At a recent meeting, Milford City Council heard plans from Dover Kent MPO regarding changes to Airport Road. Dover Kent County MPO is a planning organization which handles transportation planning for the center part of Delaware.
“In the past, they’ve helped us with various planning studies including the downtown parking study several years ago. They’ve also helped us evaluate the 10th Street and Rehoboth Boulevard intersection, the Rehoboth Boulevard corridor, and I may be missing one or one or two more,” Rob Pierce, Planning Director for the city, said. “This year, we’ve asked them to assist us with a transportation study of Airport Road, basically between the 113 intersection and the Corporate Center on Route 15.”
Pierce introduced Malcolm Jacobs, Dover Kent County MPO Transportation Planner and Savannah Edwards, Senior Planner.
“As Rob touched upon, this study is the Airport Road corridor study. It stretches from 15, or Canterbury Road, as it’s also referred to, over to 113. We’re going to be looking at intersection improvements. So that means for vehicles, trucks, pedestrians and bicyclists, and then ways to establish bicycle and pedestrian connectivity all the way around the corridor so the little pockets and areas are connected to it,” Edwards said. “Off of Airport Road is Walmart which is closer to 113 to the south side. There are a couple apartment complex buildings on the north side, more residences, one larger community and other residences scattered throughout.”
Edwards continued, explaining that on the south side of Airport Road, there are a lot of medical offices as well as a few on the north side. Delaware Hospice, the Food Bank of Delaware and the Boys and Girls Club are also located in the industrial park on Airport Road.
“There’s park facilities back there. And then finally, adjacent to Airport Road, off of 15, there will be a large distribution center coming in for development. This will be a year long study and we kicked off things this summer, in July, and as of right now, we’re kind of in the data collection as well as community engagement phase,” Edwards said. “Earlier this month, we kicked off our public input website, and that has started to be shared via the city social media accounts, as well as the Dover Kent MPO social media accounts as well.”
Edwards explained that she and Jacobs were going to be going door-to-door to some of the businesses located along the corridor to ask them what improvements they see as necessary, what problems exist or what works well.
“We want to know what works well so we can see if we can put that type of feature in another spot along the corridor. Once we get a good idea of what the existing conditions are some of the problem areas, we’ll start to refine that, to get an idea of what the prior prioritized issues are. And that dovetails into us developing actual concepts,” Edwards said. “So the drawings of where we should add things like crosswalks, a street light, if there is currently only stop signs, a bicycle lane or a shared use path away from the road, for example. Then after we have some ideas, we’ll go into community for engagement phase around January, February, and that’ll all be assembled into a draft report, and we’ll come back before you guys again in the spring be able to refine the improvements and then turn it over to DelDOT.”
Edwards reported that they launched the website on August 29 and already had 18 comments from the public. They plan to hold a workshop in the spring and are hoping to hold it at the Food Bank. Edwards shared a crash map to show council the type of data they were collecting.
“Here is a crash map as what we expected, you can see, they’re kind of clustered more by 113, and a couple also on 15, kind of drawing where we would be looking for those safety improvements along those intersections,” Edwards said.
There were no questions from council.
“This is an important study as the new industrial park is a big project for us right now,” Mayor Todd Culotta said. “I want to encourage everyone to provide input for this study so that we address any infrastructure problems that could result and address them quickly.”
