MILLBROOK, June 3 — Let me tell you about my Tuesday morning. I left my house on Ferndale Drive at 7:42 a.m., which should — by any reasonable measure — be enough time to reach the Millbrook Civic Center for an 8:30 meeting. I arrived at 8:47. Not because of an accident. Not because of bad weather. Because of the Crosstown Corridor, the same two-mile stretch of Route 9 between the Hendricks Avenue overpass and the Central Street merge that has been a daily parking lot for going on four years now. And the worst part? Nobody at City Hall seems to be in any particular hurry to do anything about it.
The Promises Keep Coming
To be fair — and I always try to be fair, even when I'm annoyed — the city has not been completely silent on this issue. Transportation Director Hal Greer presented a 'Corridor Improvement Framework' to the City Council back in February. Council member Sandra Fitch called it 'a meaningful step forward.' Mayor Donovan Ashby said the city was 'committed to exploring all viable options.' I wrote those quotes down. I'd encourage you to notice that none of them contain a timeline, a dollar figure, or any verb that implies anything will actually happen. We've been at the 'exploring options' stage since the previous mayor was in office. At some point, exploring needs to become doing, and doing needs to have a price tag attached to it and a vote scheduled.
What Residents Deserve
I've heard from dozens of Millbrook residents over the past month — teachers, nurses, contractors, parents doing the school-drop-off run — who have adjusted their entire daily schedules around a traffic problem that shouldn't exist in a city our size. Here's what I'd like to see from our elected officials before the end of this calendar year:
- A specific, funded infrastructure proposal — not a framework, not a study
- A public comment session held in the evenings so working people can actually attend
- A clear vote on the record, so residents know who's accountable
