The Road Diet That Rebuilt Union Pier's Main Street

Five years ago, walking from Whistle Stop Grocery to Timothy's Restaurant on Red Arrow Highway meant walking on gravel shoulder with cars passing four lanes wide. There was no crosswalk worth trusting, no bench to wait at, and no reason for a business to bet on foot traffic that didn't exist. Today that same half-mile has a ten-foot paved path, a streetscaped intersection with bike racks and benches, and a run of businesses that opened specifically because people could get to them on foot. That's not a coincidence. It's the result of a deliberate, and at the time controversial, decision to shrink the highway.

Berrien County took Red Arrow Highway from four lanes to three between Community Hall Road and Berrien Street, adding a dedicated center left turn lane in place of what used to be two lanes of through traffic in each direction. Traffic engineers call this a road diet. In Union Pier, it came with new sidewalks, a ten-foot non-motorized path running the length of the 1.3-mile corridor, and a streetscaped intersection at Union Pier Road with decorative pavement, lighting, benches, and trash receptacles. A new public restroom and covered trailhead went in off Town Line Avenue, built jointly by New Buffalo and Chikaming Townships with picnic tables and bike racks of its own.

Why the road actually had to shrink

Cutting a highway from four lanes to three sounds like the kind of thing that slows everyone down for no reason, and that was the argument some residents made at the time. But the math behind a road diet is straightforward: four-lane roads invite passing and speeding because drivers assume they can dodge slower traffic, while a three-lane configuration with a center turn lane removes that incentive and forces a more predictable, walkable speed. Berrien County Road Department's Kevin Stack championed the redesign through years of pushback, and by the time the Red Arrow Trail expansion reached Lakeside in a June 2025 ribbon-cutting, the argument was largely settled.

"Kevin took the heat from all the road diet naysayers, and I think we can see that the world didn't come to an end when portions of Red Arrow Highway went to three lanes."

That's how one township official summed it up at the Lakeside ceremony, a project partnership that began back in 2018 between Chikaming Township, the Berrien County Road Department, and New Buffalo Township specifically for the Union Pier segment. What started as a single corridor rebuild has since grown into something the Friends of Berrien County Trails now frames as a county-wide vision: a continuous Lakeshore Route eventually linking every town along Lake Michigan from the Indiana line to Ludington.

What actually got built, block by block

It helps to know exactly what changed, because "streetscape improvements" can mean almost anything. Here it meant:

• A 1.3-mile stretch of Red Arrow Highway rebuilt with new sidewalks on both sides
• A dedicated ten-foot path for walkers and cyclists, separated from the traffic lane
• A center left turn lane replacing what used to be a second travel lane in each direction, cutting the road from four lanes to three
• A redesigned intersection at Union Pier Road with decorative pavement, bike racks, pedestrian lighting, and benches
• A new trailhead off Town Line Avenue with two single-occupancy public restrooms, landscaping, and picnic tables

The corridor project wrapped with a ribbon-cutting in late May, and the businesses along that stretch didn't wait to see if the path would get used before deciding to open.

The stretch you can actually walk now

If you live in Union Pier and haven't strung together everything within reach of that path, the list is longer than it looks from a car window. Starting from the Whistle Stop Grocery end and heading south along Red Arrow Highway, the path connects directly to Seedz Brewery, Mangata Brewing Co., Timothy's Restaurant, Red Arrow Roadhouse, Black Currant Bakehouse, Union Pier Social, and Red Arrow Ride, the beach shop that rents out bikes and paddleboards for the trail and the water both. None of these require a parking spot to reach if you already live within walking distance, which is the entire point of a corridor built this way.

The restaurant that bet on the sidewalk before it was busy

Union Pier Social is the clearest example of a business that read the corridor project as an opportunity rather than a disruption. Co-owner Declan Stapleton had been coming to Union Pier for more than fifteen years and owned a house there for twelve before he and his partners bought the building that used to be Frankie's Place. He described spending the summer before opening whitewashing walls and hanging shiplap, betting that the streetscape work happening outside would eventually bring people to the door. It did. The restaurant opened just after Labor Day to reviews Stapleton called uniformly positive, and he later credited the new Red Arrow Highway streetscape directly for making that bet pay off.

Harbor Country Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Kimberlee Wendt described the wave of new business as a genuine renaissance for the corridor, one built on the same infrastructure Union Pier Social opened into. Walking, biking, and outdoor exploration were already part of the town's identity, but the sidewalk gave that identity somewhere to actually happen.

The trail didn't stop at Union Pier

The corridor rebuild inside Union Pier was the proof of concept. What followed was an expansion the Friends of Berrien County Trails now calls the Red Arrow Trail, stretching from New Buffalo through Union Pier and Lakeside to Sawyer, celebrated with a ribbon-cutting in Lakeside on June 27, 2025, and a "Celebrate Red Arrow Trail Day" in Union Pier the following morning. The long-term plan connects that stretch south to New Buffalo, where it links to the Marquette Greenway toward Chicago, and north toward Stevensville, with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources currently designing the segment through Warren Dunes State Park.

Locally, that meant a few weeks of disruption this spring most residents have likely already forgotten. Union Pier Road closed to through traffic near the railroad tracks starting April 20, 2026, for roughly eight weeks while Berrien County Drain Commission work proceeded, with traffic detoured via Warren Woods Road to Lakeside Road. It's the kind of temporary inconvenience that comes with a town actively investing in itself, and by summer the road was back open and the detour signs were down.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened all at once. The highway shrank first. The sidewalk came second. The restaurants, breweries, and bike shop followed the sidewalk, not the other way around. That order matters if you're trying to understand why a stretch of Red Arrow Highway that used to be just a way to get somewhere else has become, block by block, somewhere people actually want to be.

If you've got questions about what any of this means for a specific property in Union Pier, or you're curious what your home might be worth now that the corridor is finished, Meghan Maddox knows this stretch of Harbor Country block by block. Request a free home valuation and get a straight answer about where your place fits into everything that's changed.