Get informed, and speak out, on I84 expansion
Danbury needs to get involved in the state’s “Danbury I84 Project.” As the name suggests, this is a federal/state endeavor to repair and rework our largerthanlife, convenient but overbearing, interstate road from its exits 3 to 8 (including said exits top to bottom).
Connecticut’s Department of Transportation maintains that the road, with the volume of traffic significantly increased from the highway’s birth almost 50 years ago, no longer meets federal specifications for turning angles and sight lines. The DOT maintains traffic congestion and safety can be improved, at least in the near term, by significantly altering the path of I84 in a fashion analogous to pulling/straightening a rope while making it thicker in spots. The project also includes the more clearly justified shoring up of the bridges and other infrastructure associated with the highway.
It is hard for anyone but our most senior citizens to picture the Greater Danbury area without the blacktopped beast of Interstate 84 weaving through it. Indeed, the road seems “natural” now, as much development has gone handinhand with its construction and serves to justify the throughway’s existence after the fact.
However, Danbury need not sleepwalk in regards to further developments with this road. Most local political leaders (of all parties) agree that the openended widening of the interstates by Connecticut, such as that planned for the notorious I95 to the south of us, is an operational dead end. Indeed, past experience has shown that that relief of congestion by highway expansion lasts as long as it takes an increasingly mobile population to find out about the newly created slack and jump in — thereby bringing the situation full circle back to sluggish commutes.
The Hat City might take advantage of the current planning (and prefinance) stage of the Danbury I84 Project to shape the construction (and likely destruction) in a way more conducive to what we envision as our future. Transportation planners not of Danbury have a more abstract idea of transportation efficiency and/or expediency that will not necessarily complement Danbury.
The project’s ostensible purpose of decongestion and safety needs to scrutinized: I84 is slow sometimes, but is the project’s proposed biblical scale reconstruction from exits 3 to 8 (especially around exits 4 and 7), making them less tight and theoretically increasing speed and volume flow, worth the years of disruption and environmental and health costs it will entail? Most of this project will take place in the Still River wetlands or watershed. Storm water runoff from hard, impervious surfaces is the number one source of water pollution.
The DOT astutely points out that there is a high percentage of local traffic up on the highway. In light of this exigency, perhaps the congestion problem is better, and more sustainably and cheaply remedied by finding ways to get locals off the highway for crosstown trips — especially during rush hour. With decades of selfjustifying development along the highway and its exits, this communitarian vision is not conjured easily, but there has to at least be a discussion about the options of increased public transit and the facilitation of walking and biking. Obviously city, and specifically downtown, planning needs to be in this loop.
Danburians are going to have disparate ideas about what would constitute a good I84, but there has to be some common ground and that consensus needs to be communicated to state officials during the current vetting and scoping meetings of the Danbury I84 Project.
The next get together is on Sept. 24, at 12:30 p.m. in Westeran Connecticut State University’s midtown White Hall. Those interested can get oriented with the project on the state’s website (search on project name). Let’s make the “Danbury I84 Project” work for its namesake — rather than our city merely being made into a transportation means for New York and Hartford commuters. Within that effort, the very necessary discussion of what succeeds the superhighways should occur.
Considering the demographic and environmental future realities of Connecticut, anything less on that topic would make the “Danbury I84 Project” a “road to nowhere.”