Is It Time to Permanently Shelve Langley Parkway?

Last week, Concord’s engineering department as well as a traffic consultant held the third public discussion about the third leg of the Northwest Bypass/Langley Parkway at the city council chambers.

The third leg of the bypass proposes to build a two-lane road from the north side of Concord Hospital all the way through the west end to the intersection of Rumford and Walker streets, near Lincoln Financial.

Links to the two previous public hearings are here and here.

Officials, including City Engineer Ed Roberge, spent 55 minutes speaking about the positive aspects of the project: Commute times could be cut for ambulances and medical employees from the northern part of the city by two to three minutes; millions of fewer miles could be driven; that will lead to hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline that would not otherwise be used; etc.

Opponents, including a doctor who went out and measured the distances himself at different times of the day, challenged the traffic figures while others worried about access to the city’s recreational parks and abutters rejected the cut through their neighborhood.

Roberge and his team will issue a final report soon.

The project is on the council’s CIP list for future consideration and has been for years. It is slated for possible construction in 2017, at a current cost of between $12 million to $14 million. Roberge said the city would find partners to offset the cost to taxpayers (Concord Hospital paid for half of the current study's costs of $150,000). 

However, Roberge has already once filed for a TIGER grant for the roadway even though it hasn't been approved. One of the other projects he filed for TIGER grant consideration – the Complete Streets Main Street project – also hadn’t been approved by the council beforehand. The constraints of the federal grant allowed for limited changes to the initial concept once the federal monies were secured.

A number of city councilors have said they won’t support Langley Parkway and have voted against keeping it on the CIP in the past. Concord Mayor Jim Bouley said there wasn’t money for it and the project was a “no-go.”

Is it time for the Concord City Council to vote to take it off the CIP list now and permanently shelve the project? Leave a note in the comment section below.