Big Downtown Traffic Headache May Soon Be Gone

The town of Hampton is beginning the process to potentially correct a problem that has been frustrating downtown drivers since officials inadvertently created the problem roughly one year ago.

Selectmen will soon meet with a consultant about the Lafayette Road-High Street-Exeter Road intersection's traffic lights. The lights are currently stranding left-turning drivers in the middle of downtown's main intersection because the order in which the different lanes' signals appear was altered last year when the lights were resynchronized in the hopes of decreasing overall traffic congestion.

Town Manager Fred Welch said there has been a fair amount of "controversy" over that resynchronization, and he said the town will work with residents and businesses while exploring whether to revisit the study that called for those changes. 

"I think we need to go back and not to try to fix what's there with a quick fix," said Welch. "We do not want to waste time looking for things nobody wants. The study was done well over a year ago, and led to what we have now.

"People are caught in the middle of the intersection because of how the lights are sequenced. There must be a way to avoid that, and that's what they want to address."

Selectmen recently authorized Welch to set a meeting between the board, a consultant, town officials and some residents to, as Selectman Dick Nichols called it, "take the first step" toward the problem's resolution — if resolution is possible.

The town will hire the consultant to evaluate the intersection for no more than $350. Based on the consultant's observations and the opinions expressed in the meeting, Nichols said the determination would then be made whether to go forward with "a full-blown" traffic engineering survey, which Nichols estimated may cost upward of "$10,000."

"I'd like to see what kind of feedback we get [from the initial evaluation] before going to another level [with a full survey]," said Nichols.

Welch said the meeting with the consultant won't be a public session, and he said selectmen would have the authority to approve another resynchronization without gaining town meeting approval — assuming the resynchronization doesn't require a large expenditure or expensive new equipment.

"Whatever it is that has to be done, we have to ID the problem and clarify what we want, and then need to look at the [signal] controllers... to see if we have to change them or if they can [be reprogrammed to] handle what we want to do," said Welch. "To change them would be an extremely expensive thing. Finding out what the cost would be if they need to be changed is important because it would probably require an appropriation."