$12M road project proposed for Troy

Work on a proposed $12 million West Main Street corridor improvement project that would stretch from Troy’s downtown to Interstate 75 continues, including reviewing public comments.

The project would be done in two phases, beginning with the stretch of Main Street from Cherry Street just west of the Public Square in 2022 and from Ridge Avenue to the interstate in 2023.

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The project has been under discussion for several years and includes funding sources from local and beyond. For example, the $5.1 million first phase is expected to be funded through safety improvement program funds, urban paving funds and $2.05 million from local sources.

The Ohio Department of Transportation will provide project oversight and is among the sources of money, including federal grants. For the total project, the city has secured safety funding, annual ODOT resurfacing money and other grants of around $6 million combined, City Engineer Jillian Rhoades said.

A public meeting on the first phase was held in February, followed by a comment period that ended March 20. Those comments focused on safety and parking.

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Rhoades was asked to comment on the benefits of the projects along with anticipated headaches.

“The biggest benefit is the improvement of safety along the entire corridor by re-establishing curbs, installing tree lawns, creating bump outs in the downtown intersections for pedestrians,” Rhoades said.

“The biggest ‘headache’ will be traversing through all the temporary and permanent easements. There is not a lot of permanent easements required, but the federal process for a lot of temporary easements will be tedious and very time consuming,” she said. “Also, the inconvenience of the traveling public will be a headache. The recent work by Vectren is a good ‘practice’ run to gauge patience, traffic flow, etc. But this project will be multiple times greater of an impact.”

Among key elements of the project, as outlined in the phase one information sheet provided at the public meeting:

• Widen substandard lanes to provide at least 11-foot widths for outside lanes, 10.5 foot for inside lanes and 12 foot for center turn lanes.

• From Adams Street east to Market Street, implement a road diet by reducing from four through lanes with no turn lanes to two through lanes with a center left-turn lane.

• From Plum Street east to Market Street, convert south side parking from angle-in to parallel.

• From Oxford Street to Plum Street, convert north side parallel parking to angle-in parking on north side of street.

• At Kettering Hospital between Adams and Elm streets, install a raised center median with one single-access point to hospital.

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The road diet will occur, Rhoades said, while a decision is pending on whether proposed reverse-angle parking in the downtown area should be implemented.

“While we haven’t received an overwhelming amount of positive or negative response to the reverse angle parking, there is some trepidation to implementing it because it is a foreign concept to most travelers,” Rhoades said. Experimenting with reverse-angle parking in one or more areas downtown is being considered first.

Reverse-angle parking requires the driver to back in with the back of the vehicle toward the curb. The ODOT information sheet provided at the public meeting said the reverse angle parking offers benefits, including better visibility for motorists, removing the difficulty of backing into moving traffic, positions a vehicle to the sidewalk for easier loading/unloading if needed and directs driver/passengers to enter/exit the vehicle toward the sidewalk instead of toward moving traffic.

One comment submitted to the city/ODOT from a downtown business said there were concerns about the reverse-angle parking. “We consider the matter of backing into an angle parking space to be far more difficult than merely driving out — with the concomitant delay of having to pass the target slot and then reversing into the slot and interrupting the flow of traffic and frequently requiring following vehicles to reverse direction to accommodate. This is the recipe for creation of traffic jams.”

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