By SARAH MARKSTROM, Solutions News Bureau
Baldwin Road’s infrastructure improvements have set the bar for future infrastructure projects including plans currently being considered for Beck Road.
The Oakland County project to expand the busy two-lane road started construction in 2018 and all lanes were opened in 2020. By 2021 it was complete – including finishing touches for landscape and curb restoration.
Prior to the expansion, Baldwin Road was congested, with only a two-lane road that was forced to handle an average of 30,000 vehicles per day.
“The road prior to construction was gridlocked. It came to a complete stop every morning during rush hour because there was way too much traffic,” says Chris Bryson, Senior Communications Manager for the Road Commission for Oakland County (RCOC). “The traffic was already there, we were not building a project to induce new traffic. We were building a project to address the existing traffic that was already there.”
The Baldwin Road project stretches between Morgan Road and ends at Waldon Road. The project widened the two-lane road to five lanes and a four-lane boulevard in certain areas, and added five roundabouts.
After the completion of the project, Baldwin Road saw a decrease in the number of accidents. According to SEMCOG, the intersection at Baldwin Road and Maybee Road had a total of 21 crashes in 2016, the year prior to the start of the project. Once all the lanes were opened to the public again in 2020, there were a total of 10 crashes.
Like Baldwin, Beck Road, which runs through Wixom, Novi, and Northville Township, may soon be widened.
The two-lane thoroughfare faces a heavy traffic load, with an average of 25,000 vehicles a day.
According to Steve Brown, City Manager of Wixom, the very high traffic volumes result in automobile accidents, with crashes roughly 10 times the regional frequency average. With so much traffic volume and an inflated accident frequency, Brown says public safety has become a very real concern.
The Beck Road project proposes widening the current two-lane road to either four or five lanes, with a boulevard in certain sections.
And like the Baldwin project, the Beck Road project has been in the books for a while, according to Brown. The committee has been meeting to address the project, and recently held an open meeting for the public to attend.
Although the project planners and local residents both agree that something does have to be done to relieve the congestion, there are concerns.
Novi resident, Kasturi Bagchi, told the Novi Note that she had mixed feelings about the designs. She said that something needs to be done to relieve the traffic, but she’s worried about the construction timeline and the noise that might come from the widened road.
Similar concerns were voiced during the Baldwin expansion, according to Bryson. He said, however, that when the road was two lanes and “totally gridlocked at rush hour,” there was actually more noise from the cars than after it was widened.
Also, residents and business owners were very concerned about being able to get in and out of their subdivisions and businesses during the construction of the roundabouts.
“There were a number of people that were not confident about the roundabouts right up to the day we started the project,” says Bryson. “Once it opened, we had a bunch of positive feedback.”
The Beck Road project is still several years out, but even so, Brown is very optimistic about its future.
“We’re cooking with gas here,” Brown told The Oakland Press last year. “It really looks promising. This project is something I’ve been hesitant to get too excited about because this funding was just very much TBD and very much central to having any chance to move forward on this. I really feel like we’re making some outstanding headway on that and it’s looking like we can really get to the point where we might be making this project a reality in the near-term. It’s getting pretty exciting.”