PROVINCETOWN – Redesigns and renovations to Shank Painter Road and a portion of Route 6 are beginning to take shape in Provincetown.
The project calls for the addition of bike lanes along Shank Painter that would lead into a shared-use path that would be put on the southern roadbed of Route 6.
A 2 foot buffer between the 10 foot wide vehicular lanes would be added to Shank Painter Road along with the new 5 foot wide bike lanes and sidewalks on both sides of the road.
The new design of Shank Painter would give emergency vehicles more room to operate.
“This allows us to have more wiggle room for emergency vehicles to pass by, larger vehicles to be able to make their turns all the while during normal conditions providing a buffer between the bikes and the motorist to provide that level of comfort and safety,” said Transportation Engineer for the Environmental Partners Group James Fitzgerald in an update last week.
The intersection of Shank Painter and Route 6 would be replaced with a roundabout and the northern roadbed of Route 6 would change from two lanes headed east to Herring Cove into one lane in either direction.
The southern roadbed would in turn become the new bike and pedestrian path west of Shank Painter Road.
Currently the southern roadbed consists of two westbound lanes of Route 6.
“On Route 6 itself the preferred alternative was identified as the road diet concept which involved converting one roadbed of Route 6 into a two directional roadway and the other roadbed of Route 6 into a shared used path for two directional paths for bikes and pedestrians given the very low traffic volumes that are along that leg of Route 6,” said Fitzgerald.
The project also calls for the current triangular island that sits in the intersection of Shank Painter and Jerome Smith Road to be removed and replaced with a standard T-intersection.
The latest iteration of the proposed plan is one of many updates that must be submitted to the state Department of Transportation.
The update is currently at 25 percent of the design process.
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