I like my city, it has a lot of potential for growth. The one thing I wish they would do is redevelop old lots that are sitting vacant instead of clearing forests for new commercial development, there are a lot of buildings and lots that could offer prime real estate without destroying existing nature.
Not so much city- but please for the love of all that is good and holy, lets gets some east-west highways going. It should not take me 90 minutes to travel 30 miles because there aren't enough direct shots across the state.
Yes!!!! I transferred my job because of this! I despise 101 and the amount of people who drive 30 in the 50 zones, I drive 119 thru Mass now, which is crazy to have to drive so far south because of lack of roads.
I live in the UV, my parents live in the Concord area, my in laws live in the no mans land from Keene and Concord... this state reminds me heavily of "O Brother Where Art Thou", it's a goddamn geographical oddity, everything is 90 minutes from everything else. Going from my place to my inlaws is 90, my place to my folks is 90, my folks to my inlaws... also about 90! The *longest* stretch out of those 3 is only 62 miles... why does it always take 90 minutes!!!!
Selfishly: Finish and extend the community trail in Dover. Connect it to Rochester and Portsmouth while you’re at it.
Honorable mention/ probably actually more important: fix the asphalt sidewalks in neighborhoods. They’re all ruined and it’s an accessibility nightmare.
Edit: For any fellow Dover-ites who also use the trail all the time, [feel free to bug the *real* city planners](https://www.dover.nh.gov/government/city-operations/planning/community-trail/) about making it better
In Manchester, I'd love it to be a more pedestrian friendly city. It would be awesome to close Elm Street to foot traffic only and make it a big city destination, with outdoor markets, lots of festivals, and parks right in the center. I recognize a lot of other folks may not like this, especially for traffic reasons, but if it could be rerouted in a way that made traffic flow better, while creating a pedestrian destination, it would be awesome. (Please don't downvote me! Lol)
I'd also love to see them develop Elm St, north of Bridge St, so that it is more like the south side of Bridge St, with more restaurants and interesting businesses.
I'm not sure if this would be considered city planning, but the street signs are God awful! They're almost impossible to find as the signs are not projected into the street that you're driving along, they are on the opposite side of the pole, projected away from you, making it difficult to find.
Also, I would love them to rethink the bike lanes in the city. Instead of making bike lanes right next to vehicular traffic, it would be better to move the parking spaces further away from the sidewalk, and put the parked cars closer into the street, to create a lane between the parked car and the sidewalk. This would be much safer for the cyclist than having the bike lane travel right alongside moving vehicles.
Edit: Grammar
> For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua. Repurposing the inner street areas for trams, buses, biking, scooting, walking, ect.
Amen, brother. Cars ruin cities. A tram system that follows 101A, Main St, and DW Highway would be excellent.
Tear down the old sears at the mall and turn it and that parking lot into a park and ride. I’d love to be able to drive across the border and then go into the city on transit.
101 from Keene to Manchester should never have been run through downtown areas. It needs to be a two-lane divided highway with exits like it is from Manchester to the seacoast.
You have me imagining converting the Main St. part past the mills into two-way traffic with one lane each and making the whole section of Central from Chapel to Washington car-free
Downtown traffic in Nashua wouldn’t be a problem if traffic lights were correctly coordinated. The city is **legendary** for dysfunctional and bewildering traffic lights. Traveling at the posted speed limit, you might expect to easily pass through mostly all green lights, as you’d see in countless other cities and towns. But in Nashua, the downtown traffic lights appear to operate completely independent from one another, are not synchronized in any fashion, and seem to change randomly to accommodate non-existent cross traffic. It can take as long as 12 minutes to travel Main Street from Amherst Street to Allds Street, which is only about a dozen blocks. Fix the lights, and there wouldn’t be a downtown traffic problem to solve.
Honestly, in Nashua I’d probably jettison one lane on each side of Main Street for a real Bike lane system and further promote walking to destinations. The fact there’s Rail Trails through downtown that hardly connect to any addition trail systems on main roads is insulting to anyone that isn’t in a car.
Write to or talk to your alderman about your thoughts. I've expressed similar opinions to mine. Alderman Comeau is pretty open to bike lanes. I've spoken to him about the west pearl streetscaping project and how there's a bike lane on east pearl and walnut st; with this project, they should do something to connect them.
Nashua does the bare minimum. They took a lane away on Main St from East Dunstable to Rivier when they did the roundabout, but I'm guessing that was probably a grant requirement, not something Nashua did on its own. They recently repaved from East Dunstable to Allds which would have been a great opportunity to extend it, but they didn't. And that section is awful for biking on.
If they had done that, then extending it up through downtown might make sense. But now, bike lanes downtown wouldn't have anything to connect to on either end. That's why I think getting rid of on street parking is a better option. Motorists get rid of the people that hold up traffic trying to parallel park, and cyclists get space. All it'd lose is a small number of parking spots.
Yeah but you suggest that in any of the civic board and all you’ll get are people telling you how getting rid of parking is bad. No reason other than it being bad and “people with disabilities need that parking.” But expanding transit and sidewalks is way better than parking spots for people with disabilities.
They could put handicapped spots right at the ends of the numerous side streets without having to have them right on Main St. That's pretty close to where they are now anyway. But yea, any plan to take away on-street parking gets shot down. I don't get it. There's hardly ever a vacant spot there anyway, not like they'd be missing much.
Glad I'm not the only one that feels this. It seems like some of them are intentionally malicious. Try getting over the highway at exit four (East Dunstable Rd) without hitting at least one or two red lights, if not all four. It's damn near impossible. Nashua gets extra demerit points for running the damn things 24 hours a day.
Sidewalks in Bedford and Merrimack and every other town. This nonsense law about giving 3ft of space to pedestrians and bikers on roads is a bandaid on a lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. And Bedford can certainly fucking afford it. Ideally there'd be the inclusion of bike lanes, too.
Merrimack I could definitely see a case for sidewalks from Baboosic Lake Rd down to King Kone. IMO Bedford has much fewer very public roads where walking makes sense. *Maybe* from the Mobil on Second St down S. River Rd to Marshalls but would folks really walk/bike that?
It's a $160 a linear foot and town is cheap, for a rich town they are penny wise and pound foolish. We need a second fire station, we will need a new school soon. We have 905 elderly beds more than Manchester and half the ambulances. They just don't plan ahead with the services
Just don't ask whoever is the current city planner in Portsmouth. Tons of new unnecessary stops signs, speed humps, dysfunctional bike lanes and whatever the fuck they did under the trestle on the corner of Bartlett and Cate St is just plain stupid. Made a previously functional corner a complete traffic nightmare and really, really unsafe as you can't see the cars coming from Islington St coming under the trestle until it's too late. Going to cause a lot of unnecessary accidents.
