Drive down Surfside Road toward the beach this month and you will still hit four stop signs at the corner of Miacomet Road and Surfside Drive, the same corner that used to let you roll straight through if you were headed south. If you have not driven that stretch since spring, the change might catch you off guard the first time. If you have, you already know the drill: stop, look three ways, wait your turn.
The town installed the signs weeks before Town Meeting could vote on whether to make them permanent. This sequence—pilot first, vote later—offers a useful look at how traffic changes can unfold on this island, beginning with a data set and a Select Board meeting.
What Actually Changed at the Corner
On the morning of April 6, 2026, the Town of Nantucket converted the intersection of Surfside Road at Miacomet Road and Surfside Drive from a two-way stop to an all-way stop, running it as a one-month pilot. The town's own notice on the change was blunt about the trade it was making: drivers on Surfside Road would see more delay, while drivers turning off Miacomet Road and Surfside Drive would finally get some relief from a corner that had made them wait, sometimes dangerously long, for a gap in Surfside Road traffic.
Mike Burns, the town's Transportation Program Manager, put the purpose plainly when the pilot was announced: the goal was to see whether the change would more safely accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders while limiting the impact on the properties around the intersection. That is a narrower goal than it sounds. The town was not asking whether four-way stops are good in general. It was asking whether this specific corner, on this specific road, could absorb one without breaking down during peak season.
The Crash Numbers Behind the Decision
The case for the pilot did not come out of nowhere. DPW Director Drew Patnode told the Select Board in March that the town had partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the engineering firm Jacobs to evaluate the intersection, and the conclusion was that a four-way stop was warranted. The reason was specific: between 2021 and 2023, the intersection saw seven reported motor vehicle crashes, and six of those were angle crashes, the type of collision that happens when two vehicles cross paths at a corner rather than rear-ending one another. Angle crashes are exactly the failure mode a four-way stop is designed to reduce, since it forces every approach to stop and negotiate the intersection in sequence instead of one road having priority over the other.
That is a small number in absolute terms. Seven crashes over three years will not make a top ten list of Nantucket's most dangerous intersections. But for a corner that most Surfside residents cross multiple times a week, on the exact route that leads toward Miacomet Beach and Nobadeer Beach as well as Surfside itself, six angle crashes in three years is the kind of number that a DPW director takes to the Select Board rather than filing away.
The Trade Nobody Loves Saying Out Loud
Patnode framed the decision honestly rather than as a simple safety upgrade. As Nantucket Current reported, "I think this debate revolves around the weighing of the importance of traffic safety versus congestion," he told the board, and that framing matters because it acknowledges the pilot has a real cost. Burns, according to the same report, was more specific about what that cost would feel like, comparing the expected backup to a corner most Surfside drivers already know well: the Bartlett Road and Surfside Road intersection. His comparison was not reassuring so much as calibrating. It probably will not get that bad, he said, but it will be comparable, and that is genuinely the trade being made.
If you have ever sat through the queue at Bartlett and Surfside during a July afternoon, you know what that comparison is asking residents to accept. The town was telling people directly: this corner is going to get slower before it gets safer, and the question is whether that trade is worth it to you.
The Petition and the Pilot Timeline
The petition and the town’s pilot followed separate timelines. Island resident Walter Flaherty had already submitted a citizen's petition for the 2026 Annual Town Meeting warrant, Article 35, asking voters to install the stop signs permanently. That petition was filed before the town's own pilot was announced. By the time the Select Board met in March to approve the one-month trial, the pilot was underway while Flaherty's article sat on the warrant waiting for its turn on the floor.
The Finance Committee's response tells you how this looked from inside Town Hall. Rather than take a position for or against the article, the committee recommended taking no action on it, specifically because the town's plan to trial the stop signs was already moving forward regardless of what the article said. In other words, the pilot was underway before voters considered the petition. Voters would eventually get their turn to weigh in when Article 35 came up on the floor at the May 4 and 5 Annual Town Meeting, but the corner they would be voting on had already been running as a four-way stop for roughly four weeks by the time the gavel came down. Whatever happened in that room, the intersection residents were driving through every day had already changed.
The pilot and the petition followed different paths: the Select Board could test a traffic change while the warrant article awaited discussion at Town Meeting. If you are trying to predict how the next contested intersection on this island gets decided, watch the Select Board agenda, not just the warrant.
It is also worth remembering how few people actually cast that floor vote. The 2026 Annual Town Meeting drew 1,332 of Nantucket's 10,364 registered voters, a 13 percent turnout, for a warrant that included everything from the school budget to zoning changes to Article 35 itself. A corner that thousands of people cross every summer week was ultimately debated by a room that represented roughly one in eight registered voters on the island. That is not a criticism of the process. Nantucket's Town Meeting has never required a quorum, and low turnout on a Monday afternoon in early May is the norm, not the exception. It is simply a reminder that the traffic pattern you drive through today was shaped by a much smaller group of your neighbors than you might assume.
An informal Instagram poll run by Nantucket Current in early March, well before the pilot even started, found the neighborhood split close to down the middle: 53 percent in favor of the stop signs, 47 percent opposed. That is not a mandate in either direction. It is a fair snapshot of a corner where reasonable people who use it every day genuinely disagree about whether slower and safer beats faster and looser.
What This Means If You're Biking to the Beach This Month
None of this is abstract if Surfside is your neighborhood. The Surfside Road path, the paved multi-use route that starts at Nantucket High School on Surfside Road, is the most direct bike connection from mid-island out to Surfside Beach, and the same corridor also links riders to Miacomet Beach and Nobadeer Beach further down the South Shore. That means the intersection at the center of this whole debate sits almost exactly where a lot of daily bike traffic funnels toward the water. If you have been treating that corner as a rolling stop out of habit, this is the season to break that habit, whatever the technical status of the signs turns out to be by the time you read this.
The Wave's seasonal Surfside route is still running as of this writing, with buses leaving the Greenhound Building downtown every 40 minutes and continuing through September 13, so if you would rather skip the intersection altogether on a beach day, that is still an option until then. Massachusetts made the entire Wave system fare-free for the year, so there is no cost reason not to take it.
Whatever the final word on Article 35 turns out to be, the crash data behind the pilot is not going away, and neither is the basic trade Patnode named at the Select Board table. Surfside's corner at Miacomet and Surfside Drive is a small, specific example of how this island actually governs itself: cautiously, with real trade-offs named out loud, and with pilot projects sometimes underway before Town Meeting votes on whether to make them permanent. If you live here, that is worth knowing the next time the town tests a traffic change on your street before Town Meeting considers whether to make it permanent.
If you are weighing a move to this corner of the island, or already own here and want a clearer read on how Surfside's streets, beaches, and micro-markets actually function day to day, John McGarr can walk you through what local knowledge like this actually buys you. Get a Free Home Valuation to start the conversation.
