Satchel Walton(LPM)Bri Hednall’s regular drives aren’t usually too difficult: she commutes from her Shelby Park home to Jewish Hospital, and her kids go to elementary schools in NuLu and the Highlands. But since I-65 shut down, Hednall said walking around her neighborhood has felt more dangerou s, and simple turns have become “impossible.”“It’s like they didn’t think it all the way through when they did this, because we live here and we need a place to go, we need to be able to travel, and there’s no logistically sensible solution at this point, with everything being shut down at the same time,” Hednall said.With construction replacing three aging overpasses, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet expects the interstate to be closed until August. The first week of the closure fed a fervor of online gripes – semi-trucks weaving down residential blocks, delays for commuters, and 11 crashes at the “can opener.”In places like Shelby Park, other road work exacerbates the pain. In addition to closures on Burnett Avenue and Kentucky Street due to the I-65 project, Louisville Water Company is working on a block of Oak Street and a portion of Goss Avenue is closed. The conversion of Logan and Shelby to two-way streets – planned to be completed before I-65 work started – is ongoing because of issues with local utilities.In effect, routes from Old Louisville to Shelby Park and Germantown can now be quite circuitous and congested with traffic from a stretch of interstate that carried 125,000 vehicles each day.Mindy Peterson, a spokesperson for the I-65 project, said that the first week of work on the interstate went “very well” and that drivers across Jefferson County were adapting.“I’ve talked to a lot of people who have just said to me anecdotally, ‘Oh, it's much better than I thought. It’s about an extra 5, 10, minutes, and I’m where I need to be.’ And I think that is largely a success,” Peterson said.Extra traffic doesn’t seem to have led to more accidents. Last year, in the first week of June, there were 480 car crashes reported to KSP in Jefferson County. This year, there were 459, according to an online database.Chris Glasser said that Old Louisville residents have expressed frustration about the neighborhood being used as a corridor to the freeway, long before a recent uptick in truck traffic. Glasser is the president of Streets for People, which advocates for walking, biking, and transit options in Louisville.“The ease with which people are able to drive through the urban neighborhoods to access an on-ramp, or get off of an off-ramp and land in these urban neighborhoods going, you know, 50 miles an hour. I think it’s really unfortunate,” Glasser said.Glasser said that he would have liked to see the project consider reconfiguring or eliminating some ramps to keep cars at safer speeds on neighborhood streets.The I-65 project has affected drivers far beyond the neighborhoods where construction is underway. David Harris lives and works downtown, and said that he supports repairing older infrastructure, but had noticed extra congestion around Bardstown Road, St. Matthews, and Hurstbourne.“I definitely know a lot of coworkers who’ve been delayed maybe twice as long, a 30 minute commute taking an hour or longer, and for sure any time I leave downtown, traffic is a little bit heavier,” Harris said.Construction is replacing three overpasses. The overpass by the fairgrounds is already fully demolished, while crews are still working to remove the beams that formerly supported the other two.Peterson acknowledged that residents have been bothered by the noise, but said demolition was the loudest part of the process and that it would be done within a few weeks. ...read more read less