The New Walmart, cont'd

This is an exit from the new Walmart onto McKeon Road.

Let's hope they don't allow left turns into that intersection. It's bad enough as it is with the train tracks, large amounts of traffic waiting to take a left onto Blackstone River Road, and the gridlock that occurs from the school one block away.

This will be the only exit out of the new Walmart that doesn't dump traffic out onto the other end of Blackstone River Road via Tobias Boland Way, however. So, anyone headed toward the four corners area will definitely want to take a left out of this exit.

In other words... any townies who don't live on the east side of Worcester.

This intersection of McKeon and Blackstone River Road is where all the resurfacing and rebuilding of BR Road begins.

I figured they wouldn't be working there on a Sunday, so after posting earlier this morning about this project, I took a spin over there with my camcorder and shot a bunch of hi-def video.

All these pictures are screen caps of the video I shot. If I have enough time and a minimum of upload glitches, maybe I can slap together a YouTube clip of the whole thing.

As I drove around the village doing this, I kept picturing the possible traffic patterns for Walmart customers coming and going from different directions. It's really a taxi driver thing, since I'll have to figure the shortest routes in and out of there when the meter's running.

The resurfacing extends onto a short portion of Greenwood Street from this intersection where it begins, and where Blackstone River Road takes a turn to the left.

I did my best to imagine what the decorative crosswalk treatments, ornamental street lights, and spruced up facades might do to lure Walmart shoppers to stop and do some more shopping or dining in the Quinsig Village commercial district... as opposed to just getting the hell out of the traffic jams I find it very difficult to imagine won't be the area's signature, once the leviathan box store opens.

But I was wrong about the mess I foresaw in the reconfiguration of Washington Square, so I can always hope that this won't be too bad at all.

Once you get past the railroad tracks on Blackstone River Road, the construction becomes more intense.

Instead of merely scarifying the top layer of old pavement, this is where they tore out the whole road and re-graded the underlying roadbed.

This is expensive work.

I can't help but wonder who's paying for it, and wonder even more why that information isn't easily found.

But it's not born out of any particularly strong feelings regarding Walmart. Despite taking various Walmart employees to and from work in the cab and hearing how they're treated like shit, or the fact of Walmart paying out huge class action settlements for shitting on their employees, or the horror stories of smaller towns whose whole local economy was destroyed by Walmart playing checkers with these stores... or any of the behind the scenes machinations of TIF's and tax breaks and all sorts of heavy handed dealing they've managed to pull off with various municipalities over the years... despite all that, I have to admit that I still occasionally buy stuff at area Walmarts in Leicester, Oxford, and Westboro from time to time.

Here's where the new road construction for Blackstone River Road ends.

This is the corner of an un-named street that apparently goes all the way over to Wiser Ave. I've never tried to go through there, since I never looked at it on the map until I got back home a little while ago.

Since there's no street sign, I always thought it was just a long driveway to some business buried in there...

If it is a through way, though, it's probably going to see a huge increase in traffic when the Walmart opens.

Once it does open, though, I believe that the bulk of the traffic in and out of there will eventually end up getting onto Route 146. The trouble with going through the village is that it'll just take longer than going that extra highway speed mile.

I took a spin over to Lochwan Street to get this shot.

There are probably other spots where you can get a full shot of this construction site, but this one ought to suffice.

Looking across Millbury Street and Route 146 and using a little bit of telephoto zoom, this shot gets what every other shot I've tried on the cellphone camera has never been able to get.

When you're there, when you actually drive down Lochwan Street, though, the construction site for the new Walmart takes up the major scope of your view.

Actually, it's so obtrusive a view from that street that I had to laugh a few weeks ago when I picked up a customer on Gibbs Street and asked him if he was looking forward to the new Walmart opening. His response? "Is THAT what that's going to be?"

Maybe this big sign placed right in the middle of the whole thing confused him...

Heh. It certainly confuses the hell out of me!