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Traffic engineer outlines circulation plan; neighbors press concerns over bus exits
Summary
At a building committee meeting, traffic engineer Rebecca Brown described a circulation plan that separates parent, staff and bus traffic for the new Concord school. Neighbors and committee members pressed Brown on narrow neighborhood streets, steep grades and how 19 buses would exit onto South Street.
Rebecca Brown, the traffic engineer on the project, laid out a proposed circulation pattern for the new Concord school at a building committee meeting, saying parents would enter from South Street into a dedicated drop-off loop and exit onto Conant Drive while staff and buses would use separate access routes.
"Parents are anticipated to enter into the site from South Street, through this main parent driveway," Brown said, describing the parent pickup loop and a separate staff parking entrance. She said the design stacks parent vehicles on-site and provides roughly 15 surplus spaces of queue capacity "before we start impacting South Street." Brown also described a two-wave plan for buses to avoid backing up onto Cornell Street.
Committee members and neighborhood attendees raised concerns about narrow stretches of Noyes Street, on-street parking, sidewalks, and a steep grade where Noyes meets South Street that could make bus exits difficult in winter. A committee member asked, "Is the lane wide enough just for the bus or can buses pass each other in that area?" Brown responded that the lane is about 24 feet in places and is wide enough for buses or an emergency vehicle to pass.
The committee discussed several alternatives Brown had evaluated: routing buses via Conant Drive and the service driveway, reversing parent and bus flows, creating a separate parent loop around athletic fields, or using the existing front bus loop and routing buses through the service drive to Conant. Brown cautioned that each option introduces trade-offs — for example, a parent loop around the athletic fields would encroach on wetlands and remove at least one athletic field, while reversing flows could push queues into neighborhood streets and increase speeding risks.
Brown said one mitigation could be placing a traffic safety officer at a key intersection during peak hours, and suggested a longer-term option could be a traffic signal at the Princeton/Clinton intersection. "I would not be surprised if [a warrant] is met for at least the peak hours," she said. Brown also estimated a brand-new traffic signal including engineering could be "in the range of $400,000."
Mister Cashman told the committee he would reach out to Karen Hill in the city's transportation office to request review and to put the item on TPAC and TOC agendas so the city can weigh in before the committee finalizes recommendations.
Next steps: staff will seek formal feedback from the city's traffic engineers and return with that information to the committee for further discussion.
