Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Summah Traffic, Had Me a Crash, Summah Traffic, Can’t Go So Fast
I drive the length of I-93 whenever I go to my father’s house in Vermont. Get on it south of Boston, drive until it ends at I-91 in St. Johnsbury.
There is a certain stretch of the highway in the southern part of New Hampshire that drives me crazy, it so badly needs to be widened. I don’t really notice it southbound, but northbound the traffic tends to breeze along, then bottleneck, then breeze along again. The stretch where it bottlenecks is too close to civilization and too heavily trafficked to be two lanes.
Summah people notwithstanding, you can’t put the traffic back in the bottle, so you may as well make it safer and more efficient. I drove through there in a near-blizzard one time. Guess which stretch had the bulk of the accidents and cars off the road.
I greet news of a widening with approval in this case.
Speaking of roads overdue for widening, route 3 between 128 and the Cape has needed widening for the past couple decades. They are just now working on part of it. Two lanes each way doesn’t cut it until you get past Kingston, heading south. Three all the way to the canal would be reasonable, and four would be reasonable until well below Weymouth.
Now route 24, which used to be the fast, spacious road, is catching up and becoming traffic jammy all too regularly. There may be a limit to how far widening can go to making it more efficient, but we haven’t reached it yet.