City close to hiring ‘Safe Routes’ engineer
The city appears likely to hire engineering firm Greenman-Pedersen Inc. to design the Midtown Kingston portion of the “Safe Routes to School” project.
City Engineer Ralph Swenson said a committee of City Hall staff and Mayor Steve Noble have recommended hiring the Albanybased company.
Greenman-Pedersen also designed earlier portions of the Safe Routes project, which aims to make travel to and from Kingston schools safer for students who walk and bike.
The amount GreenmanPedersen will be paid for the Midtown work has not yet been determined, Swenson said. A contract with the firm ultimately will have to be approved by the Kingston Common council and executed by Noble.
The design process probably won’t be done until next spring, Swenson said. He said the actual Midtown work could be carried out in the summer of 2019.
The Midtown portion of the Safe Routes project — covering the entire length of Henry Street, from Broadway to Wall Street — is to include sidewalk reconstruction, bicycle infrastructure, high-visibility crosswalks, a covered bicycle parking area at George Washington Elementary school and wheelchair-accessible curb cuts at intersections that lack them.
The elementary school is at the corner of Wall and Henry streets.
The estimated cost of the work is $1.3 million, 80 percent of which is to be paid with a state grant awarded to the city in April 2017
“The George Washington Elementary School student body has the highest percentage of walkers in the [Kingston school] district, and this funding will enable us to provide the infrastructure necessary to make Henry Street safer for the many children who walk and bike to school,” Noble said previously.
Elements of the Safe Routes project near Harry L. Edson Elementary, J. Watson Bailey Middle and John F. Kennedy Elementary schools already have been completed.
Work near those schools included new sidewalks and crosswalks, new traffic lights and pedestrian signals, the creation of “speedcalming humps” on roads, and the installation of electronic signs that show drivers how fast their going.