There’s hardly a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian in Easton who doesn’t have a spot in town that drives them nuts — the slow lights at Five Corners, the sidewalk gaps on Port Street, or the nerve-wracking dash across Route 50 or the Parkway. Getting around town just isn’t as easy as it should be.
The good news, according to Town Engineer Rick Van Emburgh, is that many of these problem areas are finally on the fix-it list for 2026 and 2027. The work is being guided by Easton’s new Complete Streets Design Manual, a roadmap that tells the town to design streets for everyone — walkers, cyclists, wheelchair users, and drivers — not just fast-moving traffic.
In simple terms, the manual lays out how Easton’s streets should look and function going forward: where sidewalks go, how wide lanes should be, how crossings are marked, and how to make routes feel safer and more connected. It’s a shift toward treating people on foot and bike as full users of the road, not afterthoughts.
In our Spy interview with Rick, we talked about what this means on the ground — from long-awaited sidewalks on Washington and Port Streets to possible roundabouts at tricky intersections and better crossings along Route 50. If all goes as planned, some of Easton’s most frustrating pinch points could start looking a lot different by late 2026.
This video is approximately eight minutes in length.
Mary Smith says
Rick deserves a lot of credit for making Easton safer for people. He’s improving the system we have, and he’s doing it well. The challenge is that the system itself forces the entire county to drive into Easton for almost every basic need. Easton’s draft Comprehensive Plan doesn’t address that structural problem. It advocates for all future growth in the town while assuming that villages and rural communities will remain permanently frozen. That approach guarantees heavier traffic, more congestion, more fatalities, and more demand on the same corridors Rick is trying to stabilize.
A realistic plan would openly acknowledge that Talbot County’s villages need local services and growth to reduce the pressure on Easton, lessen miles driven, and improve safety countywide. Rick is doing his best to manage the consequences, but the long-term fix requires town and county planning that distributes everyday needs more evenly, instead of turning Easton into an urban, congested, and air-polluted city.