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RFH 2010, Opinion

Editorial: Meet Larry, Moe & Curley, the State's Ideas for Five-Way Intersection

Tue, Aug 31, 2010

Editorial: Meet Larry, Moe & Curley, the State's Ideas for Five-Way Intersection

Enough!

The state Department of Transportation (DOT) recently delivered three ideas to add to the ones already being studied for reshaping the five-way intersection at the heart of the village's business district.

One can only imagine they are were added to the mix to make the ones from a Saratoga Springs consulting firm look better. In short, the three ideas from the DOT are absurd; more proof of the old saying, "To err is human, but to really screw things up you need a state agency."

These ideas are the Larry, Moe and Curly of local development. One actually calls for closing off Broad Street from the intersection to Pleasant Street and making it, yes, into a parking lot. This stooge would reroute north/south traffic onto East Broad Street

One can only imagine what last Thursday -- freshman move-in day at Colgate -- would have looked like with this traffic pattern. Moms and dads would still be trying to get their students properly delivered. This would repeat on Saturdays when Colgate has a home football game and during other major events.

Now is the perfect time to stop the silliness. Run these plans from the DOT through the nearest shredder and get back to more pressing business.

Recreating the five-way intersection has, at best, been a fool's errand since the outset. It's a good example of what happens when an idea gets bastardized as part of a chase for grant funding. We went from cosmetic surgery to gender reassignment pretty quickly, and there is not a shred of empirical data to prove there was anything wrong in the first place.

Now is the time for someone -- preferably the entire Board of Trustees -- to say, "Thanks to members of the task force that was assembled to study the intersection. The village appreciates your hard work, but we are moving on to real problems."

Then, find an open spot on an out of the way shelf, file the intersection study there and let it gather the dust it so richly deserves.

Take the number of people who have been involved in this project, multiply it by the number of hours they met. The product would be shocking.

Now apply that amount of volunteer person-power to a REAL problem and imagine what could have been accomplished.

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