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August 2023
Although several intersections within the 97 municipalities of the Boston Region MPO need safety and operations improvements, transportation infrastructure improvements are typically constrained by time and financial resources. To address these challenges, the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) Board has funded two iterations of the Intersection Improvement Program over the last decade to provide quickly implementable intersection improvement recommendations that can be accomplished using existing municipal budgets or other easily accessible funding sources. This most recent iteration of the Intersection Improvement Program assessed conditions at two locations—Linden Street at Weston Road in Wellesley and Route 117 at Route 62 in Stow—to provide short-term, low-cost improvement recommendations and to suggest more expensive and permanent changes that could be made to both locations in the near future when sufficient funding can be secured.
The short-term recommendations at both intersections included expanding pedestrian zones and narrowing vehicle turning radii by painting the pavement at the intersections’ corners and adding vertical barriers to the perimeter of the painted zones to prevent vehicles from entering the newly created areas for people walking. In Stow, the short-term recommendations also included adding a pedestrian refuge island using paint and vertical separation to a long crossing and, in Wellesley, MPO staff recommended adding a bike box and using paint and vertical separation to pilot the addition of a shared-use path to the roadway. Recommendations requiring greater investment include adding pedestrian signals, sidewalks, and curb ramps with pedestrian detectable warning strips to every corner and crossing of the Stow intersection and, in Wellesley, MPO staff recommended actuating the signals at the intersection and constructing a vertically separated and paved shared-use path if the painted on-street pilot goes well.
Download documents:
Stow Memo (PDF) Stow Memo (HTML)
Wellesley Memo (PDF) Wellesley Stow Memo (HTML)