City settles on new uptown pedestrian safety plan

The city of Martinsville held a public meeting in Council Chambers Wednesday night with residents and business owners and unveiled a new plan to increase pedestrian safety in the Uptown District.

The purpose of the meeting was to gather input from the community on creating a safe, more walkable environment for uptown Martinsville and everyone was encouraged to share their perspectives.

"We took the stop lights down and that didn't go over very well," said Public Works Director Greg Maggard. "Now we are looking at stop signs and crosswalks. They're not speed bumps, they're large platforms and help delineate the crosswalks."

Maggard said the crosswalks that are currently in place appear to be situated at the right locations, but additional locations have been identified.

"We want to change the lights at Church and Moss streets to a four-way stop intersection," Maggard said. "The light at Walnut Street doesn't need to be there. It will go away and there will be a stop sign at Walnut."

Maggard identified Broad Street as being the key to the traffic flow uptown and proposed installing red-flashing lights instead of stop lights on Broad.

"You have to stop at Broad and then you'll have these raised crosswalks," said Maggard. "If they are successful, I would like to do another one in front of City Hall."

Maggard called the initial changes "Phase I" and would use the existing crosswalks as a starting point.

"We want to look at this and see if it's going to work," Maggard said. "The whole idea for me was to break it up into segments. These raised crosswalks will be significant enough that you have to slow down or you'll damage your car."

"If they don't stop for the stop lights they are not going to stop for the stop signs," said someone in the audience. Another person suggested police should be stopping people and issuing tickets more frequently, another suggested cameras be installed, similar to those that are now in service at all city schools.

"The engineering part will slow people down, but I will speak with the City Manager and the Police Chief about law enforcement," Maggard said.

Councilwoman Kathy Lawson asked about marking off parking spaces for parallel parking, or possibly creating an outside line for parking on the street that might discourage people from parking too far from the curb.

"Long term, there's more plans in the works. We're working on a grant with the County," said Maggard. "I think this is an easy start, and it's going to help with the speeding and with pedestrian safety. I want to take baby steps and see how this is all going to work."

A second part of the plan, unrelated to pedestrian safety, is a change that will remove the daily pickup of trash service provided to uptown businesses.

"The ordinance change takes away that daily pickup and provides seven or eight centralized trash bins that businesses can use. We'll give you a code to a Bluetooth lock and you use your smartphone to open it," Maggard said. "It will eliminate the daily pickup uptown. We'll have this for Council in a month or so, and businesses will have no more than 350 feet to a trash bin."

"There will be no more trash bags in front of businesses," said City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides. "It will be cleaner and keep the critters away."

Maggard said it would likely be sometime in the Spring before the raised crosswalks would be installed and the roads would have to be closed temporarily while the work is being done.

There were 14 people in attendance at the meeting and a live Facebook feed of the meeting indicated another dozen people watched remotely.

Uptown property owners Mervyn and Virginia King, Tim Martin, and Joey Martin were present as well as council members Lawson and Mayor LC Jones. Council-elect members Rayshaun Gravely and Juilan Mei were also in attendance.

"if you think of something, let us know. Now is the time to tell us," said Ferrell-Benavides. "All this will be online so everyone can see the plan. We want to make sure we're communicating and if you need another meeting, let us know and we'll put everyone together and have another one."

Said Maggard: "We're going to go ahead with the stop signs in the next few weeks, but the crosswalks won't happed until Spring. The key to me is Broad Street."

Bill Wyatt (276) 591-7543

on Twitter

Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter.