The New London Day's new political reporter, Matthew Collette, who succeeds Ted Mann, reports that the Route 11 project appears to be moving toward the Malloy administration’s front burner. 
As a general principle, advocates for sustainability take the position that spending our exceedingly limited funds on building new roads is exactly the wrong route to a sustainable, competitive green economy. Governor Malloy has tended to subscribe to this notion.
In the business world, we talk about "making the business case" for doing project x, y or z. As a parallel, what's the sustainability business case for proceeding with expanding Route 11? Are decision makers using a common set of criteria to make go/no-go decisions on transportation projects? If so, what are they?
What do you think? What's the sustainability business case for expanding Route 11?
Here are some criteria by which we might evaluate projects going forward. Will the project:
- Resolve safety problems?
- Create viable alternatives to driving?
- Reduce VMT (vehicle miles traveled)?
- Reduce greenhouse gas pollution?
- Discourage sprawl?
- Avoid runoff pollution?
- Induce transit-oriented development?
- Create long-term good, green jobs?
- Reduce congestion?
- Create some other quantifiable benefit that exceeds that cost?
Our partner, Transportation for America has a good set of similar performance objectives here. The site at http://www.nycroads.com/roads/CT-11/ makes for interesting reading, discussing the Route 11 Greenway concept that was funded in 2003.
What do you think? What's the sustainability business case for expanding Route 11? Let’s hear it.
The plan as proposed will provide a "yes" to all criteria posed, provided the mitigation plan (not yet formalized, but extensively discussed) follows the "world-class" mitigation approach developed in the lengthy hearing process over the past 12 years.
ReplyDeleteIn the completed portion of Rt 11 (Colchester to Salem), the extra-wide buffers and limited-access have blocked sprawl by preventing gross-roads, enabled beavers to create over 100 acres of new wetlands, and dramatically improved safety. Buses from Colchester to Hartford have rapidly expanded, along with car-pooling.
Adjacent lands, now less attractive to developers, have become available for conservation. Over 1500 acres of land have either been purchased by land trusts, or now have easements (land protection agreements attached to their deeds) that will prevent development in perpetuity while allowing sustainable forestry and agriculture.
New trail systems for hiking have sprouted up through the area.
Completion of Rt 11 is slated to be based on the original model, but with a lower-impact footprint, full bridging of all streams (no culverts), using arterial road standards (at lower speed limits)rather than expressway standards (wider and straighter and flatter lanes, paved emergency lanes, deeper road cuts and greater fills, continuous median grass strip, etc).
But taking CT's transportation money from mass transit for this program would be wrong. Instead, new money must be found, and the fairest way to provide it is for the users of the road to pay a toll.
Toll roads went through my farm in colonial days. The toll cost limited traffic use while assuring a safer and more efficient path for those on the road.
This project has been headlined more than once as "the green highway." It has been supported by the vast manority of public speakers at hearings, including some of the region's staunchest environmentalists.
And for good reason, since cancelling the road opens the whole corridor to unacceptible sprawl. Buying up the open space in the corridor as part of the mitigation for inevitable environmental impacts,
while placing a ribbon of road along its perimeter, can save an otherwise doomed wildlife corridor.
Unless someone finds sufficient funds for such protection without the highway, and does so without jeopardizing lands that have far higher conservation value, this land will otherwise not be protected. The future without a completed Rt 11 will inevitably be many times the amount of asphalt (on driveways and town roads), and total destruction of the large forest blocks that currently persist only because developers have avoided buiding out the corridor as long as completion of Rt 11 has been on the table.
David Bingham, Salem