|
|
Home >
Preservation News >
For the Merritt Parkway, the Biggest Threat is Traffic
The National Trust for Historic Preservation included the Merritt Parkway on its annual list of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in the country. The announcement was made on May 19 at a press conference held in Westport. As an indication of the Parkway’s importance, David Brown, the National Trust’s executive vice president, came up from Washington for the event.
This designation marks a surprising turnaround from 1995, when the National Trust gave an Honor Award jointly to the Department of Transportation [DOT] and the Connecticut Trust for sensitive preservation of the parkway, a program of restoration and improvements that is still underway. In 1995, DOT’s commitment to preserving the Merritt represented a stunning change from just a few years earlier, when the department proposed widening it, which involved wiping out many of its famed bridges and almost all of the landscape that makes it a parkway. Since then, as no one can dispute, DOT has vastly improved both the Merritt’s appearance and its safety, and it continues to do so.
"We know the Merritt Parkway needs a lot of tender loving care and we plan to keep it that way," said DOT Commissioner Joseph Marie at the press conference.It hasn’t all been smooth. There have been disagreements and concerns about just what preserving the Merritt means and how it should be done. Some of these discussions have revolved around roadway design, such as the proposed Route 7 interchange in Norwalk, which DOT is now re-designing after a lawsuit initiated by the Merritt Parkway Conservancy (see CPN May/June 2006). The landscape has been a second issue, particularly the clearing of overgrown and invasive plants and the removal of trees which the department considered unsafe. Third is the maintenance and restoration of the bridges after 70 years’ exposure to the elements (see CPN, November/December 2009).Important as these matters are, the Most Endangered listing points to a larger issue, one that in the long run will have a far greater impact on the Merritt. The National Trust’s explanation for the listing points this out: “Fairfield County, where the Merritt is located, is the most populous county in Connecticut, and its growth is straining the state's infrastructure. To accommodate increased traffic on the parkway, ConnDOT has moved to solve the problem through road realignment, bridge replacement and interchange redesign—with the result that the parkway's unique character is being sacrificed.” In other words: the threat to the Merritt is based on DOT’s efforts to cope with growth through road improvements. It’s important to note that this growth isn’t primarily population growth, but rather traffic growth. Since 1990 the number of people living in Fairfield County has increased by about nine percent, but traffic levels on the Merritt are up by about 35 percent. Much of this is due to a shift in population away from the older coastline areas to newly-developed inland areas. Another factor is the sprawling nature of new development, which results in more and longer car trips. The ever-increasing numbers of cars endanger the Merritt. More traffic means more accidents and, consequently, more pressure for safety improvements that always seem to come at the cost of historic and scenic character. More traffic also brings more pressure to increase capacity. Since 1991, DOT’s policy has been that the Merritt will not be widened, but that policy, however firmly entrenched in the hearts of the public and DOT, has no legal, binding status. It could be overturned at any time. DOT has recognized the threat of growth for a long time—at least as far back as the Merritt Parkway Guidelines, basic principles published in 1994 to guide future work on the Parkway. The guidelines say “the future of the Merritt Parkway will be determined as much by the incremental decisions of the towns through which it passes as by the Department of Transportation and the rest of the state.” DOT isn’t completely at the mercy of towns and private developers. In the past its concentration on roadbuilding funneled traffic onto the Merritt, but Commissioner Marie has renewed and strengthened the department’s commitment to an integrated, multi-modal transportation system for the state. However, DOT on its own cannot remove the threat to the Merritt, because the real problem facing the parkway isn’t a roadbuilding problem, it’s a planning problem. Nor does it affect only the Merritt. The threat to the parkway is merely a single, highly visible consequence of the automobile-centric sprawl that is also draining life from Fairfield County’s older cities and towns and paving over the countryside. The solution for the Merritt and the rest of Fairfield County must be a planning solution, a wide-ranging, coordinated effort to address the broader issues that affect historic places, including the Merritt. We need to look again at ways of encouraging development centered on public transportation or transit-friendly suburban neighborhoods like those built between the Civil War and World War II. There have been some notable successes recently, including new development in downtown Bridgeport or, more broadly, the growth of the Main Street program, but those successes have been limited. One thing that gives new urgency to this effort is environmental sustainability, which has emerged as a major concern touching almost every aspect of modern life, including historic preservation. Sustainability plays an important role in addressing the threats to the Merritt because the preservation-friendly planning that is needed is in fact sustainable. It aims to conserve natural resources by reusing existing infrastructure, buildings and neighborhoods (many of them historic) rather than building new ones. Preserving a major road as a means to achieving sustainability may seem paradoxical, to say the least. Environmental activists typically concentrate on getting people out of cars. But Americans are not prepared to abandon automobiles as a major element of our transportation system. The Merritt is important precisely as a model for taming the automobile, by incorporating a major roadway into a band of greenery that blends it into the landscape, that filters exhaust fumes, and that makes driving a pleasure rather than just a chore—“to enjoy as we go,” as Schuyler Merritt said. The Merritt Parkway is not just a treasured piece of Connecticut’s past. It’s a vital part of our present and it points the way to a future that could be more humane and more responsible. Seeing that it does so is not a job for the Department of Transportation alone. Other state agencies, town governments, private developers, even individual drivers, all must play a part. —Christopher Wigren
|
