Work on South Access Road, Cedar Mall intersection slated for 2026

Drivers looking for a better experience navigating the South Access Road and Frontage Road intersection west of Main Street will have to wait for 2026 to see an improvement.

Traffic flow congestion at the intersection came to the forefront of the city’s attention in 2022, when Caribou Coffee approached the Plan Commission with a proposal to build a 605-square-foot, drive-thru-only building in the Cedar Mall parking lot.

Plans called for the flow of drive-thru traffic to travel east-west parallel to South Access Road, which would put pressure on the intersection to the north of Cedar Mall, according to some Plan Commission members.

“That intersection is always a problem with traffic as it is,” said former Councilmember Mark O’Brien at the time, and Plan Commission Member Oscar Chamberlain had concurred.

“The north entrance is lousy — it’s not good now,” he said at the meeting at which Caribou Coffee’s petition was denied. “It just jams.”

The city applied for Highway Safety Improvement Program grant funds in November to help pay for improvements to the intersection in order to reduce the number of crashes and their severity. On April 1 word came in that the application was accepted.

The total project cost is estimated at $376,617, with the HSIP grant paying approximately $338,955 and the city $37,662. The state Department of Transportation will start soliciting a designer now that the city has accepted the grant agreement.

As a result of the intersection project moving forward in 2026, plans to mill and repave South Access Road between Main Street and the Red Cedar Bridge this summer will be postponed to coincide with work on the intersection.

“Otherwise, we’ll just have to close the road down twice, businesses will be inconvenienced twice, and some of the paving that we would have done this summer would have to have been redone,” said Jim Anderson, Community Services Department director. “It just made sense to postpone it.”