Perhaps the Merritt Park Conservancy could monitor the filters to make sure no pollutants enter the river – that is if they even still continue to exist after the cloverleaf and new office buildings get built!

You state “It makes the river a covered ditch at that point and puts massive amounts of harmful run-off into the river”

Well with the cloverleaf it builds through much of the wetlands now soaking up much of the water, can you imagine the runoff and the floods in backyards of residents, the streets of Perry Ave and of Main Street if the hillsides are destroyed?

The point of this whole debate/conversation is to get a better look at the options. We need to look at the options from

#1 Safety 1st standpoint, cloverleafs are not favored in this respect.

#2 Destroying of wetlands with an abundance of wildlife in it.

#3 Forever changing the landscape of a beautiful historic neighborhood over the landscape of a commercial corridor and a bulding owned by the head of the Conservancy…

We welcome everyone to come and listen to the true facts.

The Alternate 12A plan is a much safer, less invasive interchange all around. It keeps the development within the current commercial corridor. The exit and entrance ramps are very straightforward with NO WEAVING introduced and will safely accomodate high traffic volumes.

I am a strong proponent of Alternate 12A for safety reasons, for environmental reasons and for aesthetics reasons.

Safety: Alternate #12A does not create additional crossing traffic or “weaving” situations where cars exiting the roadway must cross through traffic entering the highway. There is a great deal of research, which states that “weaving” is the primary weakness of the cloverleaf design. As a result, cloverleafs are no longer the favored way of creating intersections, especially in urban areas where space is at a premium. We currently have an existing half-cloverleaf where Route 7 joins Route 15 and it is unsatisfactory with the present level of traffic. There are a large number of businesses on Main Avenue, whose workers commute on the Merritt and Route 7. Therefore, it is essential that we have a safe interchange. In addition, as traffic in Fairfield County and on the Merritt Parkway is expected to increase in the future, it doesn’t make sense to use a plan that features weaving traffic.

Environmental: Alternative #12A has the least impact on wetlands, even less than the Original Design. The new Modified Cloverleaf design has much greater impact on wetlands, especially the vernal ponds that are in the woodlands set for destruction. Because Alternate #12A has less wetland impact it is a logical alternative to the Modified Cloverleaf design. In addition, the Modified Cloverleaf design will require 20 acres of mature woodlands on both sides of the Parkway to be completely cleared to make room for large circular ramps east of Perry Ave. This action will destroy more than 6,000 trees, many of them 80-100 years old and more than 100 feet tall.

Aesthetics: Alternate #12A does not encroach on the Silvermine neighborhood. With this plan, all new construction is contained within the existing Route 7/Northeast Utilities commercial corridor. At the present time, Route 7 is well-screened from Perry Avenue with woodlands which preserve the character of this rural roadway, although Route 7 runs close by.

The Modified Cloverleaf option presented will necessitate clearing the woodlands to the
East of Perry Avenue from Rae Lane to Louden Street, creating a clear swath of open land from Perry Avenue to the Merritt Seven office park. The vista would include new bridges and approach ramps over Perry Avenue as well as new, elevated ramps immediately to the East of Perry. In addition, the traffic noise will no longer be buffered by the considerable woodlands. These woodlands have more than twenty different species of mature trees, some of which are 80-100 years old. There is also a tremendous amount of wildlife in these woodlands including Red-tailed Hawk, Wild Turkey, Pileated Woodpecker, Chicadee varieties, Warbler varieties, Eastern Meadowlark, Eastern Phoebe, Carolina Wren, Great Blue Heron, Snowy Egret, Wood Duck, Great Horned Owl, Ring-necked Pheasant, deer, coyote, fox, etc.

Since one of the reasons for completing the interchange is to increase commercial development in Norwalk, it makes sense to keep the new road construction in the already cleared commercial area, rather than forever damage the rural character of Silvermine.

I encourage all to attend the May 14 meeting at 7:00 pm at Silvermine Elementary School and the May 29 meeting at 7:00 pm at City Hall to voice your opinion.

With the combined local, state and federal outlays for roads estimated at more than $150 billion in 2005, Governing magazine columnist Alex Marshall finds it ”exceedingly strange” that conservative and libertarian think tanks committed to less government view taxpayer-funded highways and roads ”as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living,” while attacking ”mass-transit spending, particularly on trains.”

These think tanks ”seem to see a highway as an expression of the free market and of American individualism and a rail line as an example of government meddling and creeping socialism,” the columnist observes, citing publications and presentations of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation and its transportation wing.

They include papers entitled ”How to Build Our Way Out of Congestion”, ”Myths of Light Rail Transit” and ”Rethinking Transit ‘Dollars & Sense’: Unearthing the True Cost of Public Transit,” but none on ”unearthing the true cost of our public highway network.”

