Construction on a $1 million upgrade to the Route 20 corridor in the hamlet of Nelson should begin in early 2018 — and exactly what that upgrade will entail and how it will benefit Nelson residents was the subject of a public meeting last week at the Nelson town office.
Four engineers from the state Department of Transportation outlined the overall project to improve pedestrian and traffic safety within the hamlet and addressed questions and concerns of local residents during a June 28 public meeting.
The project — officially called the U.S. Route 20 Safety Improvement Project — will fundamentally alter the hamlet streetscape of roads and sidewalks to make it safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and automobiles to travel within the hamlet. It will also beautify the hamlet to make it look more like a community and less like a barren stretch of highway.
The work will be funded by the state of New York.
Nelson town officials and state DOT officials have been meeting, discussing and planning this improvement project for two years.
“We want Nelson to have more of a village feel than it already is,” said DOT Project Designer Eric Hitchcock during the meeting. “It will have more of a Morrisville/Cazenovia feel, instead of the drag strip you currently have.”
The project, to be done by the state DOT, will include the resurfacing and restriping of one mile of Route 20, including the addition of a center two-way left turn lane; new and replacement sidewalks on each side of the highway within the hamlet; the addition of crosswalks; reduced speed limits; and signing improvements as needed. Other elements such as bicycle lanes, on-street parking, new welcome signs at the hamlet gateways, landscaping and lighting improvements at the Nelson/Erieville Road intersection.
The first major difference residents and travelers will see in Nelson will be the restriping of Route 20, Hitchcock said. The current four-four lane road will become three lanes — one lane in each direction and a central, two-way turning lane. There will be bicycle lanes added to the road in each direction, an eight-foot-wide shoulder on each side that will accommodate parking during business hours, new streetscapes along the shoulders and new sidewalks on both sides of the road. There will be crosswalks on all four sides of the Route 20/Erieville Road intersection, as well as two new streetlights at the intersection, Hitchcock said.
It was decided that there is not enough traffic nor history of vehicle accidents at the intersection to make it worth putting in a stoplight, and the traffic volume does not warrant keeping the road four lanes within the hamlet.
“The average daily traffic here is 5,000 vehicles per day,” said DOT Regional Design Engineer Brian Hoffman. “That sounds like a lot [of cars] but really it isn’t.”
The current project schedule includes finalizing the plans by the end of this summer, with construction bids being opened in the fall. Construction is slated to begin in spring 2018, with the completion date being fall 2018.
During construction, there will be “minor delays” for traffic, although the highway will remain open at all times, Hitchcock said.
“This should be a relatively quick job,” said Jonathan Tibbetts, DOT design team manager.
During the public meeting, residents asked a number of questions, including how the sidewalks would be maintained and plowed during the winter, considering the amount of snow Nelson gets each year. Nelson Town Councilor Jen Marti, part of the town’s streetscape committee that has been working on this plan since 2015, said the town will have to form a sidewalk district that district residents will pay increased taxes on. The town will then hire someone to maintain the sidewalks in winter, funded by the new district tax.
The general mood in the meeting — which filled all the seats in the town board room — was one of cautious optimism.
Tyler Wilcox, who lives on Route 20, said the plan sounds good and the changes “will make everything safer.”
“It will be nice to have sidewalks going through town,” Wilcox said. “This will make the hamlet more appealing.”
Two concerns Wilcox said he had over the plans were the failure to reduce the speed limit beyond 45 miles per hour within the hamlet, and the issue of cars parking along the Route 20 shoulder in winter, and how they will affect, or be affected by, snow plows.
Nancy Demyttenaere — who lives in Nelson, owns two commercial buildings on Route 20 and is a member of the town streetscape committee — said she thinks the DOT plans are “phenomenal.”
“This will allow the hamlet to feel like a community instead of the Indianapolis Speedway,” she said. “This will slow down traffic, and will make us look like more of a community, which will create more of a psychological reason for drivers to slow down.”
The Route 20 improvement project was publicly announced in September 2016, when the state of New York agreed to spend $1 million to improve the streetscape as part of the state Department of Transportation’s five-year capital construction program for Region 2.
More details, including a map of the Route 20 corridor in hamlet and where certain improvements will be made, can be viewed at the Nelson town office, located at 4085 Nelson Road.
