CARIBOU, Maine — Reviving Caribou’s downtown and riverfront regions won’t just involve attracting new businesses and housing developments, and boosting recreational opportunities.
A group of engineers says it might also mean restructuring downtown roads and traffic flow to make visitors more apt to stay and enjoy those areas, whether they are driving a car, biking or walking.
Caribou first saw a major revamp of its downtown core in the 1970s and ‘80s when the Urban Renewal movement led to the demolition of blighted, wooden buildings. In their place, the Downtown Mall at the start of Sweden Street was built consisting of four brick buildings that officials hoped would give the northern Maine city a modern feel.
Instead, many in the community disliked the space, leading to fewer retail and restaurants over the next several decades, especially after the closure of Loring Air Force Base in Limestone in 1994. Today, though several retail and food establishments exist on Sweden Street, the mall itself mostly contains office space.
But it wasn’t just the mall that made people skeptical. Alongside that development came a new one-way traffic loop featuring various entrances and exits that often steer drivers away from the mall altogether.
“When you approach a downtown from all sides, you want it to be like a front door that’s inviting you in. You can just drive into it like you did [in Caribou] in the 1960s and ’70s,” said Mitchell Rasor, principal architect with Rasor Landscape Architecture. “It doesn’t feel like that when you have free-flow [fast-moving] traffic.”
Rasor was one of several traffic and urban landscape engineers who presented ideas on how to improve downtown accessibility Thursday during a public meeting at Caribou Wellness & Recreation Center.
Caribou has joined forces with TYLin International’s Falmouth office, the Maine-based Rasor Landscape Architecture and Maine Department of Transportation on the Village Partnership Initative. A program of MaineDOT, the Initiative assists municipalities with traffic studies to determine what changes could encourage more walkability, increase safety and encourage greater economic viability downtown.
Several other Aroostook municipalities — Presque Isle, Fort Kent, Madawaska and Van Buren — have signed on to the Village Partnership Initiative. The program involves gauging local feedback on what the street and sidewalk improvements might look like in each community.
In Caribou, the one-way downtown loop begins where South Main Street intersects with High Street to the right and an entrance to the Downtown Mall on the left. But if folks stay on that left lane and bypass the mall entrance, they’re now on Herschel Street, where they can either stay left and drive downhill on Record Street toward the mall and other businesses, typically considered Sweden Street’s core area.
Or they can keep right on Herschel and head to Prospect Street, connecting them with the two-lane “outer Sweden Street” business district, leading to Caribou High School, located just before the starts of Route 228 and 161.
Anyone driving into Caribou from outer Sweden Street will arrive at the loop. But that section of the loop takes them away from Sweden Street’s core and onto Hatch Drive, then back to the intersection of Main and Water streets where the loop begins.
“The one-way system creates this free-flow pattern that makes it difficult to get downtown. For visitors, that’s confusing,” said Tom Errico, senior traffic engineer with TYLin International in Falmouth. “You get much faster speeds.”
TYLin, Rasor and MaineDOT are proposing that the city consider returning Herschel and the middle core of Sweden Street to two-way traffic. After digitally mapping downtown streets, the engineers determined that two lanes would be possible because of how wide the streets are.
For instance, the one-way section of Sweden Street starting at the post office is 56 feet wide curb to curb, leaving room to reduce the angled parking spaces on both sides from 19 feet to 17 feet, keeping the 10-foot sidewalk on the left and 14-foot-wide sidewalk on the right and creating two 11-foot traffic lanes, Errico said.
A similar concept could occur on Herschel Street, which currently has two 12.5-foot one-way lanes, with 6-foot sidewalks. If the street becomes two-way on both sides, the lanes could be 10 feet each, making room for a 10-foot “shared use path” for cyclists and pedestrians on the left side, along with a 5-foot “esplande” for trees. On the right side would be 8-foot street parking and a 5-foot sidewalk, Errico said.
Similar layouts could help tighten Caribou’s widest roads such as outer Sweden Street, High Street, Bennett Drive and Water Street, whose lanes range from 10 to 12 feet, and establish shared use lanes that keep people using bikes, wheelchairs or scooters further from traffic. Water Street leads to the city’s part of the Aroostook River, which Caribou hopes to redevelop into a stronger recreational region ideal for pedestrians.
The roadway restructuring would be a welcome change for residents like Bruce and Gail Hagelstein, who said they have given up cycling in Caribou because of the high traffic flow starting at the intersection of High and Main streets as they approach the downtown loop.
“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve almost been hit and we wear orange,” Gail Hagelstein said.
None of the downtown loop streets have lit warning signals at crosswalks or stop signs. TYLin and Rasor’s proposal would entail installing warnings and signs at every major traffic and pedestrian intersection created there, Rasor said.
The shared use lanes would intersect with a new 2 ½ to 3 mile walking and bike path that could weave throughout the downtown and incorporate more green spaces to help separate pedestrians and cyclists from the roadway. The path would be extended to connect with existing walking and bike trails alongside Collins Pond.
Caribou resident David Belyea suggested extending the Collins Pond paths down South Main Street and into neighborhoods near Hilltop Heights, a senior living facility, where there is an adjacent Little League ballfield.
Other problematic intersections would be tightened up, such as the one connecting High Street to Bennett Drive, a high crash area due to angled stops and roadway patterns that often obscure incoming traffic until vehicles are too close, Errico said.
Kevin and Kate McCartney, who own The Old Iron Inn on High Street, just before that intersection, know firsthand about the dangers.
“You can’t physically turn your head enough to see if anyone’s coming,” Kevin McCartney said. “We’ve been here 32 years and have always said we live on the worst road in the world. Something seriously needs to be done.”
Caribou is still in the planning stages of the Village Partnership Initiative and will likely hold a third public meeting once engineers adjust the proposals based on comments from Thursday’s meeting, said City Manager Penny Thompson.
Once a plan is approved, more formal engineering would be necessary to determine the project’s scope and cost.
