Concord is currently designing improvements to pedestrian and bus stop safety along the shown stretch of North Main Street. (Courtesy of the City of Concord)
One out of every 25 pedestrian or bike accidents in Concord happen along one stretch of North Main Street. By redesigning the crosswalks and moving the bus stops there, city leaders are hoping to change that.
On North Main Street, from the intersection with Centre Street that serves as a gateway to downtown and the start of Interstate 393, there are four unsignaled crosswalks plus one at the traffic lights at the end of Washington Street. All four unsignaled crossings have safety or accessibility issues of some kind: They end in the middle of a driveway or, in one case, at a vertical granite curb. About 4% of the pedestrian or bike accidents in the city happen along this strip of road, according to city traffic engineer Karen Hill, and the vast majority of those incidents involved cars failing to stop for people who were using a crosswalk.
Eventually, the city will study what could be a much more ambitious redesign of this road, such as taking it down to one lane in each direction instead of two, as was done with the rest of Main Street during downtown revitalization. But with upcoming city projects on Storrs Street and Loudon Road as well as the state’s major interstate widening project in the pipeline, Concord is designing key safety improvements to crosswalks and bus stops in the meantime until the future of traffic flow on this stretch of road is better understood.
Hill presented options for each of the five crosswalks, which can be viewed in the presentation attached to this story online. Making these crosswalks safer involves building “bump outs” where needed for ramps onto the sidewalk so that people looking to cross and any approaching drivers can see one another. It also means minimizing the length of the crossing, avoiding crosswalks that land in driveways and, where possible, adding refuge islands or small medians halfway across the street.
Public attendees at the meeting Tuesday evening, including many who work in businesses on this road, didn’t express a strong preference for certain choices over others, but remarks from Hill about the safety issues on the road drew heavy nods of agreement.
Along with crosswalk improvements, city engineers have been asked by the city council to find a new location for one of the bus stops on this road.
The CAT bus, a free transportation service operated by the Community Action Program of Belknap-Merrimack Counties, has one stop on the northbound side of North Main, heading toward I-393, and two stops on the southbound side, heading downtown. About two years ago, the city and the bus service consolidated two northbound stops into one and selected a new location at the middle of this stretch of road. The new stop benefits from its proximity to the Washington Street traffic light, the size of the shoulder there, and the usability of the bus’s ADA access lift at that spot. But it is also at a very narrow strip of sidewalk and sits between two driveways for the Gallagher, Callahan and Gartrell law firm.
The firm asked the city to move the bus stop over safety concerns, and the city council agreed. Ultimately, though, there was no safer place on the road for a temporary new stop, so it will stay where it is until a safe access point for a new one can be built. The two southbound stops will also be consolidated into a single one as part of this process.
The best new bus stop spots are those presented in option 4 of the city’s presentation, CAT transportation director Terri Paige said. That would put the northbound stop about a block south of where it currently is just in front of the law firm’s offices, rather than by its parking lot. The new southbound stop would be built across the street in front of the Speedway gas station.
This stop is preferred by her team, Paige said, because it is the most equidistant between the stops on either side of it, it’s close to both signalized and unsignalized crosswalks and it’s a relatively safe place for drivers to pull back out into traffic.
Other potential stops were further south, near the Bank of NH branch and Domino’s Pizza or nearby Cleary Cleaners — renderings of these are also included in the presentation.
The designs presented were preliminary, some spots, especially the crossing at Franklin Street — a popular route for cars headed to the West Side that avoids the set of traffic lights on Centre Street. The city is also considering flashing signs to alert drivers when someone is using the crosswalk.
Several major infrastructure projects are poised to increase traffic on this section of North Main in the coming years.
If approved as part of next year’s budget — and, given that the majority of it is funded by state and federal dollars, that seems likely — the city is set to replace the Loudon Road bridge in the coming years. Full or partial closures for a reconstruction of the red-listed bridge will mean more cars using 393, and therefore North Main, to get across the river to the Heights and East Concord.
The state’s decade-long plan to widen I-93 and reconfigure several exits through Concord and Bow would also require major traffic rerouting while under construction. Its design also currently removes the option to get on I-93 North at Exit 14, meaning cars headed to the highway from downtown going that way would get on at Exit 15 via North Main.
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