Commuters are encouraged to avoid Cottage Road in South Portland this spring as a $1.9 million rehabilitation and pedestrian safety project is set to break ground.
“There definitely will be some traffic impacts for this project,” said Lacey Kremer, South Portland’s civil and transportation engineer. “The contractor’s going to do the best they can to keep two lanes of traffic open, but it definitely is recommended to be taking an alternative route.”
Repaving and storm drain upgrades will be done on a one-mile stretch of Cottage Road from Red’s Dairy Freeze near the intersection with Highland Avenue to the Cape Elizabeth town line. The work on the storm drains likely will require sections of the road to be limited to one lane of traffic, Kremer said.
From Angel Avenue to Sawyer Street, pedestrian safety improvements will be installed, including pedestrian bump-outs, which reduce the amount of road pedestrians need to cross at crosswalks, as well as new curbing and wider sidewalks.
“We’ve also got a realignment of where Pillsbury Street comes into Cottage Road,” Kremer said. “You come in at more of a 90-degree angle which just really improves the safety of the intersection.”
This year’s project comes six years after the city’s Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee made recommendations for improvements. Some of those recommendations were addressed in a previous project that made pedestrian safety improvements from Red’s Dairy Freeze to Sawyer Street.
Preliminary work for the $1.9 million project, of which half is being paid for by the Maine DOT, has already begun as workers confirm the location of underground utilities ahead of the storm drain improvements. The bulk of the project could begin as soon as next week and is scheduled to wrap up by July.
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