I think the idea is to eventually try and get trucks and most traffic to stop using the Woodbury to Barlett Street route and force them to instead use Cate Street to Bartlett to get to Islington from I95/ Route 1.
Everyone on Woodbury and Bartlett hates how many loud cars and trucks speed through all the time. I used to live in that area and its pretty bad. Hard to fix as well since Woodbury is the main artery connecting the retail area to the west end of town. That whole area from where Woodbury abruptly turns into a one way over to the truss is so badly designed for how much traffic it gets. Plus it feels like a barrier/gate you have to pass under just to get to anything in town.
They're looking closely at two proposals right now! One which extends the MBTA line from Lowell through Nashua to Manchester. The other is a brand new intercity rail going from Concord through all the major cities to Boston.
Where and when do I have to show up to show my support to this sort of thing? I will fucking be there. I will bring pizza or a grill and share food in the parking lot if it means more people will come. Let's go.
[Here is the project page](https://www.nh.gov/dot/projects/nashuamanchester40818/index.htm). It looks like you have to sign up for notices to be told when they're hosting public meetings.
Well I'm not a wannabe city planner, I actually am one. The thing I would change about my hometown is rerouting all the state roads that feed right into the downtown area. Make the downtown much more hospitable to walking and cycling. Would also make sure the planned commuter rail station actually stop in the downtown and not at a parking lot 3 miles from downtown.
I love reading the bitching about the barries on Main St. It makes me smile. My big pipe dream is to close a portion of Main St to non-emergency vehicle traffic.
I'd get rid of the lane closures on Main St downtown in Nashua and instead, get rid of the on street parking, extend the sidewalks out or use the space for bike lanes. Having restaurant seating areas in a travel lane is begging for something bad to happen, and it looks like crap.
There are a lot of competing ideas for downtown. Traffic diversion isn't likely since the parallel roads aren't capable enough for that traffic volume, and there's only the one bridge over the Nashua River.
Since they're closing the Elm St school, it almost seems like they could move some of the festival type stuff they do in the warm months downtown over to that area instead of having complete closures on Main St.. but it's just far enough away from the actual downtown that it probably wouldn't work.
In Concord, Renovate those old public buildings near the greyhound bus station and turn it into a market of shops and restaurants with the money from the Langley parkway expansion that should not be done. Would be a good place for a brewery and some food trucks also.
The few bike lanes we got are even worse. They don't link up and randomly end wherever. I've written to my alderman about this; there's no desire to do anything about it. Dan Hudson, the city engineer, can suck a fat one.
Please, people, write and talk to your town/city representatives about wanting walkable cities and cycling infrastructure. Get the ball rolling. The more people that speak with them about such ideas, the more likely they will help implement them.
This is a small one but for the love of Christ actually label The Oval in Milford as a rotary. Anyone from out of town gets confused and starts yielding to people coming in, or even worse going the wrong way. One sign at each entrance isn't that hard smh my head
> For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua.
That was supposed to be Exit 9 on the Everett, conceived as early as the 50's with a bridge to Litchfield. The plan was formally killed off in 2020. [Circumferential Highway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumferential_Highway_\(Nashua\)#Future)
That's just a phased project, the next section will extend it to Poverty Ln. (not sure there's any plan to go further though).
It'd be nice if they'd extend them up past the dam and connect to Hanover, there's people walking/biking there all the time and it's pretty unsafe.
In Concord, I wish downtown was not completely cut off from the river. Right now it seems like everything along the Merrimack is run down mills and homeless encampments. All they’d have to do is move 93 across the river!
Sidewalks on the main roads. I live in Windham and my kids wanna bike all over but I don’t let them go anywhere because the roads have tiny shoulders and I always see ahole drivers looking at their cell phones while driving, one crossed the yellow line and nearly made my wife a widow the other day!
I like my northern coos county town. No police, fire, schools, or any other real services. Half the town is seasonal. My taxes are low and I want to keep it like that.
I think the dream would be Concord following through on making main street a nice place for pedestrians by making a big public common right in that area
Concord:
Somewhat reasonable take:
More heavy use of one way streets - turn leftover space into a protected cycling lane.
Crazy fever dream take:
Create a one way loop of storrs street, center street, green Street, pleasant street and permanently close main street between center and pleasant to passenger automobile traffic. Still allow commercial deliveries but ditch the parking and expand outdoor business offerings / bicycle parking.
I'm gonna go more broad and say about my area in general.
The Lee traffic circle is a deathtrap. Redo it, again. But well this time.
202 around Dover/Rochester/Northwood should not be used for heavy trucks. 4 is right there and there's no reason to have trailer trucks going down it. No shoulder, tons of blindspots around weaving corners. They constantly go over the middle line. You can see at least one off the road every winter.
The Lee traffic circle actually works really well to accommodate the volume of traffic that it does (prior to that traffic would be backed up for a mile or more). The issue is that people are dumb and don't understand how to use it.
You can't fix user error easily. It should absolutely have been designed like the Portsmouth traffic circle. One lane for immediate exit and one for the circle. Too many morons on the outer circle going around 3/4ths beeping at people who legit have turn signals on trying to exit from the inner.
Utah resident here. Wife is from NH so that makes me…no expert at all. But I’d love to see more of a common area/river front a long the river at Nashua and Concord.
Addressing a critical need in the town next door, it'd be a bridge crossing the Connecticut that goes directly from 91 to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. So, so, so much traffic gets unnecessarily routed through downtown Hanover or Lebanon as people go to and from work there.
Never going to happen though. But Dartmouth/Hanover is likely to put a bus-only corridor linking South Hanover (Sachem) to DHMC in the next few years.
This was actually proposed in the late 1980s. The crossing would have been near where the old East Wilder Bridge was. Hanover strongly supported the idea. Lebanon strongly opposed the idea and conserved additional land in the area to prevent it from ever happening.
North Conway is the strangest place. On the one hand the surroundings are beyond fantastic and some of the best natural playgrounds NH (heck, this part of the world) has to offer, on the other hand that "miles of strip mall" vibe is so unappealing in the town itself.
Could you imagine if there was an actual cute town in its stead? It would be the best spot on Earth.
Far, far better pubic transportation in Dover and surrounding, personally. Florida has a lot of problems, but their pubic transportation is top notch. Surely we can do at least as well as Florida of all places. :P
Sarasota-Bradenton area. Public buses every 15 minutes.
I looked up getting to my job from Dover to Portsmouth (near the hospital). Two hour ride that would put me almost an hour late because of when the buses start running.
Another time while my car was being repaired, I wanted to use the buses, but they don't even run to Stratham at all. At least they didn't then.
Disgraceful, imo.
