Main Street Is
Going Two-Way.
Were You Asked?

Main Street in Hyannis has been one-way for decades. That is about to change. The Town’s “Great Streets” project will convert Main Street, South Street and parts of Ocean Street and Old Colony Road to two-way traffic. On October 1 the Town announced that “Construction for the project will commence within the next few weeks.”

The same day, residents and merchants filled the Town Council’s public comment period. A petition asking for a full public discussion before the work locks in was reported at more than 960 signatures. This page lays out the record so you can judge for yourself.

What Is Being Built

• In the Town’s words: “the one-way stretches of Main Street, South Street, Ocean Street and Old Colony Road will be converted to two-way travel.”
• A new roundabout at Six Points, where South Street, Ocean Street and Old Colony Road meet.
• Several traffic signals replaced with stop signs.
• Shared-use paths on North Street and Old Colony Road.
• The Town says Main Street parking is kept, “for a net gain of parking.”
• The Town’s schedule: two-way traffic “at the earliest by Summer 2027.” A town planner told the Planning Board in June: “Fall of 2027. Would bring to summer season 28.”
• The Cape Cod Times reported in September that the contract went to Tasco Construction, and that “The town has not publicly provided the exact date for Main Street changes.”

Who Voted, and On What

We read the Town Council’s minutes for ten meetings between 2022 and 2026. These are the votes we found:

Those are votes to accept grant money and to alter one intersection. In the ten meetings we read, we did not find a vote on the question itself: should Main Street be two-way? On July 16, 2026 the “final presentation” of the project came to the Council as a communication. The minutes record no vote.

At that July meeting one councilor went on the record against it. The minutes say Councilor Lisa DaLuz of Precinct 8 “did not support the two-way Main Street and South Street project.”

What Residents Told the Town

The Town’s October 1 release says the project was shaped by “feedback from local residents and merchants received through a robust community-input process.” So we read the input. There were two rounds of it.

Summer 2022: the Town asked what you wanted

In the summer of 2022 the Town and the Cape Cod Commission put a map online and asked residents to mark any transportation problem or idea, anywhere in Barnstable. People could drop a point or draw a route and say what they wanted. The comment period ran through August 31, 2022. The plan that came out of it says: “A total of 504 points and/or routes were inputted into the public comment tool in Summer 2022.”

The Commission still publishes those entries. On October 5 we downloaded both layers: 260 points and 243 routes, 503 entries. We read every one.

• Not one of the 503 asks to make Main Street, South Street or any other downtown Hyannis street two-way.
• Two entries use the words at all. One asks for “Two-Way Transit on CCCC road,” a bus route at the community college. The other describes a winding “2-way road” on Huckins Neck where cars speed.
• Three entries bring up one-way streets, each as a way to calm traffic on a neighborhood road. None is in downtown Hyannis.
• What did people ask for downtown? Crosswalks and safer pedestrian crossings, far more than anything else. Then all-way stop signs, bike lanes and shared paths. Two entries asked the Town to go the other direction entirely: “Close Main St to Vehicles.”

The plan built from those comments does list a “Downtown Hyannis Two-Way Conversion.” Its appendix says where each project came from. Most rows say “CS Needs Assessment.” The two-way conversion row says “Great Streets Downtown Hyannis: A Walkable Heart for Cape Cod”: the consultants’ study, not the residents’ map.

In fairness: the map did not ask about two-way traffic. It asked for improvements anywhere in town, and it closed on August 31, 2022, before the Great Streets process opened with its kickoff meeting on November 15, 2022. So these comments do not show that residents opposed the change. They show that when the Town asked residents what downtown needed, nobody asked for this.

Winter 2022–23: the Town asked about two-way

Then came Great Streets. The Town held a public design week in November 2022 and took dot-votes on the proposals in January 2023. Its own Final Report prints the result for each street. For Main Street:

That was the worst result of any street in the table. South Street, by comparison, drew 24 to approve and 16 against. The same report summarizes the public meeting this way: “While some participants expressed concerns about two-way traffic flow, most supported its return.” The report does not explain how both can be true.

The report prints the tallies. We could not find attendance counts for those meetings, or the number of people who answered the online survey, in the report or on the Town’s project page.

The Other Side of the Record

It would not be honest to leave this out. Before October, the people who came to the Council to speak about the project mostly spoke for it.

• The Hyannis Main Street Business Improvement District is on record in favor. Its executive director told the Council in July that she “supported the Great Streets projects and turning Main Street and South Street into two-way streets.”
• In November 2023, four speakers supported two-way traffic and one opposed it.
• The June 2026 public hearing on the roundabout drew no speakers.
• The Planning Board recommended the roundabout order 7 to 0.

So the question is not whether the Town held meetings. It did. The question is whether a change this large to the center of Hyannis should go ahead on grant votes alone, when not one of 503 comments on the Town’s own map asked for it, the Town’s own count of residents ran two to one against the Main Street piece, and hundreds of people are now asking to be heard.

What It Costs

The Town’s July 2026 funding slide lists these sources for construction: a $1,800,000 MassWorks grant, about $2,000,000 in state Chapter 90 road money, $925,000 from the Town’s Capital Improvement Plan, a $500,000 Complete Streets grant and about $700,000 in federal block-grant money. That adds up to roughly $5.9 million for construction, before design.

Make Your Voice Heard

• Thursday, October 15, 6:00 pm: Town Council, Town Hall, 367 Main Street, Hyannis. Nothing about the project or the petition was on the agenda as of October 4. Public comment is open to any resident.
• Tuesday, October 13: special election for the empty Council seats in Precincts 1 and 13.
• Late October: an Open Meeting of the Voters at Barnstable High School, called over the Hyannis shelter move. See the date note.
• Three of the thirteen Council seats are empty today. Find your councilor on our Your Representatives page.

Want to help? Get involved with the committee, or reach out directly.

Sources: Town of Barnstable, Great Streets project page; Town release, Oct. 1, 2026; Great Streets Final Report (2023), Figure 7; Cape Cod Commission, Barnstable Complete Streets public comment map (Point Comments and Route Comments layers, downloaded Oct. 5, 2026), Town of Barnstable Complete Streets Prioritization Plan, September 2023 and comment period notice; Town Council minutes of Nov. 16, 2023, Oct. 23, 2025, June 25, 2026 and July 16, 2026; Planning Board minutes, June 8, 2026; Town funding slides, July 16, 2026; Cape Cod Times, Sept. 2026; Hyannis News, Oct. 1, Oct. 2 and Oct. 3, 2026. The signature count is the petition organizers’ own figure, as Hyannis News reported it. Minutes of the October 1 meeting were not yet posted when this was written. The count of the 503 map comments was first posted publicly by a Barnstable resident in early October; we downloaded the Commission’s data and checked it ourselves.