Let me dispel a myth straightaway: I don’t have road rage. In fact, I’m usually anti-rage when I’m behind the wheel. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I can get just as frustrated as the next driver, but I don’t suffer from this white fire of rage that burns through all reason, that causes people to hit other people with their cars, or shooting people indiscriminately, or stalking people that once tailgated me. If anything, if given the choice between “normal” living and driving, I’m more prone to have rage in the day to day issues… this is usually a good thing because if I did suffer from the typical issue of road rage, there would have been a statewide Maxima hunt already.

No, this Rant, and subsequent rage, is directed solely at the Connecticut DOT. And rage it is, indeed! See, there’s a huge problem in CT with traffic – we seem to have a rather large amount of it, particularly in the highways that head towards the NYC area. For example, driving from Milford to Stamford is about 30 miles via Interstate 95. On a no-traffic highway, it takes about 35 minutes to get between the two cities. An average morning commute is 1.5 hours. A common commute is 2 hours. On the way home, add an additional 15 to 30 minutes because people drive slower when heading east/northbound – this is an hypothesis I cannot yet prove, but the addition time is a constant amount, so just accept it as fact.

Ok, well don’t take i95 then – i95 is the major artery, with three lanes to each side and a nominal amount of maintenance construction, so why not find an alternate route? What would you suggest? US Route 1? It’s not like it is in FL when it becomes A1A Avenue – it’s usually just two lanes per side and a whole assortment of stop lights, farm and construction vehicles, and school buses. Hardly an option. Well wait – doesn’t CT Route 15 run from Milford to Stamford? Why, yes, it does! It even flows into New York, when it becomes the Hutchinson River Parkway and goes clear through to Long Island via the Whitestone bridge. NY State even did some great construction work on the Hutch to make it suck less. So Rt 15 – the Merritt Parkway – sounds like a great alternate.

Some history on the Merritt. It was designed in the 1930’s as a “leisure road”. What’s that, you ask? Yeah, I didn’t know either, but it seems to be considered a road that people can drive but don’t have to drive to get some place – not a major road, in other words. It’s a road that should have no more than one car on any one part of the highway every 30 seconds. This means if you stood on the side of the road for 30 seconds, you would only get passed by one car. Try this on a highway, if you ever get that board sometime. You’ll get about 30 cars in 30 seconds if they are driving a meager 60 mph – average speed is about 70 mph. Oh, but wait, there’s more! The Merritt, since it meandered through backyards and other landscape type things, was also designed for cars to travel at a cruising speed of about 30-35 mph – HAH! This was not a federal road; it was a state road being designed to enhance the general living conditions of CT residents – not to be used for commuting. This is all fine and dandy – and factual, since they started coming out with those “local” history books; it’s amazing what you’ll read while waiting in a Doctor’s office – but see, this is the heart of the problem. The road wasn’t design to be used as it’s currently being used (or abused.) However, there’s no choice, for commuters. So lets look at the facts:

• There’s too much traffic for i95 alone

• There’s already too much traffic on Rt 15 already

• There’s no alternate to get to from most of CT to either Stamford or NY

This would lead you to believe that the government in CT would start looking at how to fix the problem. So far they’ve only suggested two things: take mass transit (which is idiotic for most people as there’s no infrastructure in CT for mass transit save for some city buses… in fact just this weekend a friend from NJ asked about the taxis in CT, which drew around of laughter from the local residence – the only true mass transit we have is MetroNorth, which I use daily) and to close some exits on i95. The closing of exits should help, actually, because CT drivers have issues in merging on highways, and since there’s an exit every mile on most of i95 in this area, this will help out a bit. Of course this also draws protests from local business because they are located at the end of a “to-be-closed” exit – I will gladly tell these businesses to sod off because traffic is a bigger issue! The CT DOT even estimates that if traffic continues to grow at the current rate, which it will since the CT populous is also growing at the same rate and shows no signs of slowing, it will take eight hours to get from Milford to Stamford by the year 2008 – something has to be done before this happens, don’t you think?

Why aren’t they fixing the Merritt? Well! In the CT government’s infinite wisdom and foresight, they’ve declared the Merritt Parkway a Scenic Road – a bona fide landmark. This gives it special protection – who ever heard of a road needing a guardian! So they took the only viable would-be alternate for commuters and turned it into what amounts to a park. More or less anyway. Think I’m kidding? Over the last four years let’s look at what the CT DOT has done for the Merritt. It’s put up neat little highway signs marking it a “Scenic Road”. It’s revamped a few of the entrance ramps so they have some room for people to speed up on and merge “properly” – great a idea but a waste on the CT drivers, where you will commonly find a driver stopping on the entrance ramp, as soon as said driver sees the highway s/he is merging on to. No joke. The DOT has also replaced all of the “unsightly” steel guardrails with steel reinforced wood guardrails. They’ve also started replacing the standard highway signs (for exits, etc.) with new signs that look like the original wood design. No talk of expanding the highway. No talk of general maintenance on the highway. No talk of how to ease the commute. Aside from the newly designed ramps, which are lost on the state in the first place, everything done to the Merritt, with our tax money – remember this is not a federal road, so the state of CT is solely footing the bill – is to make it prettier. We’ll need a guillotine for these administrations for allowing this.

The kicker, or the thing that set this all in motion, was an article this past weekend that happened across my path. Seems that there’s a new project being started for the Merritt. Now, mind you that there’s been budget problems for CT all over the news lately, as well as programs being cuts and tax increase talk, etc. The new project is geared to return the foliage and landscape of the Merritt back to it’s original look, when it was opened in the 1940’s. That’s right – new landscaping. So they obviously have to have certain times of the day to close at least one lane for this yard work – probably 10 AM to 3 PM. They also have to fund it. And then, the sole benefit is nicer landscaping. Less brush and under growth. I guess this is supposed to help commuters by giving them better stuff to look at, while stopped in the ever growing traffic, even though part of the upcoming traffic will be caused by the instillation of this new landscaping. At least they’ll have something better to look at, while caught in the 1 1/2 hour bottleneck every morning.

I give it six months before you find one of the brainchildren behind this landscaping effort swinging from one of the new trees – of course that’s only if that was part of the original scenery. I would be willing to make an exception to “original” landscape rule and add the (albeit fake) body to make an example of the buffoon – we don’t need nice trees or pretty guardrails… we need more, or at least better, roads. The entire state government should be forced to commute from Milford to Stamford every day for one week; watch how quickly the speed limits get raised to 65 statewide and we get funding for a real Route 15 enhancement.