Andrew McKeever Photo At left, Corey Mack answers a question from the Manchester Select Board Tuesday during a presentation on alternative possibilities for a planned overhaul of Depot Street. The Select Board gave an initial green light to proceed with one of the six proposed changes, and the preliminary concept will be enhanced further with additional details such as the location of crosswalks.
Andrew McKeever
GNAT-TV News Project
MANCHESTER — The town’s Select Board gave a green light to continue refining one of the six alternatives on a redesign of Depot Street presented during its regular meeting Tuesday night.
The board agreed with a configuration presented at a public meeting held two weeks ago, where an informal consensus of the roughly 20 townspeople present emerged around one of the options developed by planning consultants from two firms hired to assist the town with the design work. This alternative incorporated bicycle lanes to be added to the existing corridor, with variable greenspace on both sides of the street as it runs from the Roundabout to a short distance past the Center Hill/Richville Road intersection.
The select board gave an initial go-ahead to refine this preliminary design further, by adding more details such as additional crosswalks. This design will be reviewed again at a future meeting as the plans evolve.
“The conceptual design touches all the buttons — it gets a little green space in there, it calms the traffic a little bit, and still gives access to the emergency vehicles and the bike lanes,” said Board Chairman Ivan Beattie. “Everyone had to give up something to get to this design — it’s better than I thought it would be.”
The three members of the select board present — Beattie, Steve Nichols and Greg Cutler — unanimously agreed to have Corey Mack, the project engineer of RSG, Inc., the Burlington-based consulting firm that is working with the town on the redesign of Depot Street, go back to the drawing board and return with more detailed plans for the overhaul of the street, which is part of a larger project involving replacing some aging sewer lines and a repaving project. Actual construction on the redesign won’t start until next year at the earliest, and possibly not until 2018.
A typical cross section of the street at present under the alternative selected would have a five-foot wide sidewalk, a five-foot wide bike lane, two 10 and one-half foot wide travel lanes for vehicles, mirrored by the five-foot bike lane and sidewalks on the other side of the street, with an existing eight-foot green space that would alternate from side to side. Turning lanes would be built into certain spots along the street to allow for left hand turns by eliminating the green spaces at intersections or driveways where needed to accommodate the traffic volume.
Essentially, the existing center turn lane will be traded in for the green space, a belt of trees, provision for storing snow plowed during winter snowstorms while also reducing vehicle speeds The turn lanes would be incorporated at points where needed, and would help break up the corridor from a static, two lane roadway, while helping achieve the aim of calming the traffic flow and reducing speed, according to one of the slides in a powerpoint presentation Mack used to help describe the alternative that had passed muster earlier with the most favorables.
“The idea for taking the center lane out is that it provides for a little bit of the friction for the oncoming traffic,” he said. “One of the things we can do with this project is to change the design of the road to make people feel that they should be driving slower — one way to do that is to have fewer or narrower lanes.”
A $580,000 state grant with which includes a 10 percent, or $58,000 local match of funds, was intended to support a redesign of the street to better serve pedestrian, cyclists, motorists and business owners, he added.
Some additional funds will probably be needed to bring the concept to full realization if it continues as the preferred alternative, in order to add enhancements such as street lighting and storm water management, he said.
The town may be able to go back for additional funding to the state’s transportation agency. The initial request for funds was about $800,000, but that was reduced to $580,000 by the state. However, the possibility exists for the town to reapply for additional funds.
Such a grant application would need to be filed with state officials by Oct. 9, Mack said.
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