Creating a waterfront park behind the parking garage, removing a traffic light on Main Street and turning Merchants Plaza into a shared use space are among the final recommendations for how Bangor could improve its downtown.
The recommendations, released in a 267-page final report last month, are the latest step in the Maine Department of Transportation’s Village Partnership Initiative. The program allows the state to partner with communities to improve their downtowns using federal funding.
The city enlisted the help of Sewall, a Bangor-based engineering firm, Bangor Area Comprehensive Transportation System and Viewshed, a landscape architectural company from Yarmouth, for the months-long project. The companies finalized the recommendations after studying the area for more than a year and gathering feedback from residents.
If the city implements the final recommendations, they could drastically change some portions of the downtown to be more attractive and welcoming to residents and visitors alike. The recommended changes also aim to make the area less congested and safer, especially for pedestrians and bicyclists.
If the city made all the recommended changes and improvements, the total cost for the project would be roughly $54 million, according to Jodi O’Neal, a project manager at Sewell. However, 90 percent of the cost could be covered by grants through the Maine DOT, leaving Bangor to chip in the final 10 percent.
Jefferson Davis, Bangor’s engineering director, previously told the Bangor Daily News the city would likely make improvements in stages due to the high cost. The first phase will likely be Main Street between Broad and Water streets, as the city also needs to update the underground water and sewer infrastructure in that stretch of road.
The study identified the one-way loop that State, Harlow and Central streets make as the heart of downtown Bangor, but the area, which the companies labeled the “central core,” can be difficult to navigate.
To improve this, the study recommended keeping the streets one-way roads with two lanes, but adding safety improvements. These changes could include switching angled parking to parallel parking, adding bike lanes and installing bump-outs at crosswalks to make pedestrians more visible.
Preliminary ideas for improving this area, released in September 2024, proposed adding roundabouts at the intersections in the “circular core.” The suggestion was the favorite in a community survey, but the companies decided against the roundabouts, in part because of the high cost.
Altering the roads to add three roundabouts would cost $7.5 million, but keeping the streets as one-way roads with signaled intersections and the suggested improvements costs roughly $2.25 million, the final report states.
On major roads that connect to the “circular core,” such as Main and Hammond streets, the study recommends transforming all angled parking to parallel parking, adding bicycle lanes and narrowing the roads to slow traffic. In total, the roads would have 11-foot travel lanes, 8-foot on-street parking spaces, and 5-foot bike lanes with two-and-a-half-foot buffers.
The companies also recommended removing the traffic light at the intersection of Broad and Main streets and turning Broad Street from West Market Square to the parking garage into a “shared plaza.” This would transform the road, which doesn’t see much vehicle traffic, into a bricked, curbless area that cars, pedestrians and bicyclists can all use.
“It gives the city the opportunity to close [Broad Street] on Sundays or over the weekend to do sidewalk sales or art festivals,” O’Neal said when presenting the recommendations to city councilors last month. “By changing the materials and look of it, vehicles are going to know they’re in a different space and change how they’re driving.”
Bangor could also turn the wide, largely unused chunk of pavement behind the parking garage into a park bordering the Kenduskeag Stream, as the project report recommends. The road is now a 66-foot-wide strip of asphalt with perpendicular parking on both sides.
Sewall and Viewshed recommend using that space as a 52-foot-wide park with a path for pedestrians along the Kenduskeag Stream. The park can sit next to a two-lane two-way road with parallel parking on one side.
At the corner of Independent and Broad streets, the study recommends removing the existing slip-lane for vehicles looking to turn right from Independent onto Broad Street and replacing it with greenspace and a sidewalk.
That intersection sees heavy traffic and study participants reported having low visibility and feeling unsafe when crossing the street on foot, O’Neal said.
Davis plans to bring suggested phases for the improvements with estimates of when projects could take place and how much they might cost to the city council’s Infrastructure Committee meeting later this month.