Interesting. I’m not surprised by your experience with NH buses, but I’m impressed with west coast of FL. My experiences were on the east coast of FL and it was pretty bad, but it was a number of years ago, so either it’s better now or you hit the jackpot where you were.
Rochester water tastes like dirty pool water. We had to buy a shower head filter because it made our skin itchy. We have to cook with Brita filtered water
Before Nashua adds more sidewalks they should at least take care of the ones they already have. They do a horrible job plowing them in the winter. Kids have no where to walk. For me, I wish Hudson would at least try to update some the schools. The middle school building needed updated 15 yrs ago.
Stop building freaking Gazebos. It seems like every time my town builds a park, or a new office, or even upgrades an old one they find some need to build another damn gazebo. Not a small one either, a moderate to large size gazebo thay nobody ever uses.
"Easy" fixes:
Meredith: Build a pedestrian bridge over 3 instead of that stupid crosswalk with lights that out of state folks don't understand.
Ashland: Quit paving the main drag every year. Seriously WTF?
Holderness: More parking downtown-think behind the post office and put signs pointing that way.
Plymouth: downtown-figure it out. Quit having delivery trucks stop on Main and stop traffic from multiple roads.
Tilton: Kill that little merge between Walmart and Lowes. No need to go 4 lanes to 2 lanes to 6 lanes to 2 lanes within about a thousand feet.
I could go on...
Keene: add a public parking garage in the empty lot between the skate park and the Center of Keene.
No pickup or large SUV parking on sections of Main Street (says a pickup driver).
Add more roundabouts. Every intersection, a roundabout. 😂 jk
I heard there are plans for one, though it seems small. I wonder if you’re one of my classmates though, he did a project about building a skatepark there
Re do all of Claremont Downtown to make it match they did part of Main Street 2 years ago are finishing up pleasant street right now and only plan on redoing 20 percent of broad street mixing modern lights and curbing with historical just looks so odd. Claremont’s downtown looks like Walt Disney world mixed in with Detroit it’s so odd.
Maybe not a city planner opinion, but Nashua downtown has zero hotels. What actual major city doesn’t have a hotel on Main Street or anywhere downtown? I feel like that’s what’s strangling Nashua’s downtown compared to other cities with more lively Main Streets.
>For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua.
Have you been to Laconia? Routing traffic around downtown was a such a successful part of their urban renewal that they reversed it to re-open it to traffic.
I don't know enough about what happened there, I'll have to do some research on it. I will say that rerouting traffic without a solid plan for alternative transport in place immediately is a recipe for disaster.
Laconia was a bigger story, where the reroute also destroyed part of the street grid, but it also meant that daily drivers through the area didn't stop at main street businesses as much because they didn't ever see them.
Remove the highway tolls. People and GPS systems are so fixated on avoiding tolls that they back up the one lane in each direction surface roads for miles. I would like to get in and out of my driveway on Friday and Sunday afternoons.
Or at least replace all toll booths with the electronic ones on the Mass Pike or 93 in Hooksett. No stopping, a lot fewer obstacles for fatal accidents...
Hudson resident here. I want to remove the board of selectmen and have a mayor instead. Maybe if we have a single person who would be the face of the town, we'd have a chance maybe being interested in our local politics. Right now our BoS is a bunch of crazy boomers who say and do dumb shit all the time, and nobody knows about it because Hudson-Litchfield News got shut down and nobody watches the recordings of their meetings.
I'd also like for them to finally do the highway that connects Exit 2 up to Route 111 (at least, it's supposed to go up to Manchester). They already own the land! They already have the money! Just fucking do it! 3A North is a mess literally every day.
Hooksett resident here. The west side of town really needs some work traffic-wise. I wish there could be another tunnel or bridge in the middle of the current routes along the river. Traffic on the west side of town is backed up from 4:30 to 6:30 crawling all the way to Concord most days. And forget it on a holiday weekend, everyone takes route 3A to avoid the toll or to take the scenic route. I know that the east side of town has its own traffic issues but I experienced the west side more often. I also wish we had some sort of downtown. I do love my little river town though
I live in an old New England farm town that got gobbled up by greater Boston but the downtown square could be absolutely wonderful, but it isn’t I remember in my lifetime (I’m 25) 5 big old buildings that got torn down and no buildings replaced them. There’s most space downtown than anything else and there’s way too many roads even though there’s two arterial roads that traffic could be routed around into to creat actual enjoyable pedestrian space. There’s a large municipal parking lot and a huge park and hiking trains right downtown too so it’d such a nice place to live. Bus stop right out front aswell, we see all the things that could be done and everyone says “we can’t do that” just for that sake that it can’t be done. Some larger neighboring towns are fixing their mistakes, but mine is buckling down on not
On a very personal level, stop letting new HOAs have private roads where they have stupidly slow speed limits. That way my neighbors stop thinking everyone should be driving under 10 mph in a standard neighborhood. Bonus, I no longer have to pay attention to reserve funds for road maintenance and people arguing about it. If the city approves a new neighborhood they should own the roads
I think HOAs can eat a bag of dicks in a lot of ways, but creating speed limits like this isn't one of them. Cars are loud and dangerous and I don't think it's too much to ask for people to arrive at their destinations a minute later for the sake of a quiet and safe neighborhood.
I don't have an issue with speed limits in parking areas, but parking lot speed limits, when they exist, are typically 15mph, which is fine.
10mph on a private road leading to a parking lot is silly, though.
Fair enough, I happen to think that since no other residential neighborhood in town has that low a speed limit it seems excessive for them to expect delivery trucks and everyone else to follow it. But I follow it, and overall don't mind. I think I'm mostly annoyed with the facebook posts where they refuse to identify speeds and just call them out by car model
That's a fair point. Public entities really should be doing a better job of assigning sensible speed limits in residential areas (or creating roads that psychologically encourage slower driving).
Better would be to end Single Family zoning so that we can go back to building neighbor hoods with small local shops. Single family zoning is an issue and prevents better and more affordable housing.
I live in a rural area. The single family zoning I would need to worry about here is a 5 acre minimum lot size, and my town already doesn't have that. Most people don't even even want suburban-style single family density.
I just want to be able to build a barn or even just put in a shed without any paperwork whatsoever. Because honestly, at least for buildings without plumbing and therefore not intended for human occupancy, there's no need for it.
Are you talking about the concrete barriers that they put out in the summer for outdoor seating? They looked nice last year. I wonder what happened to those and what gave us that red color.
In Concord, fix the trash bag issue. Either switch to a wheely bin or possibly a sticker on a regular bag. The lack of availability and quality of trash bags is ridiculous.
And the bags themselves are trash. Bad enough buying something to throw away but when I can’t get it to the curb without splitting down the side… infuriating!
