Lowell looks to put brakes on traffic accidents

The intersection of VFW Highway and Bridge Street has the highest accident rate in the state. (John Tlumacki/Globe Staff)

The city of Lowell has reached maximum traffic capacity, officials say, and the road system has failed to shift out of neutral in meeting the demands of its motorists.

With several of the worst intersections for car crashes in Massachusetts, Lowell has regional and state officials spending millions of dollars to fix the problem.

"When I was young, it was nice. Now, everything is tight," said Thomas Golden, a Lowell resident.

"It's a big, big city with 100,000 people with a lot of traffic."

According to the Massachusetts Highway Department's 2008 study of auto accidents in the Commonwealth, Lowell is home to the number one and number three intersections with the most car crashes, along with two more in the top 20.

In all, the city has 14 intersections that rank in MassHighway's Top 200 list for crashes, which may not be the most - Worcester (21) and Brockton (18) have more - but it leaves city, regional, and state officials scrambling for solutions .

At those 14 intersections, Lowell had 1,133 accidents, resulting in 328 injuries and three fatalities in the 2004-2006 time span of MassHighway's study. Many other locations in the city concern local officials as well.

Lowell's traffic has reached 21st century levels, but the roads are operating on a substandard level, said Mayor Edward Caulfield.

A main corridor for car crashes is the VFW Highway, which runs parallel to the northern shore of the Merrimack River. The thoroughfare has three intersections on the top 200 list of crash locations, including the number one site in the Commonwealth at its conjunction with Bridge Street.

"You do have a highway where people drive 55 miles per hour right through the heart of the city," Caulfield said. "When you have those ingredients, you have accidents."

Crossing the Merrimack River is a major source of accidents, as nine of the 14 intersections are within two blocks of a bridge. The city has six locations to cross the river, and each one serves as a choke point. Compounding the problem is the ongoing replacement of the University Avenue bridge, which forces traffic to the other five choke points.

"Everyone just piles onto the bridges," Lowell resident John Lee said. "Crossing the river is the hardest part."

The bridges aren't the only problem in Lowell, which is the fourth-largest city in Massachusetts. Streets intersect at odd angles, in some places with drastic elevation changes; traffic lights are outdated - at some intersections cars must turn left against a heavy flow of traffic without the aid of a left-turn signal; street signs are difficult to see or missing; and the system appears to be overflowing its capacity as motorists fight their way through streets filled with parked cars, and slow-moving traffic.

"People cut in front of each other in the downtown a lot," said Andrew Bouchard, who commutes every day from Tyngsborough to the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

The Northern Middlesex Council of Governments has asked MassHighway to let it be the primary transportation planner for the region. The agency did a study of its own of the top 100 car-crash sites in northern Middlesex County, and 72 of those intersections are in Lowell .

"It is a city, and there are a lot of accidents," said Beverly Woods, the council's executive director. "Plus, the Lowell Police Department does an excellent job in reporting all the crashes."

The council's plan is to focus on four to six of the worst intersections each year and devise improvement strategies for each one, Woods said.

The focal point of this year's efforts has been on the worst intersection in the Commonwealth - Bridge Street and the VFW Highway. Northern Middlesex Council of Governments and MassHighway are obtaining $390,000 from the federal government for design improvements at the intersection, including fixes to some of the strange angles at the crossing.

For the next four years, MassHighway has slated $42 million in projects to improve Lowell intersections, including traffic signal improvements, bridge betterments and replacements, realigning the intersections, and the construction of a pedestrian bridge over the busy downtown thoroughfare, Thorndike Street .

"Like any old urban city in the Commonwealth, we have traffic problems, and we are trying to get them resolved," Caulfield said.

The Lowell Police Department can't do anything to change the configuration of the street system, but the department has instituted its Strategic Traffic Enforcement Program to cut down on high-risk driving behavior that leads to car crashes.

"We send officers out on all different shifts on all different days to concentrate solely on traffic violators," said Lowell Police Captain Thomas Kennedy.

The Lowell police are ticketing motorists who rush out into intersections and end up blocking oncoming traffic. The law also is cracking down on Lowell Connector speeders, setting up sobriety checkpoints, and citing people who improperly register their cars in New Hampshire.

"The whole idea is to get these people to comply with the traffic laws so we don't have these serious accidents," Kennedy said.

Brad Kane can be reached at brad.j.kane@gmail.com.