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Plans to narrow Asbury Park’s Main Street from a four-lane to two-lane road will come back before the City Council Wednesday. 

Known as a Road Diet, the traffic-calming measure is used reduce congestion and make roadways safer for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.

In the case of the state-owned Main Street, plans were to reduce its four lanes to two throughout the city, thereby adding a bicycle travel lane and a bi-directional turn lane.

City officials opposed the plan, citing the need to take into consideration the influx of traffic during the summer tourist months as well as vehicular traffic around transit buses, loading zones, and how emergency responders would traverse along the narrowed roadway.

On Wednesday, the Asbury Park City Council will vote to implement a revised New Jersey Department of Transportation [DOT] plan but the plan will not be cemented in stone. Instead, the Road Diet returns as a two-year pilot, city officials said. 

“After the city took our emergency departments’ concerns to DOT and requested several more traffic counts, we were able to come up with a  better traffic calming plan that we believe will keep everyone who traverses Main Street [be it pedestrians, cyclists, or motorists] safe,” Deputy Mayor Amy Quinn said. “And should we see any problems over the next two years, we’ll be able to address them, and if they can’t be addressed we will remove the road diet.”

Mayor John Moor said the previous plan had many flaws, including queuing, how to handle the preemption of traffic for emergency vehicles and the maintenance and repair of bumpouts [extensions of a sidewalk]. He said the city received new traffic counts conducted in July during a March meeting with the DOT.

“We’ve been working on a mutual agreement behind the scenes,” he said. “We have come to a solution where everyone is agreeable to try this as a pilot program. It all goes back to public safety. The City wouldn’t commit to this plan until our police department, our fire department, DPW, OEM, and Planning [team] were all on board. It is worth trying and this plan will not affect public safety. ”

Moor said the original plan called for no delineation of bus stops or loading zones and called for an unneeded left-hand turn along Deal Lake Drive that seemed to be positioned toward the lake.

“We showed them that it didn’t make sense, they agreed, and now Deal Lake Drive is going to stay the configuration it is today,” Moor said. “It was a terrible plan that has now been modified to be workable and tested. If it doesn’t work, it’s paint [and] it can be changed back.”

City Manager Michael Capabianco said the DOT agreed to no capital appropriation with regard to its landscape design along the corridor until the two-year pilot period ends.

“Improving the safety for cyclists and pedestrians along Main Street is vital,” Capabianco said. “We will continue to evaluate the particulars of the Road Diet during the evaluation period.”  

Transportation Manager Mike Manzella said if the new plan is approved by the City Council, work will begin right after Labor Day and is expected to wrap up with the repaving of the corridor in 2019.

“There’s quite a bit of work that has to be done before paving can begin,” he said. “They will begin with the traffic signals, sewer work for Springwood Avenue, concrete, and utility work – JCP&L poles need to be replaced because you want to take care of what’s under the ground first.”

The Road Diet will run from Cookman Avenue north to Deal Lake Drive, leaving the current road configuration from Cookman Avenue south to the Neptune border in place. Moor said the DOT decided to leave the four lanes south of Cookman after the July traffic counts were done.

“By redoing the numbers they saw that was troubled area,” he said.

And while the City will be responsible for striping dedicated loading zones, the DOT will work with NJTransit to delineate the bus stops. The DOT will create the bike lane, which will now be a dedicated Class II bicycle lane instead of the previously pitched sharrow lane that called for bike markings within a vehicle’s lane of travel.

“The bike lanes will be an important part of the city’s overall Bicycle/Pedestrian plan,” Manzella said.

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