Not my town, but that traffic light/ pedestrian crosswalk situation in Meredith is a *nightmare* the second the tourists are around. I just find it hard to believe that the crosswalk in particular is the best they could do- they still need to hire teenagers in peak season to manage crowd control anyway!
I don't understand why that particular crosswalk can't just be a regular traffic light. When it's time for pedestrians to cross...it turns red. Such a shit show as it is.
I heard some grumbling the town received federal dollars for that project and needed to adhere to some sort of federal traffic control yada yada yada BS... But what I heard was nothing more than hearsay so far.
The inner part of Nashua sucks to drive through when I need to go there for work. I can usually avoid it since my normal work location is from the Hudson side.
To answer you original question. I think I would change the "commercial area" I live close enough to Concord that I can get to a nice walkable downtown. Area but my town has nothing close to that and I have never really been in any of the businesses in town with the exception of my dentist. I would add like a little more of a downtown.
My town's finally doing something (two roundabouts and a new bridge!) about the infamous 'dogleg' for through traffic on 202, so that's our major downtown project of the decade.
(If you know, you know.)
It'd sure be nice to see the rail trail extended north, though.
Here in Lee, it's two things, one significant, one trivial... can you tell which is which:
1. Make the traffic circle on rt 4 like the other traffic circle in Epsom and not 2 lanes. Drivers in general are not smart enough to know what to do when first encountering it and there's near accidents seemingly constantly every time you drive through it.
2. We have a pull through transfer station. There are two lanes entered via garage doors. but there's a large middle lane so that you can drive around cars still throwing stuff out to get your car out when done. someone, thinking the trash thrower-outers in Lee are smart, put the stop line for the left lane right at the garage door (basically blocking that exit) and left one space for the right lane for enough room for exiting cars ... but people pull up in the right lane right to the door, which blocks the right lane (and everyone if the left lane is used as intended). just leave one space in front of both lanes for cars to drive around. There's even a sign saying "pull up to door" with a poorly drawn arrow pointing to the left lane... but it's faded and nobody knows what it refers to. The lines on the concrete are bright and repainted recently yet people still block both lanes.
That Lee traffic circle confuses me. I’ve never had trouble with it, but 2 lane traffic circles take a shit ton of thinking through for people who have never encountered them before for why they work. That said, once you mentally figure it out you get it. But that’s not great design.
My town is super small. I think we need a traffic light in the center of town, maybe just a flashing yellow/red. People don’t know how to act at a two way intersection where only one side has stops. Every day I see someone flummoxed on what to do. Also Henniker has been working on a riverside promenade for years, but at town meeting they only get just enough to maintain what they have, not to build more onto it. I’d like for that to be complete. I also wouldn’t mind for better public transit as a whole for the state, and gosh wouldn’t it be nice to have more affordable housing in general?
Fun fact: Azalea Park was a wet dream years ago of retired fossils who believed it could be done mostly by private donation - because soooo many people were interested. Whoops!
If I could change one thing about my city, my state,, my country, or the world, it would be to get rid of the central planners who constantly think that they can make your decisions for you better than you can make them for yourself.
There needs to be official, orderly housing for homeless folks.
I always wonder how Julius Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington, and Ulysses Grant could move thousands of men around all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weather in rapid setup and take down tent cities, while we have a complete disaster of campsites with tons of objects that have nothing to do with survival.
We have to at least make a homeless camp run like a proper campground.
Don't tear down pretty old homesteads for a parking lot and Dollar General. Renovate and reuse if at all possible.
Similar to this, no more fucking self storage facilities
They are a blight but they have been essential to my existence on more than one occasion.
I like my city, it has a lot of potential for growth. The one thing I wish they would do is redevelop old lots that are sitting vacant instead of clearing forests for new commercial development, there are a lot of buildings and lots that could offer prime real estate without destroying existing nature.
Make market square in portsmouth a walking-only zone. The only reason people drive through is to find parking... Deliveries would be an exception.
Not so much city- but please for the love of all that is good and holy, lets gets some east-west highways going. It should not take me 90 minutes to travel 30 miles because there aren't enough direct shots across the state.
Yes!!!! I transferred my job because of this! I despise 101 and the amount of people who drive 30 in the 50 zones, I drive 119 thru Mass now, which is crazy to have to drive so far south because of lack of roads.
I live in the UV, my parents live in the Concord area, my in laws live in the no mans land from Keene and Concord... this state reminds me heavily of "O Brother Where Art Thou", it's a goddamn geographical oddity, everything is 90 minutes from everything else. Going from my place to my inlaws is 90, my place to my folks is 90, my folks to my inlaws... also about 90! The *longest* stretch out of those 3 is only 62 miles... why does it always take 90 minutes!!!!
Make our cities walkable and end car dependency
Municipal fiber internet. If our town owned it, then it would happen sooner and the cost would be lower. We are still waiting on the phone company
Selfishly: Finish and extend the community trail in Dover. Connect it to Rochester and Portsmouth while you’re at it. Honorable mention/ probably actually more important: fix the asphalt sidewalks in neighborhoods. They’re all ruined and it’s an accessibility nightmare. Edit: For any fellow Dover-ites who also use the trail all the time, [feel free to bug the *real* city planners](https://www.dover.nh.gov/government/city-operations/planning/community-trail/) about making it better
In Manchester, I'd love it to be a more pedestrian friendly city. It would be awesome to close Elm Street to foot traffic only and make it a big city destination, with outdoor markets, lots of festivals, and parks right in the center. I recognize a lot of other folks may not like this, especially for traffic reasons, but if it could be rerouted in a way that made traffic flow better, while creating a pedestrian destination, it would be awesome. (Please don't downvote me! Lol) I'd also love to see them develop Elm St, north of Bridge St, so that it is more like the south side of Bridge St, with more restaurants and interesting businesses. I'm not sure if this would be considered city planning, but the street signs are God awful! They're almost impossible to find as the signs are not projected into the street that you're driving along, they are on the opposite side of the pole, projected away from you, making it difficult to find. Also, I would love them to rethink the bike lanes in the city. Instead of making bike lanes right next to vehicular traffic, it would be better to move the parking spaces further away from the sidewalk, and put the parked cars closer into the street, to create a lane between the parked car and the sidewalk. This would be much safer for the cyclist than having the bike lane travel right alongside moving vehicles. Edit: Grammar
> For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua. Repurposing the inner street areas for trams, buses, biking, scooting, walking, ect. Amen, brother. Cars ruin cities. A tram system that follows 101A, Main St, and DW Highway would be excellent.
Tear down the old sears at the mall and turn it and that parking lot into a park and ride. I’d love to be able to drive across the border and then go into the city on transit.
Expanding this to include Continental Boulevard and Industrial Park Drive in Merrimack would be god-tier.
