The Park Road improvement in the town of Batavia took more than a decade to come to fruition, largely for financial reasons, Town Supervisor Greg Post recalled.
Post was one of several town representatives at the recent American Public Works Association (APWA) awards in Rochester when the town received a Project of the Year Transportation Award.
With the Town Board in attendance and town highway and engineering representatives there, Post spoke on behalf of Batavia. The $4.1 million project, completed in the fall of 2022, includes speed bumps on either side of the main pedestrian crossing at Batavia Downs Gaming & Hotel and a 25-foot-wide raised table pedestrian crossing, rapid flash beacons on either side of crossing also alert drivers to the crossing. A 10-foot-wide sidewalk with trees create a promenade connecting the parking area to the main entrance, the APWA noted. Fourteen-foot-wide travel lanes with streetlights were also added to slow and control traffic access points and increase pedestrian visibility and safety.
“On behalf of the town of Batavia, we would like to thank the Genesee Chapter of the American Public Works Association for this award,” Post said during Thursday’s banquet. “This has been another great community project for us that has been in the making for 16 years. It exemplifies the ideology of the town — to always maintain true partnerships with all entities involved in a project from the start to the finish.
Post thanked several people and organizations, including the Genesee Transportation Council and state Department of Transportation “for sticking with us over the years helping us to keep this project alive and ultimately funded to a level that worked for the town. Although available funding continued to get postponed over the years, they continued to assist us and keep us in the running.”
The town supervisor also thanked every business and residential property in the project corridor.
“We had 100% landowner participation from start to finish on this project without a single property owner complaint during the entire construction period,” Post said.
“Many thanks to the construction team — CATCO, Ravi Engineering and town staff for handling such a small, yet busy, corridor — over 7,000 vehicles daily — so well throughout the entire construction project. The constant adjustment of traffic control to meet the needs of the community and the businesses was done better than we hoped and we couldn’t have asked for better workmanship and cooperation between the contractor, engineer and inspection on this project,” he said.
Post noted Batavia Downs was a key stakeholder in this project, not only providing the project’s gap funding, but meeting and working with the construction team every single day.
“They were able to operate their business at the same level as before construction began yet were available day and night to assist us whenever we needed them,” Post said.
The supervisor also thanked the emergency services providers within the corridor, who took much of the community safety coordination off the town’s plate to allow it to focus on construction.
What really makes the project, as well as every project and plan the town has undertaken, is the unimaginable benefit that it has realized by having in-house engineering, Post said.
“They don’t take away the need of private engineering resources, but rather foster an ideal and near-bulletproof project,” he said.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
