CUMBERLAND – Truck traffic on North Attleboro Road has gotten out of control, say residents, causing constant noise, degradation of the road, and a major safety issue.
Resident Brien Rylander said he’s lived here for the past five years, and while Cumberland is a great town to live in overall, speeding trucks that are loud and hog the road have greatly diminished residents’ daily quality of life.
Rylander mounted motion-activated hunting cameras on the poles in front of his home, and for the times he analyzes from about 6:15 a.m. to 4 p.m., the cameras often show an average of five large trucks coming through per hour.
He said the town absolutely needs to be proactive and get ahead of a situation that’s only going to get worse. Numerous companies have opened or grown in the immediate area, he said, and when the 662,500-square-foot The Cubes at Plainville warehousing facility comes online in nearby Plainville, traffic studies show a huge increase in associated traffic. Average weekday traffic to and from the facility from various companies is expected to approach 1,100, he said, so if even 5 percent of those come this way, that’s another 50 trips per day.
Rylander said everyone can debate all day about who is responsible for which trucks and how many there are, but the bottom line is there are many companies contributing to this situation.
“I don’t care where they’re coming from or going to, they shouldn’t be on this road,” he said.
District 4 Town Councilor Jodi Harrington-Sweet is working with Rylander and others as she also seeks to get a handle on the situation. She told The Local Insider that she agrees wholeheartedly that this shouldn’t be for trucks.
“It’s basically now a shipping route,” she said.
Harrington-Sweet proposed an ordinance that was on the council agenda for this week related to streets where commercial vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds are prohibited unless their drivers are making local deliveries. That change, which would add North Attleboro Road to a list that includes Carpenter Street, Cowell Drive, Desmarais Street, Homestead Road, Highland Road, Legion Avenue, Myrtle Street, and a portion of Paine Road, was to be put on hold.
Harrington-Sweet said she needs to get more information from the town’s Highway Department on what the asphalt surface on North Attleboro Road is meant to handle.
The marketing materials for nearby warehousing facilities discuss direct access to Route 495, she added, so why are truck drivers “nonstop” driving down these residential roads?
Harrington-Sweet said she doesn’t necessarily agree with Chief Matthew Benson’s assertion that closing off truck traffic on this road will push it somewhere else in town, because she doesn’t really see another logical way for them to go. If, “god forbid,” drivers ever go down Reservoir Road or Sumner Broad Road, they’ll never do it again, she asserted.
According to Harrington-Sweet, her own street, Hillside Road, has a rule against thru-trucking. She said side roads are already torn up, and she often sees pieces of asphalt flying up from large SUVs. Large trucks are so much worse for road conditions, she said, especially during times of year when temperatures are fluctuating wildly.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to pay to resurface this road if it’s not meant for that,” she said. “Let’s just cut it off.”
The councilor representing the district in the northeast corner of town said few changes have been made to the town’s truck routes ordinances since the 1980s. She said the town isn’t hostile to trucks, but it’s reasonable to add some common-sense changes, “especially when you’re seeing such a massive increase in traffic.”
Rylander says the impacts out-of-control truck traffic are many and diverse, including a recent truck taking out a telephone pole and knocking electric power out for the neighborhood.
There is no reason, he said, that Cumberland should be allowing drivers coming from companies in Wrentham, Plainville, and North Attleboro to keep taking the “scenic shortcut,” especially since more than half of them speed “and don’t give two hoots” about the residents who live here.
Neighbors, he said, are now communicating regularly on this topic, and he wishes more of them would raise their voices.
“It’s a big safety issue,” he said, noting the instance where he saw two truck drivers unable to pass each other because of the narrowness of the half-mile-long road. One driver had to be traveling at least 50 mph, he said.
Rylander said he purchased the cameras to prove what he’s claiming. An officer who sits here for 20 minutes in the middle of the day often won’t see anything out of the ordinary, he said, but when you’re capturing every passing vehicle during work hours, it proves that he’s not making it up.