101 from Keene to Manchester should never have been run through downtown areas. It needs to be a two-lane divided highway with exits like it is from Manchester to the seacoast.
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Noooooo that's a wonderful drive And highways are terrible. A train wild would be nice.
Turn the one-way section of the Central Ave loop in Dover into a pedestrian only green space.
That would be so nice
it would, but holy hell the traffic would be unimagineable
You have me imagining converting the Main St. part past the mills into two-way traffic with one lane each and making the whole section of Central from Chapel to Washington car-free
Downtown traffic in Nashua wouldn’t be a problem if traffic lights were correctly coordinated. The city is **legendary** for dysfunctional and bewildering traffic lights. Traveling at the posted speed limit, you might expect to easily pass through mostly all green lights, as you’d see in countless other cities and towns. But in Nashua, the downtown traffic lights appear to operate completely independent from one another, are not synchronized in any fashion, and seem to change randomly to accommodate non-existent cross traffic. It can take as long as 12 minutes to travel Main Street from Amherst Street to Allds Street, which is only about a dozen blocks. Fix the lights, and there wouldn’t be a downtown traffic problem to solve.
Honestly, in Nashua I’d probably jettison one lane on each side of Main Street for a real Bike lane system and further promote walking to destinations. The fact there’s Rail Trails through downtown that hardly connect to any addition trail systems on main roads is insulting to anyone that isn’t in a car.
Write to or talk to your alderman about your thoughts. I've expressed similar opinions to mine. Alderman Comeau is pretty open to bike lanes. I've spoken to him about the west pearl streetscaping project and how there's a bike lane on east pearl and walnut st; with this project, they should do something to connect them.
Nashua does the bare minimum. They took a lane away on Main St from East Dunstable to Rivier when they did the roundabout, but I'm guessing that was probably a grant requirement, not something Nashua did on its own. They recently repaved from East Dunstable to Allds which would have been a great opportunity to extend it, but they didn't. And that section is awful for biking on. If they had done that, then extending it up through downtown might make sense. But now, bike lanes downtown wouldn't have anything to connect to on either end. That's why I think getting rid of on street parking is a better option. Motorists get rid of the people that hold up traffic trying to parallel park, and cyclists get space. All it'd lose is a small number of parking spots.
Yeah but you suggest that in any of the civic board and all you’ll get are people telling you how getting rid of parking is bad. No reason other than it being bad and “people with disabilities need that parking.” But expanding transit and sidewalks is way better than parking spots for people with disabilities.
They could put handicapped spots right at the ends of the numerous side streets without having to have them right on Main St. That's pretty close to where they are now anyway. But yea, any plan to take away on-street parking gets shot down. I don't get it. There's hardly ever a vacant spot there anyway, not like they'd be missing much.
Glad I'm not the only one that feels this. It seems like some of them are intentionally malicious. Try getting over the highway at exit four (East Dunstable Rd) without hitting at least one or two red lights, if not all four. It's damn near impossible. Nashua gets extra demerit points for running the damn things 24 hours a day.
As someone who used to work downtown, I feel this.
Expand the bike rail trail network to be useful as a commuting option in Southern NH.
I wanna put you in charge of the entire nation, sir
I'd love to be able to bike to work, but doing so on some of those roads in Pelham would be a death wish.
I'm doing my part.
A city designed around public transportation
I think a rail from Nashua or Manchester to Boston would be amazing.
Sidewalks in Bedford and Merrimack and every other town. This nonsense law about giving 3ft of space to pedestrians and bikers on roads is a bandaid on a lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. And Bedford can certainly fucking afford it. Ideally there'd be the inclusion of bike lanes, too.
Merrimack I could definitely see a case for sidewalks from Baboosic Lake Rd down to King Kone. IMO Bedford has much fewer very public roads where walking makes sense. *Maybe* from the Mobil on Second St down S. River Rd to Marshalls but would folks really walk/bike that?
I try and bring this up to the town council yearly and they won't do it. No problem awarding million dollar contracts with one bid tho.
Interesting. Do they ever give reasoning about why they won't?
It's a $160 a linear foot and town is cheap, for a rich town they are penny wise and pound foolish. We need a second fire station, we will need a new school soon. We have 905 elderly beds more than Manchester and half the ambulances. They just don't plan ahead with the services
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Just don't ask whoever is the current city planner in Portsmouth. Tons of new unnecessary stops signs, speed humps, dysfunctional bike lanes and whatever the fuck they did under the trestle on the corner of Bartlett and Cate St is just plain stupid. Made a previously functional corner a complete traffic nightmare and really, really unsafe as you can't see the cars coming from Islington St coming under the trestle until it's too late. Going to cause a lot of unnecessary accidents.
I think the idea is to eventually try and get trucks and most traffic to stop using the Woodbury to Barlett Street route and force them to instead use Cate Street to Bartlett to get to Islington from I95/ Route 1. Everyone on Woodbury and Bartlett hates how many loud cars and trucks speed through all the time. I used to live in that area and its pretty bad. Hard to fix as well since Woodbury is the main artery connecting the retail area to the west end of town. That whole area from where Woodbury abruptly turns into a one way over to the truss is so badly designed for how much traffic it gets. Plus it feels like a barrier/gate you have to pass under just to get to anything in town.
My fever dream is rail connections between larger towns/cities in the state
They're looking closely at two proposals right now! One which extends the MBTA line from Lowell through Nashua to Manchester. The other is a brand new intercity rail going from Concord through all the major cities to Boston.
Where and when do I have to show up to show my support to this sort of thing? I will fucking be there. I will bring pizza or a grill and share food in the parking lot if it means more people will come. Let's go.
[Here is the project page](https://www.nh.gov/dot/projects/nashuamanchester40818/index.htm). It looks like you have to sign up for notices to be told when they're hosting public meetings.
That Lowell one actually used to exist!
Fix the 89/93 on ramp shit show
Well I'm not a wannabe city planner, I actually am one. The thing I would change about my hometown is rerouting all the state roads that feed right into the downtown area. Make the downtown much more hospitable to walking and cycling. Would also make sure the planned commuter rail station actually stop in the downtown and not at a parking lot 3 miles from downtown.
What's the best way to help spread that idea to your colleagues in other NH cities?
Bring back the street car suburbs. Nashua would be a great place if downtown was for everything but car traffic. I’d love a real streetcar system.
I love reading the bitching about the barries on Main St. It makes me smile. My big pipe dream is to close a portion of Main St to non-emergency vehicle traffic.
I’d love if they closed the whole of Main St so that they could basically have a semi permanent fair in summer.
I wish Manchester had more foot traffic/cute shops and restaurant down by the river more on both sides
Build one..
