Politics & Government

Truck Traffic Irritating Oak St. Residents

The late night trucks and speeding down the straight and wide Oak Street have irritated residents for years and now, new calls from residents to address the problem has the town looking for solutions.

“For some time the people have been pretty vocal about the trucks that get them out of bed at 3 a.m,” DPW chief Roger Hill told the selectmen on July 23.

Currently, trucks from the industrial park in Mansfield use Oak Street to get to Route 95. With few roads that could handle the large trucks in Foxborough, the most likely new route would send the vehicles to Route 95 via Route 106 to Route 140 in Mansfield.

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Residents have requested that the town perform a study for a Heavy Commercial Vehicle Exclusion request that would be submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. The exclusion would likely be a partial one to ban trucks from driving down the road overnight.

To get the ban, the study would have to show that at least eight percent of traffic on the road is from trucks.

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According to Hill, the study has been attempted twice in the past with MassDOT rejecting the request for the study both times.

So far, there seem to be few solutions to the issue. Even if the study was done and the street got the exclusion, there is still the issue of moving the problem to another neighborhood. 

“I think we’ll fail again because it’s tough to get an exclusion anyways. You have to provide a suitable alternate route,” Hill said.

In the meantime, the town hopes to do their own informal study to see if they have a chance at qualifying for an exclusion at the suggestion of selectmen chairman Mark Sullivan.


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