Another detour may be coming this week to North Lawrence, but drivers and neighborhood residents needn’t worry about a long-term commitment.

While crews recently lifted a detour that steered vehicles around the construction site at North Second and Locust streets, the upcoming version will be employed only to help accommodate repairs of damaged pavement.

And instead of lasting for eight months — as the Elm-to-Locust-to-North Third-to-Lyon streets detour did — the new routes are expected to last for no more than eight hours at a time.

“It’d be very temporary, for only short periods — maybe a day,” said Steve Lashley, project manager for the city’s Department of Public Works. “Most likely it’ll be a single lane closure, with either flagmen waving people around or it might be a temporary detour for the day, to an adjacent block. It won’t be anything for any duration.”

The temporary redirections will be along North Second Street, from Locust to Lyon streets, a stretch that had served as the backbone for a detour that lasted more than six months longer than anticipated as part of a $2.5 million intersection-reconstruction project that remains months behind schedule.

Because North Second was neither designed nor constructed to handle such a high number of vehicles for so long, the road ended up with extensive damage during a particularly rough winter, said Mark Thiel, assistant public works director.

To make repairs, crews will be grinding as much as three inches of concrete off damaged sections of the road, then restoring the surface with asphalt pavement that also is up to three inches thick.

And throughout North Lawrence — on virtually every neighborhood street that is not surfaced with concrete — hired contractors will be dispatched to apply thin layers of road-smoothing pavement later this spring and summer. The covering, measuring about 3/8 inch thick, also serves to prevent moisture from seeping into cracks, therefore extending the life of the street.

Such work, dubbed “microsurfacing,” is particularly cost-effective, Thiel said. Microsurfacing works out to about $1.94 per square yard, compared with about $15 per square yard for more extensive removal-and-replacement work.

Crews will be out on neighborhood streets this month, making minor repairs to prepare for the microsurfacing, Thiel said. Roads will begin getting their new coatings in May.

Among the roads slated for microsurfacing will be North Second and North Third from Lincoln Street to just south of the Kansas Turnpike’s entrance road. The stretch will get the new surface and new lane markings.