Indian Trail Plan Changes Again Median Will Become Turn Lane; Move Will Accommodate Emergency Vehicles

The design-as-you-go Indian Trail Road project has been changed once again. A controversial landscaped center median strip will be paved over and replaced with a center turn lane.

Two weeks ago, Indian Trail residents learned from neighborhood firefighters that wide emergency vehicles such as fire engines wouldn’t be able to pass cars on some parts of the road.

The trees planned for the median will be moved to the swales on the side of the road. Irrigation will be added later.

“This is the best scenario,” said Katy Allen, the city’s director of engineering services.

City Council members, who said they received complaints from Indian Trail residents, commended Allen for reconsidering the plan.

Last week, city staff proposed adding mountable curbs along the median strip that would allow fire engines and other emergency vehicles to roll up onto the median to pass cars pulled over to the right.

Removing the median strip will add about $115,000 to the original $4 million cost of the project, and $20,000 more than the alternative proposed last week.

The 44-foot-wide road will include two 16-foot-wide lanes, one going each direction, and a 12-foot-wide center turn lane.

Work is expected to start today.

The first phase of the road project is about 10 weeks past its original completion date. The second phase of the project, from Shawnee to Ridgecrest, is now under way.

City fire officials said they were never shown design plans that called for the narrow lanes and curbed median strip with trees.

Indian Trail neighbors, while pleased with the latest design change, questioned the process during Monday’s council meeting, the last for City Manager Bill Pupo who announced in July he would resign.

“Someone needs to take responsibility for the road design,” said Muriel Bechtel, co-chair of the Indian Trail Neighborhood Council.

“The city wants to have better roads, we all do, but when the city mismanages projects like this, it doesn’t inspire any confidence,” she said.

Indian Trail residents also renewed their call for the city to develop an emergency evacuation plan for the neighborhood.

Indian Trail Road is the only street in and out of the neighborhood. Resident Mike Page likened it to the River Nile running through Egypt.

“We need some way to get out of there in an emergency,” he said.

Over the years, Indian Trail Road has been designed and redesigned. In February 1997, a plan shown to the neighborhood by city engineers included expanding the road from two lanes to four, with a landscaped center drainage swale. The landscaped center strip created a boulevard effect, softening the wide swath of pavement.

Today, the road project has been scaled back to two slender lanes because of trouble obtaining right-of-way and less-than-expected traffic based on the Growth Management Act.

The first phase of the project has been held up for a variety of design changes, some caused by the lost right-of-way, others when developer Harlan Douglass asked for better retaining walls than the utilitarian econo-blocks originally called for in the city’s design.