The Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation (DCR), the state agency which has authority over the intersection of Lynn Fells Parkway with Melrose and Crystal Streets, recently held a public meeting where they unveiled a proposed redesign of this dangerous intersection. This process comes as a welcome development for our entire community but particularly for our school community. The unveiling of this design came a full year after the previous public meeting, where DCR presented four different options for this intersection and took public feedback on those designs. Our Committee expected an updated final design which incorporated prior public feedback, the majority of which was focused on traffic calming and on making the intersection safer for pedestrians and non-motorized users through dedicated infrastructure. We were surprised to see that DCR instead chose to recommend the most basic design from the 2021 meeting (“Option 1”), which installs a traffic signal but does not make any other material changes. That design can be reviewed here. We were also surprised to learn that city staff supported and preferred the most basic option.
At this most recent meeting, the design received a fair amount of critical feedback for not doing more to prioritize pedestrian and bicyclist safety, including from our Committee and from multiple City Councilors. This intersection directly abuts the Middle School/High School complex, and hence is critical for pedestrian and bicycle travel to school. Reducing vehicle trips is also the city’s #1 transportation goal in its NetZero Action Plan, as well as the state’s top transportation priority in 2025/2030 Climate Plan. As we all know, we cannot expect substantial shifts towards walking and biking unless people feel safe doing so.
Our Committee supports DCR’s preference for signalizing the intersection, but we also acknowledge that through-traffic at the parkway is too fast, and too heavy, for bicyclists and non-vehicular road users to be safe in the roadway. For this reason, we have submitted a letter to the City of Melrose and to DCR urging the incorporation of mixed-use pathways on both sides of the intersection. This will allow non-vehicular users to be able to proceed both east and west through the intersection without needing to enter, or cross, Lynn Fells Parkway. Our letter is published below. We have not yet received a response from the city or DCR, but will share any updates we learn about.
The meeting recording can be viewed at this link.
June 24, 2022
Re: Lynn Fells Parkway at Melrose Street Intersection Improvements
CC: Mayor Paul Brodeur; Jess Parenti, Department of Conservation and Recreation
To Director of Public Works Proakis-Ellis:
We write in hope of securing your assistance to make further improvements to the “preferred alternative” design for the intersection of Melrose Street and Lynn Fells Parkway, currently under consideration by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
As we noted in our letter to DCR dated June 7, our membership was disappointed by the overall lack of improvements for pedestrians and bicyclists in DCR’s preferred alternative. We feel that such a design fails to uphold DCR’s commitments to shared mobility on the state’s parkway system, Melrose’s commitment to Complete Streets, and furthermore that the incorporation of sharrows and paths along driveways is particularly problematic due to the heavy use of this route by students coming to and from the middle and high schools. Because this corridor represents both (1) one of the highest-crash intersections in the city, and (2) a crucial travel route for young Melrosians, we strongly believe the design should prioritize the safety of “vulnerable” road users (children, seniors, pedestrians, bicyclists, people with disabilities) over motor vehicle throughput.
In your role as liaison to the DCR in coordinating the inter-agency planning of this project, we would like to offer several recommendations we believe will help this project conform to the City of Melrose’s Complete Streets goals and the DCR’s Parkways Master Plan, and will ensure DCR is able to move forward with design and construction in a timely fashion.
Our foremost recommendation is that the project be updated to include grade- or curb- separated cycletracks, or shared-use pathways, on both the north and south sides of the entire section of Lynn Fells Parkway between Melrose Street and Main Street. These should be designed so that pedestrians and bicyclists can mix comfortably, particularly going downhill when bicycle speeds may be faster. They should furthermore be designed in anticipation of future separated cyclist facilities extending east and west of the project area to the existing bike lanes on Lynn Fells Parkway at Bellevue and Vinton Street, respectively.
Whether such a design is accomplished by taking City land on the south side for a widened path, reducing or dropping vehicle lanes, or reconfiguring lane geometry similar to what was initially proposed in DCR’s Design Option 3, is a choice that we leave to you and the DCR project planning team. Regardless of how it is accomplished, there is no question that automobile speeds and volumes along Lynn Fells Parkway make mode separation mandatory for ensuring user safety along this corridor.
As MassDOT states in their 2021 Safe Speeds guidelines, “Where land use and context support higher operating speeds, more separation is needed to reduce the risk of high-speed collision …. In these cases, it is critical to find ways to separate people walking, biking, and other roadway users from cars and trucks.” The current design, featuring a single poorly-connected pathway crossing multiple driveways across the north side of the intersection, and “sharrows” in the roadway, will not sufficiently address safety concerns in this corridor.
We encourage your office and DCR to study the potential additional benefits of simplifying or reducing vehicle lanes through this project area, in an effort to eliminate the dangerous lane-swapping maneuvers that are regularly carried out by throughbound vehicle drivers, and preventing high-speed turns through pedestrian crossings. This may also include studying the reconfiguration of the lanes and signals at Main Street and Lynn Fells Parkway to better incorporate safer pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle traffic. Finally, we support the city’s efforts to close one of the driveways to Dunkin, or to reconfigure access to the Whole Foods plaza to a two-way driveway on Melrose Street, and will put our public support behind any campaign for such changes.
While we would have preferred a more ambitious project that took more serious consideration of options such as a roundabout configuration or expanding the project scope to include a longer stretch of the Parkway, we recognize that such options are not on the table at this time. We share the goals of your Department and the City of Melrose in building safer, more accommodating streets that work for all Melrose residents and families, and we would like this project to come to fruition. We appreciate any updates you can give us regarding the City’s evaluation of this project and we look forward to encouraging DCR to produce a design that puts Melrose at the forefront of the Commonwealth’s redoubled efforts to design safer roadways.
With respect,
The Officers and Membership of the Melrose Pedestrian & Bicyclist Advisory Committee
Encl.