Invited by the columnist to square its support for governmental road funding with its ”general dislike of government involvement,” Reason Foundation’s founder, former president and prolific transportation study author Robert Poole responded that he ”never thought about it that way.”

The foundation’s general premise ”is that transportation infrastructure would work better if it were market-driven,” he said. ”Where it’s possible, that infrastructure should be run in a business-like manner with users paying full cost.”

The columnist calls this reasoning ”essentially incorrect,” stressing, ”Transportation is like education: it works best through heavy general funding that pays off down the road in a community’s or nation’s overall prosperity.”

Noting that governments have spent several trillion dollars on roads over the past century, he writes, ”This system, open to all with a car, has created our automobile-based landscape of suburbs, single-family homes, office parks, mega churches and shopping malls. Love it or hate it, it is the product of massive government spending.”

Although the foundation’s ideas for truck-only lanes and congestion pricing ”are worth considering,” the columnist cautions city and state officials often confronted with its studies that ”the systematic bias in favor of roads and against transit makes the foundation’s work suspect.” — Governing 4/7/2008

SAD, BUT INTERCHANGE NEEDS MORE THOUGHT

It appears that the state Department of Transportation learned from its experience with a group of conservationists who were able to stop a major Merritt Parkway interchange project because they disputed its design.

The DOT is showing signs, at least publicly, that it is taking seriously a new group of residents’ concerns over the project, which has been redesigned. It is giving them greater opportunity for input than had previously been planned.

That’s good, because there are serious, legitimate concerns with the new design – including questions of driver safety.

We’ve long urged the state to get on with it, and make improvements to the Route 7-Merritt Parkway interchange in Norwalk to address safety and traffic concerns for commuters. The project has been in development for more than 10 years, and the DOT finally was about to get started on a new interchange in 2005 when the Merritt Parkway Conservancy sued to halt work. A federal judge in the spring of 2006 ruled in favor of the preservationists, saying the DOT and Federal Highway Administration hadn’t proved that all steps had been taken to ensure minimum impact to the parkway.

Now the DOT and preservationists have arrived at a joint plan that appears acceptable to both.

Hallelujah, let’s get the shovels in the ground right?

Well, not so fast.

Residents of Norwalk’s Silvermine community have stepped up to say they have wrongly been left out of discussions of the new plan, which would affect
them directly by encroaching on their neighborhood.

Furthermore, the new interchange plan employs a so-called cloverleaf design, which in many places has become notorious for the traffic and safety problems it causes – ironic as traffic and safety are the exact issues the Merritt interchange project was intended to resolve in the firstplace.

Just months ago, state DOT officials had said they’d been trying “to move away” from cloverleafs. The problem with those layouts is they make vehicles enter a highway just before the spot where others exit, causing drivers to negotiate a hair-raising weave of accelerating and decelerating cars, trucks and SUVs. Conservancy members have said this particular cloverleaf wouldn’t present the problems of others, but that’s going to take some convincing.

Also, the footprint of the new design is much wider than the original. It overlaps wetlands that the original did not, and intrudes into residential areas.

Silvermine and other residents have been outspoken about the new design since a March 18 public hearing. The DOT, to its credit, has said it will schedule an additional hearing late this month or in May. It also has continued to take written comments from the public, abolishing a former deadline, and will continue taking them until a project plan becomes final.

There is another plan on the table, an alteration of the DOT’s original plan that does not employ a cloverleaf. That needs to be seriously considered, even though it has taken a back seat to the cloverleaf design favored by the Conservancy.

As hard as it is to say after all this time, the DOT should proceed cautiously. The worst possible outcome of this frustrating, drawn-out process would be a new interchange that doesn’t improve traffic or safety, and potentially makes them worse in the long run.

Well, #11, guess all these folks should have just driven better, don’t you think?

From a Long Island Newspaper:

The interchange where the Meadowbrook Parkway meets Hempstead Turnpike loops in the shape of a cloverleaf and is the third most dangerous spot on all the state roads on Long Island.

Police say they respond to a rear-end crash here on the borders of East Meadow and Uniondale just about every day.

The flawed, outdated design and the high volume of rush-hour traffic make for a tricky turn, no matter which way you’re headed.

“It’s kind of like trying to put 10 gallons in a 5-gallon jug,” said Frank Pearson, a regional transportation planner for the state Department of Transportation. “Literally, it just spills over.”

The short stretch of the Meadowbrook Parkway as it undercuts Hempstead Turnpike recorded 180 accidents in 2004 and 2005, two of them fatal and 78 causing injury.