Chelsea’s fire chief asked the city this spring to take out a lane shift recently added to Broadway in front of the Mill Hill fire station, saying it put cars in the path of fire trucks leaving the building. The request went to the Traffic and Parking Commission, which answered with something narrower.
What the chief asked for
Chief John Quatieri wrote to the commission on April 8 asking it to review “the recently added lane shift and newly added right turn lane on Broadway in front of our Mill Hill Fire Station located at 883 Broadway.” The email was later attached to a commission report in the council’s June 8 packet, which is how it became public.
The station was already hard to get out of, according to the email. Apparatus “pull immediately onto the sidewalk then onto Broadway, in most cases, into oncoming traffic.” Since the new striping went in, the chief wrote, cars turning toward the station end up “at times directly into the path of an exiting truck.” The email calls that “a significant safety issue.”
The new turn lane was not working as a turn lane either. “Vehicles are consistently parking in this lane, making the lane shift configuration unnecessary,” the chief wrote, adding that the change had “unintended impacts on the surrounding businesses.” The proposal was to remove the lane shift, return that stretch of Broadway to a single lane of traffic, and restore the parking that was there before.
What the commission did
The commission met on May 5. Its report to the council, dated June 1, lists one action “based on the communication received by Fire Chief John Quatieri,” with the chief’s email attached. The action reads in full: “the removal of the dashed lines and the installation of a flexible post in front of the businesses at the corner of Broadway and Webster Avenue.”
The chief had asked for the lane shift to be removed and parking restored; the commission removed dashed lines and added a flexible post. The report does not explain the difference, describe what the dashed lines marked, or say whether the lane shift itself remains. The chief sits on the commission as one of its members, alongside the police chief, the public works commissioner, the housing and community development director and three resident members.
What is still open
Whether the change solved the problem at the station door is not in the record. The commission met again on September 2, and its actions from that meeting have not yet reached a council packet. The recording of that meeting has no captions, and we have not been able to review it.
The Mill Hill station matters beyond this block. At an April public safety committee discussion of a new fire station, the chief noted that the site of the planned battery storage facility falls in Mill Hill’s response area, not Central Station’s. The city is also looking for land for a new fire station. Downtown, a separate Broadway redesign is under way, and what is being built there is a different project on a different stretch of the road.