Keep Queen Street Open

To the Editor:

Efforts by Queen Street’s Bob Geckle to effectively close Queen Street traffic into Newtown’s Shopping area are bad for Newtown.

For two years concerted efforts have been made to close part of Queen Street to traffic into the central shopping area of Newtown. