The new Culver’s location in McCordsville is under construction, and town officials have concerns with traffic on alleys surrounding the new business.
The main concern is with South Railroad Street, the one-lane road that crosses behind Culver’s and Indiana Street, which would be unable to handle the overflow traffic from the business. While several solutions were presented by McCordsville Town Manager Tim Gropp, Director of Planning and Building Ryan Crum and Town Engineer Mark Witsman, none were without issues.
“There are no good options here,” Gropp said.
The best option, according to Gropp, Crum and Witsman, speaking on behalf of the town’s staff, would be a right-of-way acquisition in order to widen Railroad Street as it curves to the south and align it with Center Street, but this would require the town acquiring that land through either a purchase or eminent domain. The widening of Railroad Street would also likely run into issues with utilities, some of which would have to be relocated if the town chose to go down this path. If the land cannot be acquired, the remaining options are to close and barricade the road or to widen one of the other alleyways as a “Band-Aid fix.”
Gropp said that town staff is currently advancing with the plan to widen Railroad Street and will advance until they reach a road block, but that they will need guidance from the town council on what to do if and when that road block is hit.
“Council’s going to have to tell us [what the backup plan should be] because we’re pursuing what we think is the most logical way to get this done, what makes the most sense,” Gropp said. “That’s ultimately going to have to be a council decision, not a staff decision.”
For Indiana Street, the plan is to close it and eventually remove the stone that makes up the alleyway to ensure drivers don’t try to use it. There were also disputes between two different surveyors over where the streets and alleys of the area are actually supposed to be due to an apparent surveying error when the town was designed in which there were two different frames of reference used, one using the collective center line of the two railroad tracks that run to the north of Railroad Street and the other using the center line of just the northern track, which caused two historical surveys to be about eight feet off from one another. Witsman argued that the frame of reference which lines up with the current locations of the alleyways should be used since that’s what was actually used to construct the alleyways and noted that there are currently no legal disputes over using that frame of reference.
