millerm277
Active Member
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2013
- Messages
- 475
- Reaction score
- 507
Add a signal and slow down the traffic moving through here. Let's ground this "interchange" (it is really just a large intersection or at least should be), add a traffic signal and incorporate the pedestrian features AND car features at grade. This could eliminate the ramping and odd collector roads around the intersection as well as open up land that could be sold off by MassDOT (or at least ground leased). I would also be willing to bet that the land value would offset a good amount of the cost of grounding and rebuilding the intersection. This would also unlock approximately 7 acres of land for development!
I sometimes feel like a broken record here but: ....does the public support any of those ideas? An initial glance at the area and the history of this project + public opposition to prior concepts makes me rather skeptical.
Nearby single-family housing neighborhoods are usually unlikely to be happy with new development, especially of anything that isn't just another suburban strip-mall type operation - so I doubt "more acres of land for development" is a point in your favor.
Everyone that I've ever met hates the other signaled intersections along 9, and I'm not at all convinced that the average person thinks slowing down traffic on Route 9 even more/adding more of them would be a positive change.
This is a low-density suburban area + car-focused commercial strip with zero local transit besides a single low-frequency weekday-only bus on Route 9, to remind.
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I'm also not sure I'm convinced that you can get the current volume of traffic through a basic signalized intersection unless you're doing a lot of queue/merge lanes - the other signaled intersections look to have much lower traffic volumes on the cross-streets than Route 27 has, and thus likely can give Route 9 more of the cycle time than here would be able to. If there's traffic modeling to suggest otherwise, I'm open to hearing it, though.