Engineers at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation have pledged in previous meetings to replace the intersection of Lees River Avenue and Route 6 — number five on the state’s Top 200 Crash Clusters list — with “something that fits with the context” of Somerset. 

MassDOT, alongside Joe Yoo from the project management section of the state’s Highway Division, MassDOT’s Right-of-Way Bureau’s Lisa Szamreta, and in coordination with engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill’s Project Manager Ajeet Sandhu and Katherine Patch, the firm’s senior transportation engineer, presented tentative plans at an Aug. 5 public informational meeting for a $6 million hybrid roundabout that preliminary research says will help curb vehicular collisions and increase the intersection’s safety. 

The meeting that was intended to provide a glance at proposed plans and invite feedback fueled an hours-long onslaught in which Somerset’s residents and business owners expressed their frustrations with the idea of a rotary that they say could contribute to traffic backups, high project costs, and possible business relocation. They claimed the roundabout would only increase the number of accidents but agreed it could reduce the severity of those accidents.

See more at heraldnews.com.