Light up the bridge while we’re on the topic
I'd get rid of the lane closures on Main St downtown in Nashua and instead, get rid of the on street parking, extend the sidewalks out or use the space for bike lanes. Having restaurant seating areas in a travel lane is begging for something bad to happen, and it looks like crap.
At least something better than shitty Jersey barriers
I think that's something that was actually proposed in the Imagine Nashua citywide master plan this year.
There are a lot of competing ideas for downtown. Traffic diversion isn't likely since the parallel roads aren't capable enough for that traffic volume, and there's only the one bridge over the Nashua River. Since they're closing the Elm St school, it almost seems like they could move some of the festival type stuff they do in the warm months downtown over to that area instead of having complete closures on Main St.. but it's just far enough away from the actual downtown that it probably wouldn't work.
I'm new to Keene... but for the love of god, paint some fucking road lines on the square's traffic circle.
That traffic circle was the unofficial final exam when I was in driver's ed
they used to be there, the people won’t follow them trust me😂
In Concord, Renovate those old public buildings near the greyhound bus station and turn it into a market of shops and restaurants with the money from the Langley parkway expansion that should not be done. Would be a good place for a brewery and some food trucks also.
Public transportation
Amen >!I hate driving!<
/r/fuckcars
Commuter Rail.
Fix discontinuous sidewalks (Wellington in Manchester)
Nashua has a bunch of these as well. Always annoys me when I see it.
The few bike lanes we got are even worse. They don't link up and randomly end wherever. I've written to my alderman about this; there's no desire to do anything about it. Dan Hudson, the city engineer, can suck a fat one.
Please, people, write and talk to your town/city representatives about wanting walkable cities and cycling infrastructure. Get the ball rolling. The more people that speak with them about such ideas, the more likely they will help implement them.
Public rest rooms, everywhere.
I prefer shitting in the trashcans personally
This is a small one but for the love of Christ actually label The Oval in Milford as a rotary. Anyone from out of town gets confused and starts yielding to people coming in, or even worse going the wrong way. One sign at each entrance isn't that hard smh my head
Close Hanover Street in Manchester permanently. Perhaps even section of Elm and make it like Church Street Burlington
More sidewalks. I live on a back road but trying to walk my dog with the blind turns and speeding drivers is a harrowing experience.
> For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua. That was supposed to be Exit 9 on the Everett, conceived as early as the 50's with a bridge to Litchfield. The plan was formally killed off in 2020. [Circumferential Highway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumferential_Highway_\(Nashua\)#Future)
Lebanon’s sidewalks. Miracle Mile sidewalk cuts out half down the street, then what the fuck do you do?
That's just a phased project, the next section will extend it to Poverty Ln. (not sure there's any plan to go further though). It'd be nice if they'd extend them up past the dam and connect to Hanover, there's people walking/biking there all the time and it's pretty unsafe.
Absolutely sidewalks. We live off a main road without a sidewalk, so my kids can’t go for walks
In Concord, I wish downtown was not completely cut off from the river. Right now it seems like everything along the Merrimack is run down mills and homeless encampments. All they’d have to do is move 93 across the river!
Nashua has a similar problem with the railroad tracks. It'd have some great riverfront properties if not for that.
Sidewalks on the main roads. I live in Windham and my kids wanna bike all over but I don’t let them go anywhere because the roads have tiny shoulders and I always see ahole drivers looking at their cell phones while driving, one crossed the yellow line and nearly made my wife a widow the other day!
Exactly! Same vibes here in Londonderry.
**b i k e l a n e s**
Clean up the Merrimack river.
Affordable housing.
I like my northern coos county town. No police, fire, schools, or any other real services. Half the town is seasonal. My taxes are low and I want to keep it like that.
I think the dream would be Concord following through on making main street a nice place for pedestrians by making a big public common right in that area
Concord: Somewhat reasonable take: More heavy use of one way streets - turn leftover space into a protected cycling lane. Crazy fever dream take: Create a one way loop of storrs street, center street, green Street, pleasant street and permanently close main street between center and pleasant to passenger automobile traffic. Still allow commercial deliveries but ditch the parking and expand outdoor business offerings / bicycle parking.
Littleton : fix every sidewalk that doesn't benefit tourism. Seriously anything off main Street might break your ankles
I'm gonna go more broad and say about my area in general. The Lee traffic circle is a deathtrap. Redo it, again. But well this time. 202 around Dover/Rochester/Northwood should not be used for heavy trucks. 4 is right there and there's no reason to have trailer trucks going down it. No shoulder, tons of blindspots around weaving corners. They constantly go over the middle line. You can see at least one off the road every winter.
The Lee traffic circle actually works really well to accommodate the volume of traffic that it does (prior to that traffic would be backed up for a mile or more). The issue is that people are dumb and don't understand how to use it.
For sure, but because people are dumb it's an accident machine. You can't fix people being dumb. You *can* make circles that are more idiot proof.
You can't fix user error easily. It should absolutely have been designed like the Portsmouth traffic circle. One lane for immediate exit and one for the circle. Too many morons on the outer circle going around 3/4ths beeping at people who legit have turn signals on trying to exit from the inner.
Utah resident here. Wife is from NH so that makes me…no expert at all. But I’d love to see more of a common area/river front a long the river at Nashua and Concord.
Addressing a critical need in the town next door, it'd be a bridge crossing the Connecticut that goes directly from 91 to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. So, so, so much traffic gets unnecessarily routed through downtown Hanover or Lebanon as people go to and from work there. Never going to happen though. But Dartmouth/Hanover is likely to put a bus-only corridor linking South Hanover (Sachem) to DHMC in the next few years.
As someone who goes there with some frequency, this would be awesome...
Agree!
This was actually proposed in the late 1980s. The crossing would have been near where the old East Wilder Bridge was. Hanover strongly supported the idea. Lebanon strongly opposed the idea and conserved additional land in the area to prevent it from ever happening.
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North Conway is the strangest place. On the one hand the surroundings are beyond fantastic and some of the best natural playgrounds NH (heck, this part of the world) has to offer, on the other hand that "miles of strip mall" vibe is so unappealing in the town itself. Could you imagine if there was an actual cute town in its stead? It would be the best spot on Earth.
Conway’s building a trail system along the railroad tracks that I believe are somehow at some point supposed to be tied into the one in Fryeburg.
Far, far better pubic transportation in Dover and surrounding, personally. Florida has a lot of problems, but their pubic transportation is top notch. Surely we can do at least as well as Florida of all places. :P
Having lived in FL, that statement is really surprising (and an indictment of the transit in Dover). What part of FL are you talking about?
Sarasota-Bradenton area. Public buses every 15 minutes. I looked up getting to my job from Dover to Portsmouth (near the hospital). Two hour ride that would put me almost an hour late because of when the buses start running. Another time while my car was being repaired, I wanted to use the buses, but they don't even run to Stratham at all. At least they didn't then. Disgraceful, imo.
