The Warren Select Board is moving forward with a temporary reconfiguration of the Route 100, Main Street intersection at the north end of Warren Village to determine whether a narrowed T-intersection will slow traffic.
As part of a June 16 discussion about the return of speed humps, their size and location, the town’s consultant VHB proposed using temporary mountable islands or raised areas to tighten the northern access to the village, which is currently a long, wide-open angle.
VHB will work with the town and road crew to install a short-term version of a more traditional T‑intersection, using temporary markings and materials to simulate mountable islands and tighter turning radii.
This intersection has been an issue going back to the 1980’s. At one point, Vtrans came in with a heavy (and perhaps prescient) hand and skinnied that intersection down by more than a third (with an island in the center) which resulted in a local hue and cry. The intersection was reopened (but not all the way).
Fast forward to today and what VHB is suggesting makes a lot of sense. Drivers entering the village from the north do not really stop or slow much at all if there’s no northbound Route 100 traffic to make them stop. That means they come into the village at something close to highway speeds and carry that speed with them.
The geometry of the current intersection encourages drivers coming off Route 100 to enter Main Street too fast, which in turn makes the adjacent speed table/hump feel harsher than designed.
Forcing folks to come to the kind of stop needed to turn onto the Sugarbush Access Road or any other road in town with a T-intersection would absolutely slow traffic, requiring deliberate action. It’s logical – you can’t take a 90-degree turn at 50 mph in a Subaru.
The VHB concept tightens the approach while still allowing commercial vehicles and emergency vehicles to navigate the intersection. Speeding in our villages is rude, and it is dangerous. This experiment will go a long way to demonstrating whether a simple fix can alleviate a real problem.
