Merritt Parkway is worth preserving
Hugh Bailey’s opinion piece “People vs. highways” gets a handful of points right.
While we fully agree that the Merritt Parkway is scenic, even pastoral and certainly historic, the 37.5-mile road is without peer in the United States — listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its unique bridges and carefully designed landscape, and designated by the U.S. Department of Transportation as a National Scenic Byway. But the core of his argument, that the Merritt Parkway Conservancy’s efforts to preserve this heritage is a binary choice between people and highways, is way off the mark.
It mischaracterizes why we oppose a planned apartment development rising an effective seven stories high and sited within 10 feet of the edge of the Merritt Parkway southbound entrance ramp at Exit 44. At six times the size of the existing Hi-Ho Motel, it would be, as we were quoted at the Fairfield Town Planning and Zoning Public Hearing, “incompatible with the scale and character of the Merritt Parkway and surrounding land.”
This development puts two state objectives at odds — the multiyear, multimillion-dollar investment by the state Department of Transportation to upgrade the safety and appearance of the Merritt Parkway as one of its busiest roads and its largest historic place, and Section 8-30g, a statute aiming to remedy the shortage of affordable housing in some communities. We recognize the need for more affordable housing. But the fact of the matter is that the 29 below-market-rate units this development would create under 8-30g would accomplish very little toward solving this problem, while the proposed 94-unit building looming over the travel lanes will have significant visual impact to the people in the 25 million vehicles driving this historic environment annually. The location, distant from any public transportation, is inappropriate for moderate-income housing and will only add to traffic.
We are also concerned about the stormwater issues this development would create. The 2.3-acre site of mostly exposed rock ledge is already a source of periodic flooding below the Black Rock Turnpike overpass; adding more impervious coverage to it with this large building and terraced parking will only increase the volume of runoff. We would have no quarrel with a reasonably scaled development on this site, but there are far better sites south of the parkway linked to sidewalks and public transit for a project this size.
This is not about people versus cars, and is not a choice between highways and affordable housing. The Merritt Parkway is a great public space, the county’s most affordable asset open to all, built for the enjoyment of people. We find that most residents want to keep it from devolving into an environment like I-95, and we will continue to work hard to prevent its death by a thousand cuts from oversized buildings like this one.