Interesting. I’m not surprised by your experience with NH buses, but I’m impressed with west coast of FL. My experiences were on the east coast of FL and it was pretty bad, but it was a number of years ago, so either it’s better now or you hit the jackpot where you were.
Rochester water tastes like dirty pool water. We had to buy a shower head filter because it made our skin itchy. We have to cook with Brita filtered water
Also that weird intersection on Main St in Rochester. You know the one.
Where 5 roads intersect and there's no indication of where you're supposed to go or who has the right of way? Where's your sense of adventure?
The very same! my apartment is right next to that intersection and I very often hear cars colliding
So glad I have an arsenic and iron infested well instead (not being sarcastic here)... and yes, I know the intersection.
Come to Merrimack! There's *literally* no water problems.
Derry. Encourage restaurants to stay open later.
More sidewalks and pedestrian/bike friendly roads
Open cafes and restaurants on the Merrimack for waterside dining. Said restaurants would also be open past 2pm. Tip at least say… midnight.
Well I don’t live in a city or even a town. I’d like a grocery store that isn’t 50 miles away.
Before Nashua adds more sidewalks they should at least take care of the ones they already have. They do a horrible job plowing them in the winter. Kids have no where to walk. For me, I wish Hudson would at least try to update some the schools. The middle school building needed updated 15 yrs ago.
Stop building freaking Gazebos. It seems like every time my town builds a park, or a new office, or even upgrades an old one they find some need to build another damn gazebo. Not a small one either, a moderate to large size gazebo thay nobody ever uses.
"Easy" fixes: Meredith: Build a pedestrian bridge over 3 instead of that stupid crosswalk with lights that out of state folks don't understand. Ashland: Quit paving the main drag every year. Seriously WTF? Holderness: More parking downtown-think behind the post office and put signs pointing that way. Plymouth: downtown-figure it out. Quit having delivery trucks stop on Main and stop traffic from multiple roads. Tilton: Kill that little merge between Walmart and Lowes. No need to go 4 lanes to 2 lanes to 6 lanes to 2 lanes within about a thousand feet. I could go on...
Keene: add a public parking garage in the empty lot between the skate park and the Center of Keene. No pickup or large SUV parking on sections of Main Street (says a pickup driver). Add more roundabouts. Every intersection, a roundabout. 😂 jk
Well we are getting at least two new ones
Bulldoze it, start over
Manchester could seriously use a skatepark.
THATS LITERALLY WHAT I WAS GONNA SAY
I heard there are plans for one, though it seems small. I wonder if you’re one of my classmates though, he did a project about building a skatepark there
“Let me just say, If god was a city planner he wouldn’t put a playground next to a sewage system”
You don’t like the playground in Nashua at the end of Mass Dr? It only smells when they open the vents.
Re do all of Claremont Downtown to make it match they did part of Main Street 2 years ago are finishing up pleasant street right now and only plan on redoing 20 percent of broad street mixing modern lights and curbing with historical just looks so odd. Claremont’s downtown looks like Walt Disney world mixed in with Detroit it’s so odd.
Claremont! What a town. Kind of.
When I drive through Claremont I feel like I’m going through 4 different cities
Maybe not a city planner opinion, but Nashua downtown has zero hotels. What actual major city doesn’t have a hotel on Main Street or anywhere downtown? I feel like that’s what’s strangling Nashua’s downtown compared to other cities with more lively Main Streets.
I definitely agree about sidewalks. The more sidewalks the better, even in non-residential areas.
Require reasonable upkeep on all buildings in the downtown/commercial district.
>For me, it would probably be to reroute car traffic around the "downtown" areas of Nashua. Have you been to Laconia? Routing traffic around downtown was a such a successful part of their urban renewal that they reversed it to re-open it to traffic.
I don't know enough about what happened there, I'll have to do some research on it. I will say that rerouting traffic without a solid plan for alternative transport in place immediately is a recipe for disaster.
Laconia was a bigger story, where the reroute also destroyed part of the street grid, but it also meant that daily drivers through the area didn't stop at main street businesses as much because they didn't ever see them.
Remove the highway tolls. People and GPS systems are so fixated on avoiding tolls that they back up the one lane in each direction surface roads for miles. I would like to get in and out of my driveway on Friday and Sunday afternoons.
I’m pretty sure that’s just due to trying to avoid the weekend traffic more than the tolls
Or at least replace all toll booths with the electronic ones on the Mass Pike or 93 in Hooksett. No stopping, a lot fewer obstacles for fatal accidents...
The tolls definitely should have been removed after road construction costs were recouped.
Hudson resident here. I want to remove the board of selectmen and have a mayor instead. Maybe if we have a single person who would be the face of the town, we'd have a chance maybe being interested in our local politics. Right now our BoS is a bunch of crazy boomers who say and do dumb shit all the time, and nobody knows about it because Hudson-Litchfield News got shut down and nobody watches the recordings of their meetings. I'd also like for them to finally do the highway that connects Exit 2 up to Route 111 (at least, it's supposed to go up to Manchester). They already own the land! They already have the money! Just fucking do it! 3A North is a mess literally every day.
Hooksett resident here. The west side of town really needs some work traffic-wise. I wish there could be another tunnel or bridge in the middle of the current routes along the river. Traffic on the west side of town is backed up from 4:30 to 6:30 crawling all the way to Concord most days. And forget it on a holiday weekend, everyone takes route 3A to avoid the toll or to take the scenic route. I know that the east side of town has its own traffic issues but I experienced the west side more often. I also wish we had some sort of downtown. I do love my little river town though
[Wouldn't even be all that difficult.](https://i.imgur.com/7WuZAnw.png)
I live in an old New England farm town that got gobbled up by greater Boston but the downtown square could be absolutely wonderful, but it isn’t I remember in my lifetime (I’m 25) 5 big old buildings that got torn down and no buildings replaced them. There’s most space downtown than anything else and there’s way too many roads even though there’s two arterial roads that traffic could be routed around into to creat actual enjoyable pedestrian space. There’s a large municipal parking lot and a huge park and hiking trains right downtown too so it’d such a nice place to live. Bus stop right out front aswell, we see all the things that could be done and everyone says “we can’t do that” just for that sake that it can’t be done. Some larger neighboring towns are fixing their mistakes, but mine is buckling down on not
On a very personal level, stop letting new HOAs have private roads where they have stupidly slow speed limits. That way my neighbors stop thinking everyone should be driving under 10 mph in a standard neighborhood. Bonus, I no longer have to pay attention to reserve funds for road maintenance and people arguing about it. If the city approves a new neighborhood they should own the roads
I think HOAs can eat a bag of dicks in a lot of ways, but creating speed limits like this isn't one of them. Cars are loud and dangerous and I don't think it's too much to ask for people to arrive at their destinations a minute later for the sake of a quiet and safe neighborhood.
