Last week, the Connecticut Department of Transportation announced it was moving ahead with a project to widen about three miles of Interstate 84 in Waterbury. The project should take five years to complete, at a reported cost of $400-500 million.
To put that in perspective, Connecticut receives $486 million in federal funds a year for all road and bridge projects. With 72 percent of major roadway miles in less than good condition and 35 percent of bridges either structurally or functionally deficient, this doesn’t seem like a good time to spend limited funds on capacity expansion.
While the State has made some high-profile transit investments like CTfastrak and the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield rail corridor, Connecticut still spends about 23 percent of its Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) on road and bridge expansion — a much higher proportion than what neighboring states New York and Massachusetts spend on increasing road capacity.
Prioritizing this project, especially at a time when vehicle miles traveled is shrinking and transit ridership is the highest it’s been in over 50 years, isn’t a sustainable path for Connecticut’s future. ConnDOT must leave the 1950’s-era transportation planning where it belongs: in the 20th century.
[…] Connecticut Ready to Spend $500 Million to Add One Lane Each Direction to 3 Miles of I-84 (MTR) […]
Sometimes road expansion and improvement plans make sense, but one should also look closely at things like rail improvements first. For instance, I80 in NJ is badly clogged, and widening might improve things, BUT moving ahead with the restoration of the Lackawanna Cutoff and restoring train service to western NJ, the Poconos, Stroudsburg and Scranton has the potential to get a fair number of cars off of I80. Lots of people commute over this route and lots of people go to the Poconos for skiing and tourism. Yet this project has been held back for decades, though NJT is doing a tiny piece of it as it expands train service westward.
This route might also be good for freight service and could get lots of trucks off the road.
There is another corridor that might benefit from rail renewal – the Southern Tier of New York. You have rail along this route – some freight, and a massive updating of Rt 17 / I86. Both the road work and upgrading rail and maybe adding some commuter or passenger capability might make sense.
On Long Island, roads are badly clogged. LIRR is gradually seeing more freight service after decades of cleaning out the same. If LIRR added double railing (or triple in some spots) and fixed the mess at Jamaica, and if the Port Authority finally did what it was created for – a rail tunnel from the island to NJ, that could greatly improve rail service and road conditions on Long Island.
[…] costly road and bridge expansion projects. Almost 41 cents of every road or bridge dollar goes to expansion, even with over 70 percent of roads in the State in less than good […]
While I agree that the state may be spending a disproportionate percentage of transportation funds on road capacity expansion, it is somewhat misleading to characterize the I-84 widening through Waterbury as capacity expansion. Each end of the three mile project area has at least 6 travel lanes. The project area has four lanes. It serves as a traffic funnel/bottleneck in both directions that causes daily misery for drivers in the region. It seems obvious that the roadway was never designed properly. I agree the price tag is astronomical, but that can be the cost of correcting poor planning. Our anger should be with the engineers who long ago designed interstates that split our city centers across New England. I hope the project goes forward.
[…] conditions again slipping, it’s time for states to reconsider big-ticket road projects like the $500 million widening of I-84 in Waterbury. In a positive move, however, Governor Malloy and the Connecticut General Assembly […]
[…] Waterbury, a setting that was meant to highlight a major component of the infrastructure plan: the widening of 2.7-miles of Interstate 84. The project, which ConnDOT first announced in 2013, adds a lane […]
[…] I-84 widening in Waterbury, which broke ground on April 1, was originally estimated to cost $400 to $500 million, based on needs identified in a 1998 Environmental Assessment. Interstate 84 is four lanes wide […]