01/20/2025 Monday Meeting Recap

We looked at upcoming project plans for Henry Law Avenue and collected feedback to deliver to the city

Welcome to the Strong Towns Seacoast newsletter. We recently held our first meeting of the year with a discussion on the Henry Law Avenue and Payne Street redesigns that the City of Dover is planning on doing soon. The project is following Dover’s complete street policies and is looking to make some traffic flow improvements for those streets. We invited our attendees to look at the proposed designs and give feedback on where we saw some shortcomings in the design and what areas look like quality improvements.

Henry Law Avenue and Payne Street

The project covers Henry Law Avenue up to where Payne Street intersects with it and Payne Street up until it intersects with the upcoming waterfront development. Let’s step through some images of the current streets next to the proposals from the city.

Upper Henry Law Avenue

Current overhead view of Henry Law Avenue near the Children’s Museum.

Proposed changes by the City of Dover

Looking at these two images we can see that the city is taking those striped, no-parking areas and making them into curb bump outs near the street entrance and crosswalk. They are also proposing a small cutout of the sidewalk for emergency vehicles. Other than those few things, this really looks similar to the current design, but we wanted to make a few suggestions here.

Striped no-parking area to be converted to curb bump out plus trees near Washington St.

More bump outs and trees proposed near indoor pool parking lot (top). Proposed vehicle pullout redirects sidewalk (bottom).

First, the emergency vehicle turnout completely reroutes the sidewalk to make room for something that is rarely going to be utilized for the intended purpose. More than likely it will become moving truck parking for the neighboring apartments. Neither of those use cases are unwanted, but can we accommodate them without redirecting the sidewalk? One suggestion that stood out was lowering the sidewalk to street grade for the length needed. This would eliminate the sudden curve and curb drop-off that is being proposed, while still making space for emergency vehicles when needed.

Moving day at Central Towers. Looking north along Henry Law Avenue.

Second, there are no bike lanes in the proposed design. The city has stated its intent to adhere to its complete streets policy, which means consideration for bicycles. This street is a great path for cyclists to get to and from downtown and head towards somewhere like Pointe Place in Dover. Cyclists can take a quieter, more comfortable path to travel between these places and when I put those destinations into Google Maps and choose cycling as the transportation method it displays the path that I’m describing.

A low(er)-stress bicycle route between Downtown Dover and Point Place (and points further south) would include the proposed Henry Law Avenue redesign, avoiding Central Avenue south of Washington Street.

Including a bike lane along the length of Henry Law Avenue that flows towards Central Avenue would make getting to downtown on bicycle much more comfortable and start to build out a bike network that allows people to get to and from downtown with ease. We suspect that the reason a bike lane was not considered is because the city is wanting to keep the angled parking, but this priority comes at the sacrifice of other modes of transportation which we think the city should implement.

From our conversations with the city the minimum allowed street width for angled parking is 16’, which is very wide for a single lane of traffic

If we change the angled parking to parallel parking we can also reduce the width of the street. Just look at how much more room is available.

Just look at how much space that angled parking was consuming from our street. With parallel parking we are able to widen both sidewalks to 8’, put in a buffered contra-flow bike lane, while reducing our asphalt footprint. This promotes, walking, biking, allows for vehicles and should be a cheaper build and maintain design due to the reduced street width.

Henry Law Avenue and George Street

The current intersection of Henry Law Avenue with George Street is an awkward triangle that is being proposed to become a roundabout. This looks good to us and we didn’t have much feedback for this section. Roundabouts are a great way to get vehicle traffic to slow down so that it can safely negotiate for the right of way. The proposed roundabout is a single lane, which is preferred (double lane roundabouts make negotiating much more complicated), and provides lots of opportunities for people to cross these streets in areas where vehicle traffic should be moving slowly.

Henry Law Avenue and George Street currently intersect in an awkward triangle.

The roundabout has narrow entrances and exits which promotes slow vehicle speeds and safer crossing opportunities.

Payne Street

Again, the designs here are not too much different than the current implementation. Also we have again prioritized vehicle parking to the point of excluding other forms of transportation. We don’t even have a sidewalk on both sides of the street in the proposal. The street does get pretty narrow at points and is meant to have travel lanes in both directions, but let’s try and see if we can find some room for the missing features.

The current street is pretty bare, with little more than some asphalt along it. The proposed design lines the street with street parking and 90 degree parking, but only has one sidewalk and no bike lanes.

We think that there can be a bike lane or multi-use path along the street opposite the park side. There are two sections that we need to try to redesign because this street has several areas of different widths and we want to represent the bike lane at each of these. The first is at the narrowest point where it connects with Henry Law Avenue.

Even though this is one of the narrowest parts of the street, we can see that the travel lanes are still pretty wide. Note: The tree on the right is meant to represent a hill

Squeezing the travel lanes down to 9’ is pretty tight, but allows us to put in the missing sidewalk. Note: The tree on the right is meant to represent a hill and the width has been reduced to match the width in the city’s proposed design

Next up is the section with 90 degree parking. This one has the most room available to work with.

There’s plenty of space to work with, but we will not be able to keep the 90 degree parking if we want room for our proposed multi-use path. Note: The tree on the right is meant to represent a hill

swapping to parallel parking on both sides of the street lets us keep more of the parking while also giving us the room for our multi-use path. Note: The tree on the right is meant to represent a hill and the width has been reduced to match the width of the city’s proposed design

If we used parallel parking on both sides of the street we can find our 8 feet for the multi-use path. This path will connect the upcoming waterfront development to Henry Law Park and allow for multiple modes of travel along this street.

Wrapping Up

I’m glad that we were able to collect this feedback and we are looking to meet with the city to discuss these suggestions. I think that we will likely get some pushback on our suggestions for parking reduction, but making this park more accessible to other forms of transportation will also help to decrease the demand for parking. We have also requested parking data for this area and will be looking at that to inform our advocacy to see where we can make the least impact on the availability of parking. Thank you to everyone who showed up to our meeting to discuss this and thank you for reading the Strong Towns Seacoast Newsletter.