The specter of impatient and inexperienced high school drivers making risky left-hand turns onto Route 101 from Nashua Road may yet be averted.

A meeting on Tuesday, April 29, at BCTV between state officials and Bedford town and school counterparts ended with an apparent consensus on a temporary solution.

At the meeting, state officials revealed they were open to allowing a traffic light at Route 101 from Nashua Road without major widening. That makeshift solution would cost about $300,000, according to Michael Dugas, the preliminary design chief for the Department of Transportation.

The intersection has become a concern for the school district, which warns that significantly more teenage drivers will be passing through the area every day on their way to Bedford High School this fall.

School Board member Cindy Chagnon said lights had been added to the Wallace Road and Meetinghouse Road intersections only after fatal accidents. She said the community was hoping to avoid a similar outcome at Nashua Road.

The town had a bond with about $3 million for upgrading the intersection on its ballot in the March election, but the measure failed.

“We need help and we need help before we have an accident and before we have a really bad accident, not afterwards,” Chagnon said.

Many town and school officials said they had been told that the state would not allow them to put a light at the intersection without adding a left-turn lane onto Nashua Road and a second eastbound lane from that road to Meetinghouse Road.

Had the town and school district known they could do the light alone, Town Councilor Paul Roy said he is confident funding would have easily been approved in March. He said many people in town had objected to spending millions of dollars on Route 101 since it is a state highway.

Until the fall, Bedford was counting on the state to take care of widening Route 101 from Route 114 to Wallace Road. But decreasing revenue from the gas tax, limited federal funding and skyrocketing inflation in construction materials forced the state to cut $2 billion from its 10-year transportation plan last fall, said Bedford state Rep. John Graham, who was one of several state lawmakers present at the meeting.

The Route 101 widening was at the top of the list of projects that were cut in the fall, according to an official DOT list. Jeff Brillhart, assistant DOT commissioner, said the projects that merely expanded highway capacity were cut from the 10- year plan in favor of ones that addressed safety.

Former School Board member Steve Beals found that explanation puzzling.

“How in the world if safety was the criteria for taking things off the 10-year plan? How in the world or why in the world wasn’t this number one on the list?” he said.

Brillhart responded that the opening of the new high school, with its teenage drivers, was not considered as a factor in the cuts.

Town Councilor Michael Scanlon said, absent state funding, it is not fair for the state to require that the town widen Route 101 if it wanted the signal at Nashua Road.

“As far as I’m concerned, if the state’s going to walk away from responsibility for 101 and we want to fix our problem, I don’t really care about the state’s problems anymore,” Scanlon said. “I’m going to fix the town’s problems.”

The assistant commissioner said the town may be eligible for money from the state highway aid program, but money would be tied up at least until 2012. Graham and state Sen. Sheila Roberge, who chaired the meeting, have both introduced legislation to restore some funding.

Rep. Mark Clark, however, said he thought the town would have a better chance of getting help through a federal earmark than through any state programs. He said state legislative efforts were unlikely to succeed.

Several residents at the meeting expressed support for the $300,000 traffic light solution. “That seems like a pretty inexpensive solution to at least address a serious problem,” said Dennis Grimes.

Brillhart said his office will call Town Manager Russ Marcoux to schedule a meeting between DOT and Bedford town engineers to further explore that option. But he warned that without any widening the light would exacerbate the existing traffic backups on the highway, saying that drivers in Bedford and other towns may not be happy with the cheaper solution.

A number of town and school officials expressed surprise that the state would permit the installation of the light without the widening.

“We were under the impression that the additional through lane on the eastbound direction was required to meet the warrants for a signal,” said Superintendent Tim Mayes.

Dugas said the school district had met with a district representative for the DOT when it was drafting its plan for improving the Nashua Road intersection.

He said the state had told Bedford school officials what they needed to do for off-site improvements, following guidelines similar to those for a private development.

That was in 2007. But this week, state officials were willing to be more flexible. “I guess what’s changed now is the immediacy of the problem,” Dugas said.