| Street | To | From | Treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commonwealth Avenue | Centre Street | Grant Avenue | Mill and Overlay |
It would be great to get a parking count on the south side here, to see if bike lanes can be installed.
On the north side, this is a no-brainer and I assume CSWG will add it. Also lane-narrowing!
Crossing at the dog grooming is treacherous. Worthy of daylighting and a bumpout (flexposts?) to narrow crossing and increase visibility.
Wondering if the breaks in the Comm Ave island need to be so wide, especially at the entry to the shopping area near Blackers. At Irving, entry is one-way. Traffic does loop and exit the shopping area, but it still seems very wide and misaligned.
Can parking in the carriage road near Blackers be reorganized to make bike/ped activity safer? Reverse angle parking?
Interesting idea. These lines are in the works as part of the Two-Way Biking on the Carriageway project.. It does seem like there could be opportunities to reduce those openings.
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I’m reminded by Google Maps that School buses may drop off in here
Yes - multiply near misses at Comm Ave dog grooming crossing!
Yes, this has been discussed going back years & thank you for posting it and keeping this alive.
–It’s well agreed by DPW that both openings in the berm are excessively wide. Jason met me here maybe 5 years ago and the idea was to narrow the berm opening on the east side (toward Grant) and the berm opening on the west side (by Irving). This would have two benefits:
- Additional parking space along the berm, and
- require traffic on Comm Ave to slow down to make the turns. (I’ll add that excessively wide berm widths is a problem up & down Comm Ave and in my opinion one large factor that contributes to excessive speed, as WB drivers do not need to slow down at all to make their right turns to the north.)
Yes, and we actually found out the school that uses the Carriage Road here as a bus stop. It’s Buckingham, Brown and Nichols.
@peller Jason floated the idea of Reverse-angle parking several years back. And on that day while he & I were standing there talking, we interviewed parents who (I knew who were shopping then and) passed by us about this. They weren’t so crazy about it. It goes back to the notion that people in Newton don’t yet accept the reverse angle parking, as evidenced by comments last year during the library solar panels project.
@jennmartin.srts Yes, reducing the openings is important.
About the current crosswalk: 1) increasingly, customers are parking across the street there, as parking fills up in the lot. 2) I talked to Karen Blacker about this, many of her employees park in the lot, so then customers have to park elsewhere and (often) cross Comm Ave. She likes the idea that her employees would park on Comm Ave & have a pedestrian crosswalk there (with RRFB) to safely cross Comm Ave to their jobs.
The current crosswalk at Comm Ave that begins at DoggoneIt: I would recommend 1) moving that to begin in front of Get In Shape, and 2) extend the berm across the street to be in line with Irving St. Irving & the crosswalk do not line up, and many people crossing do not remain in the crosswalk; rather, they angle toward the stores & parking lot. So extend the berm 10 or so feet so it’s in line with Irving, and move the crosswalk slightly east. This also puts pedestrians in clearer view of WB drivers, rather than their currently being hidden by utility pole.
That automatically narrows Irving St on its west side before Comm Ave, and then you can also narrow it on the east side.
Will add a drawing soon to illustrate.
@Jane_Hanser two observations here: 1) reverse parking is the obvious engineering solution for angled parking adjacent to an area with so much pedestrian activity 2) people just can’t handle their cars well enough to manage reverse parking, as shown by the Homer Street experiment. That’s worrysome.
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Here are my (sorry, low res) photos to show (more in line with where that mother is standing in the photos), and the berm extended to accommodate & protect the newer location. This is a mother pushing her baby in a stroller. Right before reaching the berm, she zig zags to the road to be more in line w/ the shops & Irving St. The pattern is likely the same going north to south for people coming from the Commercial Zone or from Irving St. The sidewalk crossing location would then be east of (and not hidden by) the utility pole.
Adam,
Reconnecting with our Newtonmoves forum after a long hiatus!!! Here’s a photo of the new RRFBs across Irving here.(Plus ADA-compliant curb-cut and new curbing, done last year with the Comm Ave repaving project.) Nobody in the crosswalk in this photo but I have observed they work, particularly helpful that the 2nd, 3rd etc., drivers in line can see that somebody is in the crosswalk and slow down appropriately & keep proper distance from the car in front. The crashes were usually the 2nd car crashing into the 1st one, which had stopped to allow a pedestrian to cross.
