M-29 road diet in St. Clair starting this summer

Local officials in St. Clair aren’t sure when the reconfiguration on M-29 will be underway, but they know it's imminent.

The city’s council members signed off on supporting the Michigan Department of Transportation’s plans to implement a road diet on Riverside Avenue, a state highway, a year ago. Since then, officials have said they were waiting on the state to move forward on the project designed to slow down and calm traffic through the community’s busy downtown corridor.

So far, officials said features in the traffic light at Clinton Avenue and M-29 have been replaced as part of those efforts. Mayor Bill Cedar said city administration hadn’t received a confirmed start date for the rest — a “diet,” consisting largely of restriping the roadway to reduce its number of lanes from four to three — as of Monday morning.

However, both local and state officials said it was still expected to start this summer.

"It could happen as early as next week," said Jocelyn Hall, MDOT spokeswoman. "It's just a matter of whether or not that coordination comes together."

Currently, according to MDOT’s online traffic maps, Riverside sees an average of more than 10,000 vehicles a day.

The road diet itself involves lowering the number of lanes from two travel lanes in each direction to just one with a left-hand turn lane in the center.

The majority affected area for St. Clair’s road diet is primarily between Clinton Avenue and the northern city limit. But Hall said a left-hand turn lane may be installed as far south as north of Palmer Road. 

MDOT originally commissioned a study for the project with a $36,000 Transportation Alternatives Program grant. All the options presented to city officials in 2018 also included making room for additional on-street parking and some sort of bike lanes.

Hall said that although some early options did include more parking, particularly back-in angled parking, that they didn't anticipate a change to the number of on-street spaces.

The project would include the bike lanes.

“This is an experiment. Maybe we’ll stripe and see how it works,” Cedar said. “Everybody’s telling us they’re doing them everywhere now and they work. They slow things down and make things safer.”

Road diets have already been implemented in other areas of St. Clair County, and officials have said the effort is working.

A reconstruction project on Huron Boulevard in Marysville also included installing fewer lanes before school started in 2018. Soon after, both school and city leaders said they observed traffic out into the road from a school parking lot, adding it appeared safer for students.

North River Road in Fort Gratiot also got the road diet treatment as part of a resurfacing around the same time.

Hall said the "weather has been the biggest barrier" to getting started on the plans. MDOT is coordinating the work with the regular restriping already planned for that M-29 corridor. 

She said the signal changes were already made so that when the restriping is completed, its timing will be able to be changed and not dependent on "whether or not electricians are available that day, as well."

Hall added that the project was an inexpensive one for the state.

"The costs are so minimal I can't even calculate it for you," she said. 

Cedar said it’s too soon to know what effect the road diet will have on St. Clair. He said he’d need a while to determine whether it impacts boat traffic this season versus traffic in the wintertime.

He said he encouraged everyone to be patient.

“I think you’re going to have to look at it through the summer season, the winter season, to see how it moves traffic,” Cedar said. “The whole idea is to move traffic and slow things down.”

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.