 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
Last Spring, the university was gearing up to renovate the remaining part of Main Street not improved by recent construction. The plans were put on hold, however, as a funding opportunity presented itself to the university. Now, as the new funding is about to become available, the project is mere weeks from officially starting.
The planned renovations, which seek to upgrade the Main Street corridor that extends from the Field House to Mast Road, will include continuous biking paths, a pedestrian walkway that will lead straight to the West Edge Parking Lot and improved lighting conditions for those who walk at night, according to Steve Pesci, special projects director at UNH’s Campus Planning and Development department.
“This project is lucky enough to be benefiting from stimulus funding,” said Pesci. “In the past six months, we’ve changed the schedule and funding of the project. The concept of the project has remained the same.”
As the university planned to begin work on the project this past spring, an opportunity to make use of $722,000 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) presented itself. This was an opportunity that Campus Planning could not pass up.
“For the town and the university, this delay works out for the better,” said Pesci. “If we had pushed ahead on this project… we would have gotten less money and gotten less done. So this is one time when delays are a good thing.”
The project is about to receive bids from local development agencies. In order to receive and use the ARRA funding, the university must have the project contracted to one of the anticipated bidders by the middle of November. Otherwise, the funding disappears.
“We have been working like dogs on this one in order to have the project contracted by Nov. 15,” said Pesci.
The existing stretch of Main Street represents a run of New Hampshire road forgotten by the state after a bypass for Route 4 was built in the 60s to bring the state highway to its present location. In the past decade and a half, a series of projects have sought to accomplish what the Main Street West project will ultimately complete.
“This has been 15 years of coordinated effort and phases to rebuild Route 108 and Main Street, from Route 4 to Route 4,” said Pesci. “Three cycles of students saw this get done.”
In addition to the widening of the street and the addition of bike lanes, which will offer a continuous biking path from downtown Durham to Route 4, a mixed-use pedestrian path will be added to Main Street.
“We know that right now, if you’re a biker, the road is a barely acceptable path,” said Pesci. “If you’re a pedestrian, there is no acceptable walking path.”
The path will be paved with permeable asphalt – new eco-friendly pavement technology that allows water to pass through it freely. Additionally, it will be well-lit from the Field House to where it will follow down Mast Road and run through the woods to the back end of West Edge. The path will be open to both people on foot and bikers who wish to not ride on Main Street.
The Pedestrian Path will impact roughly 18,000 square feet of existing wetland area along the existing road corridor, something that Pesci said the university will “mitigate by creation of an equivalent wetland adjacent to the site.”
“The project will also contribute $15,000 to the NH Aquatic Resource Mitigation Fund,” said Pesci. “This approved design was demonstrated as the least impacting alternative able to meet the intent of improving pedestrian safety.”
The project also calls for a series of alternates that may become realities depending on the results of the bidding. These alternates include two bus pullouts 500 feet from Mast Road and additional lighting and trees along the pedestrian path. A roundabout may also appear in the project, a feature that will precede future work on a new road that will connect Main Street to McConnell Drive. This road, which will run along the fields behind the Field House, will eventually give way to the elimination of College Drive and the traffic signal in front of the Whittemore Center.
“As we build South Drive, we slowly abandon College Drive for private traffic,” said Pesci.
The road, which is expected to be completed in roughly five years, will also allow for the development of a new community in the southwest quadrant of campus – a corner of the university community that does not currently exist.
Also utilizing the new roundabout will be another planned road that will run north of an enclosed A-Lot parking structure, adding another underpass for the railroad tracks and working to eventually eliminate Depot Road, as a new method of getting to the Dairy Bar and Amtrak parking will become available from the north.
But before all this can happen, Main Street West must be completed to finish where 2007’s Main Street East construction left off.
“What Main Street West is is another domino,” said Pesci. “When it is done, that lets us go to the next domino. Main Street West and Main Street East were very big dominos in that plan.”
Construction on the road itself is expected to start as early as next spring, while the wetland work could start this fall, pending existing weather conditions.
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