Luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers New England has broken ground on Eastside
Commons, a 170,000-square-foot, 83-unit luxury condominium project off Gano
Street on Providence’s East Side, adding a new entrance off the busy street.
An entrance has been cut at the far west side of the project, according to Skip Kelleher, vice president of Toll Brothers’ New England division, which will be the only possible complication of traffic in the area. The entrance is located near an old train tunnel that headed into downtown.
In order to minimize impact, cars can only take a right to enter the Eastside Commons if they are traveling north on Gano, coming off Route 195 and taking a right onto Gano, he said, to minimize traffic problems.
“What we didn’t want was cars coming from the other direction making a left into the property from that point,” he said. “If they’re coming from the other direction, they will make a left onto East George Street and a right into the project. That way people won’t be coming out onto Gano during peak traffic times.”
The foundation has been poured for one of the buildings and the other is moving into the structural steel phase, according to another Toll Brothers official. The project is west of the Eastside Marketplace plaza at One Wayland Avenue.
The one-way, right-turn-only entrance has already been cut, Kelleher said, and has been fenced off. The intersection at East George Street and Wayland Avenue will allow two-way traffic in and out of the condo community. This intersection’s traffic flow will not change because of the project.
Toll Brothers received approval for its traffic plans about two years ago, Kelleher said, and the two entrances and exits were the original plans submitted to the planning department. According to Thomas Deller, city planner, the major concern, he said, was adding more cars to the already crowded Gano Street.
“We had no problem with people coming in (to the property) on Gano; it was people coming out onto Gano that we were concerned with,” he said.
Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers conducted a traffic analysis to determine the impact, if any, on the surrounding businesses, residential areas and specifically to Eastside Marketplace.
“The reflection (of the analysis) was that there would be an impact on surrounding neighborhoods,” Deller said, but nothing that would pose a danger to public-safety vehicles trying to enter the Commons or surrounding neighborhoods, and nothing that would drastically change the flow of traffic in the area.
“Every development causes traffic but it doesn’t necessarily cause enough traffic that the world stops working,” he said. “There is going to be more traffic and it will be more congested at times.”
Kelleher said the traffic study indicated that for the number of expected trips in and out of the project, the additional residents would not adversely impact traffic.
“Our market is more toward a move-down buyer,” he said. “Our buyer profile is a semi-retired person who doesn’t have to leave during peak traffic times each day.”
Purposely, there is no access through the marketplace to Eastside Commons.
