This issue was recategorized from Sidewalk or Curb Repair to Roadwork and Construction.

Robert P. Knox Jr. (Director of Public Works) assigned this issue to Yem Lip (Director of Engineering)

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How about instead of ignoring issues for months - the city of malden actually addresses the issue here? If this was properly looked at and taken care of at the time, the safety of malden residents would have not been at risk. instead, you just ignore the issue for months and then close it out, no doubt getting some sort of credit for percentage of issues "completed".

here's the solution malden: when you dig up all the sidewalks in a pedestrian heavy zone, put up some cones or create some sort of safe walkway for pedestrians! you don't even need a police detail.

Dear Resident,
Thank you for your feedback. The work on Main Street, and in particular, the intersection work on Main at Forest Street, was expressly undertaken to improve pedestrian safety. The scope of work is complex, involving intersection realignment, new crosswalks, new handicap-accessible wheelchair ramps, new signals, and revised timing and sequence of these signals. As you may recall, the final paving was fully completed a week before the big snow storm. This work had to be done before winter weather set in.
Yes, ideally, we could have the contractor work on one corner of the street at a time and partitioned a coned off area for people to avoid, but since we needed to get the entire project done in such tight timeframe, I had given the contractor the green light to work on both corners of Forest at Main. We understand that it can be inconvenient to adjust walking patterns in the short term, but as citizens in a forward-thinking city, hopefully we can all recognize that the long-term safety improvements outweigh the inconvenience of altering walking patterns for a short time. Again, thank you and residents of Main Street and surrounding streets for their patience.

Thank you for the reply, and behalf of the commuters who walk through this intersection every day, thank you for finally making this a safer intersection.

That said, I am extremely disappointed in your reply. At the beginning of summer (maybe spring) several sidewalks were also re-done on Forest St, Pierce St, and Bainbridge St. In nearly every case, work was done on both sides of the road at the same time. I saw many complaints (some from myself) regarding this.

When both sides of the sidewalk are impassable, I would love to hear where you think residents should walk? Either in the case of something like Forest St, or in the case of a major intersection where cars routinely run through red lights?

What I am hearing in your response is simply that you DO expect residents to walk in the middle of the road, sometimes even around parked cars.

"We understand that it can be inconvenient to adjust walking patterns in the short term" -based on this comment you made, I think you're grossly misunderstanding the issue here. Our issue isn't that we need to "adjust walking patterns" - if that were the case, I don't think anyone would complain. The issue is that we are forced to walk into traffic, putting ourselves at risk.

Are we happy the city is finally paying some mind to Main St/Forest St intersection? You bet.

But, if the city can't find a safe way for pedestrians to get around sidewalk repairs in the future, someone will get hurt, it's only a matter of time.

You make it seem like making a safe way for pedestrians to walk is this complicated process. I promise you, it is not. I walk nearly 2 miles every day in downtown Boston where sidewalk repair or other types of construction frequently inhibit pedestrian access and there is ALWAYS, at a minimum, orange cones to direct traffic around the construction.

You can do better.