Bath Middle School students will and soon have a safer way to walk to school.
Bath, with the help of a Maine Department of Transportation grant, is building sidewalks on portions of Oak Grove Avenue and Old Brunswick Road, where the middle school sits, as well as all of Judkins Avenue. The streets are mainly residential areas.
The new sidewalks will stretch from the intersection of Oak Grove Avenue to Crawford Drive, across Judkins Avenue, and down Old Brunswick Road from Judkins Avenue to the middle school.
“These roads are all in the neighborhood of Bath Middle School and there’s quite a bit of pedestrian traffic in this area,” said Public Works Director Lee Leiner.
Although there’s a sidewalk in front of Bath Middle School, Leiner said middle school students often walk in the area to get to nearby athletic fields for after-school sports and activities, but have no safe sidewalk to travel on for much of the route.
The city was awarded a MDOT grant in 2013 to do the project as part of a Safe Routes to School program. The department agreed to pay for 80% of the roughly $872,000 project, Leiner said, and Bath will chip in the remaining 20%. Leiner estimated the city will pay about $250,000, which was included in a capital budget.
The sidewalk construction is being done by Pratt & Sons, a Mechanic Falls-based contractor. Construction is expected to begin on or around April 1 and finish by Aug. 31, 2021.
At a public meeting about the project Thursday, two local residents, Bruce Jackson and Tim Blair, asked the engineers to prioritize maintaining a safe pedestrian route for children and families during construction, especially while school is still in session.
“It has been my experience that sometimes during these kinds of projects, accommodations are made for vehicles … and sometimes pedestrians find themselves having to navigate an awkward and unsafe situation,” said Blair, who is a member of the Bath Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee. “I’m emphasizing the importance of that not just for students and the proximity to the school, but also thinking of Oak Grove. Even though there aren’t currently sidewalks, there is a lot of pedestrian activity in the road.”
According to the most recent data from the MDOT, an average of more than 2,800 vehicles per day traveled on Oak Grove Avenue. Nearly 1,600 cars on average drove down Old Brunswick Road each day, according to the MDOT.
The former Morse High School sits on High Street, but students moved into the new Morse High School off Wing Farm Parkway last month.
Don Ettinger, engineer of record from Gorrill Palmer, a civil engineering company overseeing the project, cautioned nearby residents the area “is going to look really bad before it looks really nice.”
Some streets will likely be reduced to one-way alternating traffic during the day and some driveways that intersect the new sidewalks may be temporarily torn up and replaced with gravel before the sidewalks are paved.
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