The state’s Dept. of Transportation (MassDOT) will be enhancing pedestrian crosswalks and signals at the intersection of Gallivan Boulevard and Adams Street in Adams Village this month. The “fast-track fix” comes after lobbying initiated by state Rep. Dan Cullinane led to funding for the work.

“There are not enough safe crossings along the boulevard,” Cullinane told the Reporter last week.

In a letter to a MassDOT highway administrator last year, Cullinane noted that while there is a pedestrian push button for people seeking to cross Gallivan from Granite Avenue to Adams Street, there is no button for a pedestrian to use when trying to cross Adams Street on the other side.

He also went into detail about traffic issues in the middle of the heavily traveled intersection where drivers anxious to get on their way are regularly frustrated while navigating their way through a maze of lights and green-arrow turn signals, often going through red lights and speeding up at turns, putting pedestrians at great risk.

He added that MassDOT has been “incredibly responsive to this,” and he was grateful that they were able to fast-track the project. 

“This is definitely a fix that was needed,” he said, “I’d been advocating for this even before I authored the letter [in 2018]. I’ve seen accidents and near misses and heard from constituents who avoid crossing the intersection altogether. It has been a source of frustration for me over the years.”

He said that he had “filed an amendment in the budget for $100,000 for these improvements. We are going to make sure that every penny of those funds goes toward making sure that the intersection becomes safer and more aesthetically pleasing. We want the community to know that there’s an investment.”

Andrew Paul, a MassDOT engineer, visited the intersection with Cullinane. “We did a site visit with the representative to get a better understanding of what the issues were,” Paul said, “and we had electricians and other engineers do some investigation of what we could do in the short term.”

He added that “we developed a design for the three pedestrian crosswalks at the intersection. One of them had the pushbuttons and the pedestrian signal heads integrated into the system. We followed the representative’s suggestion of implementing the pedestrian signal into the traffic controller at the other crosswalks.”

Paul said that the project should be wrapped up in the next few weeks. As for MassDOT’s larger scale implementation plan, he said, “It’s currently programmed a few years out in our five-year plan. We are just going through a process now of collecting data and scoping the work, but haven’t yet identified any specific interventions through this corridor.”