CTH E Reopened Five Days Ago. Some Drivers Are Still Taking The Long Way.

COUNTY Trunk Highway E reopened last Thursday after a 24-day closure between CTH Q and CTH VV for emergency concrete-box culvert repair. Traffic has resumed at its usual volume. The detour signs have come down. And a small number of drivers, having spent three and a half weeks finding their own way around, have declined to go back.

Roger Delvecchio, 44, has driven a UPS route through the Pewaukee corridor for 11 years. During the closure he began cutting north on Blackberry Lane, a connector he says he had never once used in over a decade of driving the area, and which he now credits with shaving four minutes off his afternoon run. He has continued using it every day since the closure ended.

"I'm not going back to guessing at a four-way stop that isn't even there anymore," Delvecchio said Thursday, idling at the intersection of Blackberry and Hillside. "I found something that works. Why would I unfind it."

"I'm not going back to guessing at a four-way stop that isn't even there anymore. I found something that works. Why would I unfind it."

— Roger Delvecchio, UPS driver, 11 years on the Pewaukee route

A Second Opinion

Not every convert to the detour network is convinced it was worth it. A FedEx driver who reaches the same Blackberry-Hillside intersection by a different path, having been rerouted there by his truck's GPS unit during the closure, said Thursday he still uses the route out of habit but does not endorse it. "It's definitely longer, and you pass three traffic lights," he said, declining to give his name because he was between stops and did not consider the topic worth the delay. "I don't know what he's so happy about."

County records show the closure ran from August 24 to September 17, a period during which Waukesha County Public Works logged no official detour route beyond signage directing drivers to CTH Q. Residents were, in effect, left to find their own way, and a number of them did, with results that varied.

The Great Detour

Local blogger Patricia Nowak, who writes a neighborhood newsletter under the name "Waukesha West Watch" from her home on Hillside Drive, coined the period "the Great Detour of September 2026" in a post dated September 10, roughly two weeks into the closure. She said the name was intended half-seriously and has been startled to see it stick. "I called it that because Lakeland Drive had its own overnight ramp work going on at the same time, and it felt like the whole west side was rerouting itself simultaneously," Nowak said. "I did not expect it to outlive the actual road closure."

Nowak said her own household briefly experimented with a route through a stretch of Lakewood Lane during the closure's second week and abandoned it after four days, citing a blind driveway that made left turns "a personal risk I wasn't equipped to keep taking." She said she now drives CTH E "like a normal person" and finds the continued use of Blackberry Lane by others "a little bit sad, honestly, but I respect the commitment."

What The County Says

Asked whether the county had any comment on drivers who continue to avoid a road it spent three and a half weeks repairing, a Waukesha County Public Works spokesperson said only that CTH E "meets all current pavement standards" and that "any route a driver prefers is between that driver and their GPS." The spokesperson declined to characterize this as a win or a loss for the repair project.

Delvecchio, for his part, said he intends to keep using Blackberry Lane through at least the end of the month, at which point he said he would "reassess," though he acknowledged when pressed that he had said something similar about a shortcut through a Sussex parking lot in 2019 and was, as of Thursday, still using that one too.