A fellow citizen came to the Aberdeen City Council meeting Monday and spoke eminent sense: we need to control more intersections on Melgaard Road! The discussion comes right at the start of the meeting:
Melgaard Road runs along the south side of Aberdeen. It used to be the south edge of town, but Central High School moved south of that street in 2004, and housing has expanded greatly near the high school south of that road since. Along a nearly two-mile stretch, from the traffic light at Roosevelt to the school-time four-way stop at South 3rd Street, Melgaard traffic has no stops, no pedestrian-controlled intersections, nothing. When parents and students fill that road at the start and end of the school day, residents living south of Melgaard have almost no chance of catching a safe gap in traffic to cross and get to their jobs anywhere in Aberdeen.
Chief Dave McNeil, a parent and resident of the area, noted that he sees lots of risky driving from folks trying to jump into small gaps. He also says delays for folks trying to enter or cross Melgaard during those peak times sometimes run seven or eight minutes.
Alas, city engineer Robin Bobzien points out that during the peak traffic times, the east-west traffic on Melgaard reaches a thousand vehicles in an hour while the north-south cross traffic reaches only 175. Bobzien says those traffic counts and current accident counts just don’t justify interrupting the flow on Melgaard with lights or four-way stops. Decreasing north-south travel delays unavoidably delays east-west traffic (of course, that trade-off doesn’t stop us from placing three traffic lights on Roosevelt, the main north-south route to the high school).
If we can’t control the Melgaard intersections, the next best remedy is to reorganize traffic at the high school. Melgaard and Roosevelt are the only through streets to the school, which was placed far enough away to make walking to school impractical for the vast majority of kids and teachers in town. The Central HS parking lots appear to have been deliberately designed to make it harder to get into and out of the facility. The lots force every exiting vehicle to exit north to the Roosevelt/Melgaard intersection. Bobzien recognized the obvious secondary solution: create an outlet from the high school to the south, exiting through the new neighborhood to the west. Of course, that exit would only release pressure of students who live in that neighborhood; anyone else taking that route would still have to get out via Merton or Lawson Street and enter Melgaard.
Not mentioned at Monday’s meeting but always on my mind is a third infrastructure solution: overpasses. A couple of pedestrian overpasses, perhaps one right at the high school at Mel Ros Drive and another to the west, either at Lawson or at the bike path crossing at the creek on Dakota, would make it safer for students and teachers to walk and bike to school and would reduce the number of cars clogging Melgaard twice a day.
There is a fourth solution that would alleviate some traffic concerns without laying any new concrete: carpools and buses. Changing South Dakotans’ mindset to embrace sharing a ride may be harder than busting up concrete, but we have to remember that if more people shared a ride, or if the school district would run a couple bus routes through town, or if the city would subsidize free bus service for kids from 7 to 8 a.m. and from 3 to 4 p.m., we could significantly reduce traffic along Melgaard during the peak hours.
The Aberdeen City Council took no action Monday, but the council members who spoke all appeared to agree with the easy observation of anyone who’s driven to Central in the morning that we need some kind of traffic control on Melgaard Road.
Another solution is better long range planning. Streets need to be planned and developers need to be required to build street networks so that developments like this would not be allowed until such time as major east west and north south collector streets are built so that traffic has alternatives to go multiple directions. There should be a east west street at the quarter line south of this development.
Agreed. The school was sited with little thought to practical traffic flow. I know the whole idea was to build where there was space and get out of the crowded downtown area, but I’d love to see some comparisons of traffic counts and flow around the old Central location and the new one.
When we moved here, I resisted buying or building a house south of Melgaard specifically because of this traffic problem.
Fifth solution: roundabouts. Worthington, MN has 3 on cross-traffic intersections of MN60.
Scott’s too correct. City “planners” too often are developer facilitators vs looking out for the totality of community needs.
Roundabouts! Thanks, John! I hadn’t thought about that. I wonder if there’s room to build a traffic circle at Lawson. The corner at Lloyd, at the east edge of Melgaard Park, would be an easy spot to build a roundabout.