Borough hoping to unsnarl its traffic

MILFORD — The good news is there may be some relief in sight for Milford’s traffic problems. The bad news is that the remedy may be just as annoying for the locals as it is for the visitors. The borough wants and needs the business they bring, but they don’t want vehicle traffic speeding by their front yards. How can the borough deal with Milford’s growing traffic congestion where cars travel on roads designed as cartways? What about drivers who find back street routes to shortcut long queues at the town’s only traffic light? These topics have been the subject of a seven-month, $34,000 traffic study by the Dunmore engineering firm, HRG Inc. Traffic Engineer Paul Menichello briefed the borough council on his findings at a March 19, special meeting. He gave the bad news first. Other than optimizing the timing of the light changes, “there’s not really a whole lot you can do,” he said, to reduce the congestion around the Broad and Harford streets traffic signal, without eliminating a lot of needed parking. Menichello said the study found the Sixth Street/state Route 2001 intersection would benefit from a new traffic light. Breaking up the flow there would allow motorists better opportunities to get out of side streets and could reduce the queue at Broad and Harford. The engineers’ traffic study found the volume also qualifies it under state requirements for traffic lights. For best efficiency, the light would require the installation of left-hand turning lanes, which would again reduce parking. Menichello noted further that the light would add new construction and maintenance costs, which further dampened council members’ enthusiasm. Menichello ran through a list of possible funding sources, but none of them were new alternatives for the panel. “We don’t have $150,000 (cost of a traffic light),” Borough President Matt Osterberg said. “Plus maintenance,” added Councilman Bo Fean. The meat of the presentation was three diagrammed proposals to reduce “cut-through” traffic, using borough residential streets and alleys to avoid the wait at the central traffic light. The first of these and the one Menichello said was his recommended plan, would create a series of alternating and converging one-way streets and alleys, designed to make passage between Harford and Broad streets on residential streets so confusing that a motorist would say, “‘I’ll never do this again,’” Menichello said. “On the other hand,” he admitted the pattern might also confuse residents. The engineer did not do an exact count on the numbers, but admitted, “there’s going to be a lot of signs, ‘One Way’ and ‘Do not enter.’” Fean noted that stop signs go for $56 and “kids steal them all the time.” Fean said the plan would not work without a “full-blown” installation of signs, because motorists would find the outlets. The visual impact didn’t escape Councilman Bill Kiger. “We’ve got a historic town here. We don’t want to clutter it up with signs.” “We don’t want to create a maze here. I don’t care if they use the side streets, I just want them to drive slow,” Osterberg said. Menichello’s second alternative involved creating some one-way streets and using “traffic calming” devices, such as slightly raised - three to four inches - intersections and “gateways.” The gateways involve widening the street berm at some principal intersections and adding a median just inside the street lanes, which reduces the turning space and forces traffic to slow further to make the turns. Menichello said the devices would slow, but not necessarily reduce cut-through traffic, and he admitted that the “bulb-out” corners make headaches for snow removal. The engineer’s third alternative was similar to the second, using “bulb-outs” at corners and principal entries to the borough, along with raised intersections, but without any one-way streets. He called this “the least successful and most expensive alternative.” Osterberg agreed with several residents who raised primary concerns about excessive traffic on the 15-foot-wide alleys. He liked the idea of some “calming devices” combined with some one-ways streets. “The place to start is the alleys around Broad and Harford. They’re a tangled mess,” he said. Noting that these measures were the beginning of a 10-year plan, he directed the engineer to review his plans and come up with a combination of calming measures and one-way alleys around the central business district, as starting point. “We have to make changes in the way we behave before we start putting up signs all over the place,” Osterberg said. He asked the engineer to return with proposals for the council’s next regular monthly meeting, on April 9.