Recent traffic backups on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven are due to come to an end Friday as paving and other construction work wraps up, Tisbury town officials said this week.
Off-season work on the the $6 million Massachusetts Department of Transportation-sponsored project has been under way since 2020.
Tisbury town administrator John (Jay) Grande said final pavement striping is estimated to conclude Friday. Minor work will extend into next week, with June 24 as the newly scheduled end date for the project, Mr. Grande said.
Mr. Grande also confirmed that construction on the road would start again in the fall, sometime after Labor Day. The next phase of work will include new utility poles, which will allow both Verizon and Comcast to extend their services on the Island, he said.
For business owners along the path of construction, this spring has been an exercise in patience.
“I beg for the rain these days,” said Chris Pantlanoe of Rocco’s Pizza in the Tisbury Marketplace. “Because it means the construction doesn’t happen and I have business.”
On days when the sun is shining, and the calm of the harbor is punctuated by a busy construction site and a long line of stalled cars, Mr. Pantlanoe has had virtually no lunch rush.
“When they are [paving the road] I have a 45-minute wait just to get around the road, and when that happens I have no business,” he said.
It’s been the story for months as Mass DOT works to improve road quality and add bike lanes to the busy thoroughfare. In order to mitigate traffic, construction organizers have usually staggered traffic at multiple points on the road with the help of a state police officer directing traffic.
Alternatively, if one side of the road is being repaved, the road has been transformed into a one-way street, setting up detours to create a loop with County Road and Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.
Weather conditions have caused delays — roads cannot be paved while it is raining — along with the decision by construction organizers to pause work on weekends so as to not add to the traffic congestion that comes with an increased number of tourists.
Road improvement project began in 2020 and will resume in the fall.
— Mark Alan Lovewell
“With the recent weather, I was most interested in seeing if they will be able to get all the work done before [June 24th],” Mr. Grande said. “I would think they would as they have a whole other week to do it.”
Mike Holtham, the general manager of the Net Result fish market, said he is thankful for the upgrades to the road. He cited increased pedestrian traffic from Vineyard Haven, crediting improved sidewalks and a new crosswalk for the influx of new customers.
“We’re looking forward to the construction wrapping up. It has definitely impacted us but the road looks great, and the work definitely had to be done,” Mr. Holtham said. “It has had its ups and downs but it had to be done.”
For Darby Patterson, an employee of Martha’s Closet, as well as a part-time delivery driver for Morrice Florist, the congestion was determined by the traffic patterns around the construction, not the construction itself.
“How construction affects you depends on who is directing traffic,” she said. “Any inconvenience usually wasn’t the construction process, it was how they directed traffic around it.”
While often frustrating, that increased traffic never posed a real impediment during flower deliveries.
“It didn’t really impact my route, apart from sometimes making me grumpy.”
