The Department of Transportation’s announcement it will acquire Best family land at Five Points came as welcome news to the Five Points Working Group, a team of citizens, business owners, local officials and lawmakers who had been meeting for a year before making recommendations to DelDOT.
It’s also welcome news for anyone who travels through the congested intersection or the nearby intersection of Route 9 and Beaver Dam Road, popularly known as Malfunction Junction.
It’s been five months since the working group made its recommendations to DelDOT – all 78 of them, for projects as far away as Warrington Road and Millsboro.
Five months is long enough that some members of the group wondered if their meetings had been an exercise in futility, designed to drain people demanding improvements of all the energy they had for solving traffic problems.
The decision to purchase land lays to rest those thoughts and marks a clear step forward.
At the same time, the land acquisition overshadowed news that in five months, DelDOT has made progress on 36 of the working group’s 78 recommendations. Eight have already been addressed or folded into other projects; 13 are in progress, and DelDOT says 15 more will be addressed by the end of 2019.
The recommendations range from studying traffic patterns along entire corridors to improving signage, new traffic signals, closing Route 1 crossovers and many others.
We have no illusions that traffic woes can be remedied overnight. But developing public input and then acting on the ideas the public provides is a major step forward toward solving traffic problems in Sussex.
The process has been time-consuming, and some excellent ideas did not make the list of recommendations. Still, this process offered DelDOT clear direction, and we applaud DelDOT officials for taking the first steps toward making travel safer and more efficient.
With thousands of new homes and a number of new hotels on the way, there is no time to lose. Upgrading our roads remains more urgent than ever.
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Editorials are considered and written by Cape Gazette Editorial Board members, including Publisher Chris Rausch, Editor Jen Ellingsworth, News Editor Nick Roth and reporters Ron MacArthur and Chris Flood.
