Natick’s 5-year roadway improvement plan, which Public Works updates the Select Board on annually, is never going to please everyone. The Engineering Division only has so many resources, and needs to dole them out in a way that makes sense fiscally and logistically, so that it isn’t just playing whack-a-hole with problem road conditions. But the plan does at least give residents and businesses a feel for when the roads in their neighborhood or where they travel often will be improved.
Roadway improvement has also been a topic intertwined with override discussions, as fewer funds for roads under a “no override” scenario has been raised by proponents of the proposed $7M override that voters will weigh in on at the March 25 election.
Executive Director of the DPW & Facilities Bill Spratt and Town Engineer Bill McDowell shared the latest on the roadway plan at the March 19 Select Board meeting (see about 20 minutes in to the recording).
Spratt explained that the DPW tries to schedule road improvements in the wake of water, gas and electric company work so that newly paved roads won’t get dug up again for a while.
The DPW is taking a new artificial intelligence-based approach to assessing road conditions, doing away with a more subjective method used in the past for establishing a pavement condition index (that method would, among other things, watch for “alligator cracking,” where the surface looks like alligator skin…). The new RMT system, which involved outfitting Natick vehicles with vibration sensors and cameras, lets the town proactively spot roads or segments that might need work—information is updated every night. The town should soon be posting its Natick 101 session on the DPW, and that includes more on the AI technology.
“We’re using technology to our advantage and it’s much cheaper,” Spratt says.
Natick has improved about 34 miles of roads—including sidewalks, ramps, curbs, etc.—over the past 10 years (roads have about 25-year life spans). The town gets roughly $1M a year in Chapter 90 funds from the state for us, plus typically about $2.5M via Town Meeting approval.
“We are getting almost to the tipping point where we can start doing more preventative maintenance as well as reconstruction to get our roads to last even longer,” Spratt said.
This South Natick street, where puddles become ponds, is on the 2026 listTwenty streets are on the schedule to be improved in 2025, and this includes Glen Road, which McDowell said “this winter, for whatever reason, appeared to explode.” Madonna Street is on the list too—that sounds “Borderline.” A few roads (Vernon, Curtis, others) were removed from this year’s list after the town learned gas pipe work would be happening over the summer. So the roadwork will be a little less centralized than usual in 2025.
Note that if you live on an unaccepted road, those not maintained by the town like the rest, Natick does have a newish process in place for converting unaccepted roads to accepted ones (look up which roads are unaccepted). Several unaccepted roads are going through the town’s review process now.
Looking ahead, the town will coordinate roadwork with the Rte. 9/27 interchange project so as not to cut off alternative routes.
The Select Board approved the roadway improvement plan, and this will allow the DPW to go out to bid soon on impending roadway work.
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I’ve noticed that in my neighborhood, repairs to Natick roads are of poor quality and prone to breakdown. The town waited until cold weather hit to repave Highland Street last Fall (never a good idea). The finishing work around manhole covers and the like was never completed. Mere months after paving, potholes have formed in the brand-new roadway. Likewise, Sawin Street was “repaired” a couple of years ago. Half the street was paved over (with the old blacktop left intact) and the other half was a “patch and pray” job — as if they ran out of time or blacktop in the middle of the project. Poor grading has resulted in gullies on the side of the road. Unfortunately, the cure often seems worse than the disease when it comes to Natick road “improvements.” I love Natick, but the poor quality of both Natick roads and Natick road repairs are by far my top complaint.