Fire Commission Opposed to Narrowing of Main Street

The Town’s Fire Department wanted to know if it could navigate the proposed narrowing of Main Street, so it conducted a road test.  Firefighters drove the ladder truck (the longest truck in the fleet, albeit slightly narrower than the other trucks) as well as a utility truck along Main Street. The test documented with still photographs and video whether the drivers could safely navigate the proposed narrowing of the roadway, as mapped out by the DPW striping. Safety, they noted, includes the ability for other motorists to pull over to let emergency vehicles pass.

There wasn’t enough room. 

Even though the fire trucks were moving at 20-25 mph during the test, drivers had difficulty negotiating the narrow lanes, which sometimes dropped from 12 to 11 feet wide, and there were problems with seeing oncoming traffic around the bend. The median and edge stripes were barely visible on the sides of the trucks and sometimes disappeared altogether on the curves. A hard curb would make matters even worse, they said.

While emphasizing again that they had no position on sidewalks, per se, the Fire Commissioners unanimously passed a motion expressing their opposition to the narrowing of ANY road in Town below the minimum set out in the Town Code, as well as opposing hard curbing where roads do not meet the Town Code.

Using the Town Code as the standard seemed to be a reasonable approach to the Commissioners. A table showing street design standards by Zoning District lists 40′ as the minimum width for the “traveled way” of a major street and 26′ as the minimum width for a local street in most residential zones. In the business district 40′ is the minimum width. Elsewhere, the Code mandates 25′ as the minimum width for an “accessway” in a new subdivision. The proposed narrowing of Main Street would make this major collector road narrower than the narrowest of the Town’s minimum road width standards by a foot or more.

While discussions about minimum road widths may continue, the Fire Commission was quite clear about its concern for the negative impact on public safety of narrowing Main Street, which is the Fire Department’s major access to the Southern and Eastern portions of Town.