The Connecticut Department of Transportation announced yesterday that it is seeking bids for the Interstate 84 widening project in Waterbury. The project, which is based on a 16-year-old environmental assessment, is expected to take five years and cost $400 million, “although the final amount will be determined by the bids received,” according to ConnDOT.
This announcement couldn’t have been timed more poorly. On Tuesday, the CT Mirror reported that 413 of the state’s 4,218 bridges were structurally deficient as of December 2013, up from 406 in 2012, according to the Federal Highway Administration. In fact, the number of structurally deficient bridges has been on the rise for years.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand a 2.7-mile segment of highway in a part of the state that isn’t growing (and at a time when vehicle miles traveled is on the decline) isn’t an investment in Connecticut’s transportation future. The news of another increase in the number of structurally deficient bridges, coupled with aging transit infrastructure along the New Haven Line, is one more reason ConnDOT and Governor Malloy need to rethink this ill-advised plan, and consider less expensive proposals to mitigate congestion along the I-84 corridor.
Has TSTC ever met a freeway widening project it did not oppose?
Widening I-84 to the west of I-64 is not yet needed. But to the east and into CT it’s long overdue.
Can we really trust the judgment of a ‘transportation’ organization organization with a picture motif that acts as if showing a vehicular road, particularly a freeway, is some sort of unviewable obscenity?
AS someone who has driven that stretch of highway on trips to and from Nova Scotia, I would like to see something done. However that something need not be the widening which won’t address the major merge split problems. One something that could be done is reinstate rail between Waterbury and Hartford and one way to do that is to kill the proposed takeover of an existing rail right of way that way part of such a line and instead put RAIL on the route of the proposed Hartford Busway.
[…] out to bid the day after it was reported that state’s number of structurally deficient bridges increased once again in […]
[…] costly road widening projects that will ultimately induce more traffic. After devoting 2014 to securing $400 million to widen three miles of I-84 in Waterbury, when highway efficiencies to reduce […]