I cannot keep my own counsel any longer. I must address an issue. Trips to the supermarket, bank and post office that may have taken 12 to 15 minutes in southern Sussex County now take an hour. The explosion of construction on our highways prompts some probing questions. I served as an elected commissioner in a Pennsylvania township for 10 years. Each year, we three commissioners would spend two days touring all the highways and roads in our township. We would create a list of maintenance and repair requirements on all our roads and create a priority list for the maintenance and repair work while considering future developments and infrastructure needs. In this way, our roads were kept serviceable and at no time did we need to repair all our roads at one time. We reduced the number of responses needed for “unplanned emergencies.”
Now, look at our roads in this region. New Road has three major developments (one of which is removing all the trees from a forested area) and one major bridge construction all at the same time, in a span of two miles. New Road will be under construction and obstructed for at least two more years. The Canary Creek bridge construction (long overdue) will require closing New Road. Look at Savannah, Park, Robinsonville and Beaver Dam roads and John J. Williams, Kings and Route 9 highways, all under construction. There are probably more. DelDOT has proposed for Kings Highway the absurd construction of five roundabouts in a mile-and-a-half length. I don’t know of anywhere in the country where this has been done.
Clearly, no thought was given to the traffic backup and confusion this would generate. Is it becoming evident that our roads have been neglected by local and county officials, as well as DelDOT, for many years? While approving developments at breakneck speed, with no thought given to the increase in the traffic or population or thoughts to the consequences for our infrastructures, we now face construction mania and gridlock. I find it difficult to offer a solution so late in the processes, but certainly a moratorium on development and an evaluation of our highways until we get a handle on this quagmire, and a long-range plan to address infrastructure needs in the future, would be a start.
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