Rochester’s Mount Read Boulevard could be politely described as a mess. It’s a vast gray landscape that serves as an industrial highway with scant greenery to help give it any semblance of color or life. And that’s when the weather is nice. Winters are worse, with heavy snowfall and plow traffic pushing up cold mounds on the sidewalks — in the spots that have sidewalks at all, that is.

Luckily, all that could change. On Thursday, Mar. 20, the city held an expo at 1850 Mt. Read Blvd. in order to showcase proposed plans to fix up the five-mile strip from Buffalo to Stone roads. Those plans include a slimming down of the boulevard’s current six lanes to a tight four in order to make room for more plant life, namely trees and grass. Plus, bicycle lanes would be added and sidewalks would be expanded as part of the plan.

This is good news for residents like Deborah Tucker, who’s among the 15,000 people who live in the neighborhoods off of Mt. Read, RochesterHomepage.net reports. Tucker doesn’t drive, so she often braves the busy traffic of the road in order to get to where she needs to go, often by using the service roads. Added sidewalks could provide Tucker the walking paths she requires.

Winters on Mt. Read (and in Rochester in general) tend to be extremely perilous. Eighteen-wheeler trucks have also historically had troubles navigating the icy winter terrain on Mt. Read. Plus, passenger vans have statistically higher chances of rolling over during sudden and unexpected turns, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fixing the road may help to prevent these kinds of accidents from occurring in the first place.

Of course, not everyone is on board with the plans. Jim Niger, who runs a local business at Mt. Read and Lyell Avenue, worries that shaving off two lanes is going to cause large backups in traffic. However, Mt. Read currently services 18,000 vehicles a day, which is less than its designs had initially called for. Still, an overhaul of this magnitude is likely to take 20 years to complete for a total cost of $60 million — obviously a high-stakes investment.

This initial groundwork is the city’s attempt at a preemptive plan in order to focus on fixing Mt. Read, which is going to be in need of some serious fixes in the coming years. Since the State of New York actually owns the road, the city wants to be able to have a plan in place that state lawmakers will like, though any final legislation would have to be entirely approved by the state.

The feedback received at last week’s expo will help officials from the State Department of Transportation, Monroe County and the Town of Greece reach a final consensus on what the plans for the Mt. Read Blvd Corridor will be, WHEC reports. Stay tuned for those plans to be announced some time in May.