BRUNSWICK — The Department of Transportation is scheduling a meeting next month on a proposal to rebuild the intersection of Mill Street, Pleasant Street and Stanwood Street.

U.S. Route 1 shares the intersection, adding traffic to an already busy juncture of three central roads that is known to infuriate merging drivers from Stanwood Street and cause long back-ups on Mill Street.

The state is fundng the project.

The date of the meeting has yet to be scheduled, Town Manager John Eldridge said, because DOT is still “tweaking” the design, which would essentially widen the intersection to alleviate congestion on Mill Street from cars trying to merge south onto Pleasant Street.

At least one town councilor who lives near the intersection opposes the design, however, arguing that cars trying to make a left turn from Stanwood Street to Pleasant Street already have a difficult time making their way quickly into the right-hand lane.

“Coming out of Stanwood Street, when you have a green light and you’re going to be turning up on Pleasant Street heading south, if you can’t get over to the further lane on the right immediately, you very often can’t get over there are all,” Councilor Kathy Wilson said Friday.

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Wilson sits on the Master Plan Implementation Committee, as well as the Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee. She said the intersection has been “one of my pet peeves for four or five years now.”

Cars coming from Mill Street have a yield sign merging south on the Pleasant Street, although Wilson said they rarely do for vehicles turning left from Stanwood that are trying to quickly get over to the right-hand lane.

Wilson is often one of those drivers – she lives off Pleasant Street – but so are residents who need to turn right on River Road at the next intersection.

“If you want to turn up River Road,” she said, “I’ve had times that if I didn’t immediately get into the right-hand lane (after turning left from Stanwood), I had to go up to the turnaround and go all the way back (up Route 1).”

Vehicles headed south on Route 1 on Mill Street have a yield sign when they turn onto Pleasant, but a raised island and a solid white line with a rumble strip currently exists at the intersection, which encourages those cars to merge without feeling the need to yield, Wilson said.

While there have been few actual collisions, Cmdr. Tom Garrepy said the police department receives complaints and hear confusion about the intersection, especially over which drivers have the right of way.

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Wilson reported lots of road rage. “It’s infuriating,” she said.

She said the DOT’s plan to widen the intersection by constructing a large island and moving the Mill Street merge lane farther away – onto the undeveloped piece of land owned by the town that was formerly home to a Cumberland Farms gas station – wouldn’t solve the problem of allowing Mill Street drivers to get over to the right lane.

“All that will do is make it even harder,” she said.

Instead, she prefers a solution that would emphasize to oncoming Mill Street vehicles that they must yield to cars coming from Stanwood Street – either a bigger yield sign, a yield sign painted on the road, or even a traffic signal, she said.

Callie Ferguson can be reached at 781-3661, ext. 100, or cferguson@theforecaster.net. Follow Callie on Twitter: @calliecferguson.

Redesign of the Mill-Pleasant-Stanwood intersection in Brunswick will be discussed next month by the Maine Department of Transportation.


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