Exactly how long the work will take depends on weather and working around underground utilities, said Ben Hemson, the city’s business advocate.

“For the general public, once you see that concrete is down and no work going on, that’s when you’ll know we’re in the final countdown,” Hemson said.

Hemson said he’s been talking with businesses in the construction corridor and knows many have planned ahead to mitigate construction impacts. All businesses will be accessible during construction, he said, and the city will relax its sign code for businesses in the area by allowing each one to put out one sandwich board or banner without a permit.

The city also will add construction and detour information to Google Maps and the Google-owned map app Waze. Hemson said this will help businesses such as Pine Mountain Sports and GoodLife Brewing Co., which see a lot of tourist traffic in the summer.

Bend’s fire administration building and west station are on Simpson Avenue just east of the roundabout. Battalion Chief Dave Howe, a spokesman for the city’s fire department, said the department has been involved throughout the 14th Street planning process and will be able to respond to emergencies from the station despite road and roundabout closures.

“It’s going to be about 10 weeks of responses that will take a little more to get there, but we’re going to get there,” Howe said.

— Reporter: 541-633-2160; jshumway@bendbulletin.com