West Avenue Reconstruction
November 1st, 2013
NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING NOTICE
FOR THE PROPOSED 2014 RECONSTRUCTION OF
WEST AVENUE – West 7th Street to Maple Street
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2013 @ 7 P.M.
CITY HALL – 315 4TH STREET WEST
RED WING, MINNESOTA
City of Red Wing wants to tear up our road and rebuild it. After they’re done with that one, they’ll move on to the next. I can feel the assessments approaching. But true, the street needs work. West Ave. is a pretty busy street, and people do go too fast, particularly near the top of the bluff which has such limited visibility either way. I’d like a speed sensor, and if they’re going too fast, fling a little pea gravel at them! It’s the main drag to a school, and kids are walking past here all the time (need to put up a Little Free Library on the corner, and a bench for the woman who waits for her ride every day).
At that Ped Xing sign on the right there was a wreck not too long ago where a red SUV t-boned a dump truck pulling a trailer, the truck turned to avoid the crash and ended up partly in the front yard of the house on the right (truck may have been going too fast, but the SUV had to have pulled out of the driveway into its path, no other way says this accident reconstruction expert. After that, it had to be pulled out from under of the back of the dump truck. Everyone walked away, could have been a lot worse.)
They’re looking at narrowing the part near our house from 40 to 32 feet, which is good, that should slow people down, though I can see problems because even with the street wide as it is, people heading south near our house, up the hill, tend to cross over the line, and if it’s narrower, there will be no where for the northbound people to go when the crest that hill and find someone in their lane, well, no where but up onto the new sidewalk on the east side. And that brings up another interesting factor. First I’d heard they were going to rebuild the big retaining wall across the street:
See that van up there? I keep waiting for it to go over the edge… The driveway is behind it, parallel to the street for maybe 30 feet, there are two perpendicular driveways behind the van going east a bit to those properties’ garages, and then further off to the right the driveway goes down to the street just below the crest of the bluff. Imagine getting out of there on a busy morning, or getting up there in the winter! Under that brush growing, there’s a retaining wall 15-20 feet tall, and that’s what I’d heard they were going to rebuild. Now I hear not. So gotta go and find out, that would be a serious expense. Anyway, here they’re going to narrow it, and put a sidewalk on the other side of the street. There’s a reasonable argument it’s necessary for the kids going to school. Oh, and see that tree right behind the “Save the Bluffs” sign? That one is scarred from people crashing into it, if you go straight up the hill, well, you go straight into the tree, and they do. BUT DON’T YOU EVEN THINK OF TAKING THAT TREE OUT!!! I want it for the shade, and if they don’t hit the tree, they’ll hit the house, so NO! We lost our other boulevard tree in the big snowstorm, so no, no, no, no, don’t even think about it!
Meeting, next Monday. Be there or be square!
Leave a Reply