Monumental redesign in Swampscott

SWAMPSCOTT – Police consider it the town’s most notorious place for fender benders and traffic jams. But beginning next week, the intersection of Burrill and Humphrey streets and Monument Avenue is finally going to change.”If you don’t make the right-hand turn off Burrill onto Monument, you’re going to have to go back up to the Monument rotary – that’s going to take some getting used to,” Swampscott Public Works Superintendent Gino Cresta said Tuesday.The project to re-configure the intersection began in 2012 when the Metropolitan Regional Planning Agency approached the town about whether it had any troublesome intersections, Cresta said. The Humphrey/Burrill/Monument juncture was an easy choice, and the agency presented the town’s Traffic Study Committee with three options, including a new rotary and set of lights.The committee favored a proposal to construct a new, raised triangular area in the street in front of Linscott Park. The area will act as a “rumble strip” and essentially provide Lynn-bound traffic on Humphrey Street with an exit (such as you might find on a highway) off Humphrey as the street turns along the shore.Take the “exit” and you will head down Burrill Street, passing Monument Avenue on your right.If approaching the intersection from Lynn, traffic making a left onto Monument Avenue and/or Burrill Street will have a designated path rather than the current opportunity to make a long hairpin turn as you wait for an opening in passing traffic. Traffic traveling on Burrill Street toward Marblehead will have to make a right at the corner of Burrill and Monument Avenue (the southbound side) to get onto Humphrey Street. If you miss that intersection, you have to turn left onto Monument Avenue northbound after the existing traffic island.Cresta said workers began cutting asphalt Wednesday and that the new traffic pattern will be put into place once the street signs arrive, probably by May 8. He estimated the project cost at between $10,000 and $15,000, with work completed by the department. He said that he did not know why the project had been delayed since 2012.