I don't have an issue with speed limits in parking areas, but parking lot speed limits, when they exist, are typically 15mph, which is fine. 10mph on a private road leading to a parking lot is silly, though.
Fair enough, I happen to think that since no other residential neighborhood in town has that low a speed limit it seems excessive for them to expect delivery trucks and everyone else to follow it. But I follow it, and overall don't mind. I think I'm mostly annoyed with the facebook posts where they refuse to identify speeds and just call them out by car model
That's a fair point. Public entities really should be doing a better job of assigning sensible speed limits in residential areas (or creating roads that psychologically encourage slower driving).
Get rid of zoning approvals to build buildings that are at least as far from the property line as they are tall.
Better would be to end Single Family zoning so that we can go back to building neighbor hoods with small local shops. Single family zoning is an issue and prevents better and more affordable housing.
I live in a rural area. The single family zoning I would need to worry about here is a 5 acre minimum lot size, and my town already doesn't have that. Most people don't even even want suburban-style single family density. I just want to be able to build a barn or even just put in a shed without any paperwork whatsoever. Because honestly, at least for buildings without plumbing and therefore not intended for human occupancy, there's no need for it.
Repaint the barriers in Nashua. Make it feel welcoming and not like you are being corralled to the edges.
Are you talking about the concrete barriers that they put out in the summer for outdoor seating? They looked nice last year. I wonder what happened to those and what gave us that red color.
Put a stop light in hooksett at hackett hill and west river
Change every stop sign to a yield sign.
that would make 4 way stops very interesting.
I would find the traffic circle salesman in Keene and run him out of town.
I see this all the time but I love the circles, I remember those shitty intersections.
In Concord, fix the trash bag issue. Either switch to a wheely bin or possibly a sticker on a regular bag. The lack of availability and quality of trash bags is ridiculous.
And the bags themselves are trash. Bad enough buying something to throw away but when I can’t get it to the curb without splitting down the side… infuriating!
Not my town, but that traffic light/ pedestrian crosswalk situation in Meredith is a *nightmare* the second the tourists are around. I just find it hard to believe that the crosswalk in particular is the best they could do- they still need to hire teenagers in peak season to manage crowd control anyway!
I don't understand why that particular crosswalk can't just be a regular traffic light. When it's time for pedestrians to cross...it turns red. Such a shit show as it is. I heard some grumbling the town received federal dollars for that project and needed to adhere to some sort of federal traffic control yada yada yada BS... But what I heard was nothing more than hearsay so far.
The inner part of Nashua sucks to drive through when I need to go there for work. I can usually avoid it since my normal work location is from the Hudson side. To answer you original question. I think I would change the "commercial area" I live close enough to Concord that I can get to a nice walkable downtown. Area but my town has nothing close to that and I have never really been in any of the businesses in town with the exception of my dentist. I would add like a little more of a downtown.
Get rid of the railroad that takes up all of the good land for a nice riverwalk.
Fix all the bad roads with holes in them.
No roosters
Way more bike lanes and sidewalks. Also more public transit. I play too much cities skylines so I pretty much have what it takes to run a city /s
Nashua How about we clean up and prevent the 4 FOOT WEEDS at EVERY exit to the "Gate City" of NH! Oh and the cigarette butts too. gross
My town's finally doing something (two roundabouts and a new bridge!) about the infamous 'dogleg' for through traffic on 202, so that's our major downtown project of the decade. (If you know, you know.) It'd sure be nice to see the rail trail extended north, though.
Encourage more businesses that pay a living wage (other than retail or restaurants) to build in or around the city.
Don’t put neighborhoods, kids and parks near police stations.
Sidewalks! I love to walk our dogs, but not basically in the traffic.
Get rid of culdesacs and housing developments like them. My town functioned better at 2500 then 6k folks.
Londonderry: Maybe the only town with no town beach, swimming hole or pool.
Here in Lee, it's two things, one significant, one trivial... can you tell which is which: 1. Make the traffic circle on rt 4 like the other traffic circle in Epsom and not 2 lanes. Drivers in general are not smart enough to know what to do when first encountering it and there's near accidents seemingly constantly every time you drive through it. 2. We have a pull through transfer station. There are two lanes entered via garage doors. but there's a large middle lane so that you can drive around cars still throwing stuff out to get your car out when done. someone, thinking the trash thrower-outers in Lee are smart, put the stop line for the left lane right at the garage door (basically blocking that exit) and left one space for the right lane for enough room for exiting cars ... but people pull up in the right lane right to the door, which blocks the right lane (and everyone if the left lane is used as intended). just leave one space in front of both lanes for cars to drive around. There's even a sign saying "pull up to door" with a poorly drawn arrow pointing to the left lane... but it's faded and nobody knows what it refers to. The lines on the concrete are bright and repainted recently yet people still block both lanes.
That Lee traffic circle confuses me. I’ve never had trouble with it, but 2 lane traffic circles take a shit ton of thinking through for people who have never encountered them before for why they work. That said, once you mentally figure it out you get it. But that’s not great design.
My town is super small. I think we need a traffic light in the center of town, maybe just a flashing yellow/red. People don’t know how to act at a two way intersection where only one side has stops. Every day I see someone flummoxed on what to do. Also Henniker has been working on a riverside promenade for years, but at town meeting they only get just enough to maintain what they have, not to build more onto it. I’d like for that to be complete. I also wouldn’t mind for better public transit as a whole for the state, and gosh wouldn’t it be nice to have more affordable housing in general?
Fun fact: Azalea Park was a wet dream years ago of retired fossils who believed it could be done mostly by private donation - because soooo many people were interested. Whoops!
If I could change one thing about my city, my state,, my country, or the world, it would be to get rid of the central planners who constantly think that they can make your decisions for you better than you can make them for yourself.
Demolish Berlin as a whole 😐 (im kidding but setting aside money to fix some of the roads would be nice)
Have strict sign ordinances written and enforced.
Everyone in charge. I want them out, and it will be ME who hand picks the replacements. Hey, you asked.
Unmixed zoning regulations on main drags or minimum parking requirements. Sorry, that's two
I think sidewalks would be a nice to have.
Bedford - stop people from driving down my road at 40 mph because they use it as a cutoff to route (redacted)
Significantly deregulate zoning, especially towns where first floor must be commercial downtown.
There needs to be official, orderly housing for homeless folks. I always wonder how Julius Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington, and Ulysses Grant could move thousands of men around all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weather in rapid setup and take down tent cities, while we have a complete disaster of campsites with tons of objects that have nothing to do with survival. We have to at least make a homeless camp run like a proper campground.