LOUDON — When residents are polled next month about ways to improve the town in the next decade, they will be asked four specific questions about highway traffic and safety, as the town responds to concerns aired in recent months about the Route 106 corridor.

Town officials are updating the town’s master plan, a duty required of municipalities every 10 years. In October’s edition of the Loudon Ledger, the town’s newsletter, residents will be asked to answer a master plan survey with questions about the future of Loudon, said Donna White, the town’s administrative assistant. The survey will also be available through a link on the town’s website.

The master plan, a long-range plan for the town, was last updated in 2001. After that process, a list of projects was compiled, and many items on the list have been addressed, White said.

For instance, the town decided it needed to bring elderly housing to town, and that was accomplished by building a 32-unit senior housing building. The last update also provided a change in minimum acreage rules for developers subdividing land parcels, a change that has pleased developers and the towns, she said.

This update of the plan will likely take one to two years to complete, because the process includes a period for taking resident input, time for planning and prioritizing changes, and because finding funding for town projects has been difficult in recent years.

The town is working with the Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission in Concord to come up with four specific questions on the survey regarding highway and traffic issues, said Mike Tardiff, the commission’s executive director.

The commission hasn’t formalized the four questions, he said, but they will be related to concerns expressed by residents attending a Department of Transportation hearing in July on the state’s newest plans for the Route 106 corridor between Canterbury and Concord.

At that meeting, several residents expressed concerns about the highway’s frequent congestion, and about the number of accidents that occur said Michael Dugas, chief of preliminary design at the DOT’s Bureau of Highway Design.

It was decided after that meeting that those concerns could be best addressed through the master plan update, Tardiff said.

The most recent plan for the Route 106 corridor is “sort of a master plan update for the corridor,” Dugas said. The previous long-range plan for the road was made in the 1990s. But the new plan presented to residents has been heavily revised, he said.

For instance, the previous plan suggested five lanes — two northbound, two southbound, and one turning lane in the middle. The new plan would change the 11-mile stretch to three lanes, one going each way and a turning lane. The width of the road would change from 48 feet to 64 feet, he said.

But that $15-20 million construction plan hasn’t yet been funded by the state, and it isn’t high on the DOT’s priority list, Dugan said.

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Dan Seufert may be reached at dseufert@newstote.com.