Danvers 'Death Alley' Route 114 Planned Safety Changes Examined

DANVERS, MA — Narrower travel lanes, broken-up turning lanes and improved sight lines and crosswalk access are among the safety measures planned for what Danvers Select Board member Matthew Duggan called the "death alley" stretch of Route 114 outlined in a presentation from state transportation officials Tuesday night.

The report comes about 10 months after an emotional Peabody public meeting where nearby residents mourned loved ones who died in crashes on the stretch of Route 114 that connects Route 1 in Danvers and Route 128 in Peabody in recent years.

The state Department of Transportation and state elected officials unveiled some proposed short-term changes to the roadway designed to cut down on crashes two weeks ago with transportation officials elaborating on those changes with the Danvers Select Board on Tuesday night.

"This effort didn't just happen," Mass DOT Project Manager Michael Trepanier said at the meeting. "This happened because of a great deal of grassroots, groundswell pressure on MassDOT to focus on Route 114 due to the dangerous nature of the corridor."

Some of the more "quick-build" changes, such as optimizing signal timing, updating signage and installing new pavement markings at select locations, were part of a Tier 1 set of changes being put in place this fall.

More substantial changes, such as the narrowing of lanes and shortening stretches of turning lanes that a safety data study determined were often being used as travel lanes, will be implemented in the spring and summer of 2023.

"I do want to credit local officials and the community who have really held MassDOT's feet to the fire on this," Trepanier said. "Transportation improvements take a lot of time. A lot of the members of the public lament that. Our elected officials lament that.

"Words like 'five and 10 years' get thrown around. But we are doing work this fall and this spring that won't take years and years."

The shorter-term work in the Western Corridor in Danvers is designed to reduce the number of predominant "angle crashes" that occur by vehicles entering from a parking lot or cutting across oncoming traffic at a left turn-only lane with others designed to reduce speeds.

MassDOT Senior Project Manager Kayla Sousa said the traffic data study identified one stretch of the road from Mount Pleasant Street to Sylvan Street where the speed limit is 30 miles per hour but that the average vehicle travels 44 miles per hour, and where up to 80 percent of vehicles exceed the speed limit.

She said beyond the narrowing of lanes, there are also plans to retime the signals so they "reward" drivers who go the speed limit by hitting a series of green lights, and installing solar-powered speed limit signs to remind drivers of how fast they are driving compared to the speed limit.

"Some people will see those signs and slow down," Sousa said.

The road safety audit process conducted with state and local officials in the spring of 2022 documented 285 crashes over a three-year period, including four recent fatal crashes. Other reports have tallied 16 fatal accidents, 1,627 non-fatal accidents, and 3,260 property damage accidents on the Peabody stretch of the roadway alone over the previous 19 years.

"This is a long-time coming," Duggan said. "There are portions of the highway that are called 'death alley.' The statistics kind of miss some of the crashes that occur that may not be reported. They may not show up in the metrics."

Trepanier said because of the public outcry and the extreme number of crashes with serious injury on the road in recent years MassDOT was charged with coming up with solutions that could reduce crashes in the short term as a potential more major reconstruction — such as a divided road — are studied long term.

"This corridor would have the characteristics that would make us examine that option," Trepanier said. "But that is the five-, to 10-, to frankly 20-year-type project. Those types of improvements require a great deal of capital investment, and a great deal of engagement with our communities, with our elected officials, with businesses, and with a lot of different interests. Those require a great deal of property taking. Or the trade-off with significantly more congested roadways.

"Not to say that we're not going to consider it but that's why that's not on the table for this part of the project. Our task has been to reduce the crash rate."

While the lane-narrowing will result in wider areas between the travel lanes and area businesses, Trepanier said those will not be designated as bicycle lanes.

"We would not want to encourage anyone but only the strongest and most confident cyclists to ride down this road," he said. "We would not be comfortable with painting that as a bike lane. It is not for bicycle accommodation."

A new public website on the proposals and to solicit feedback can be found here.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)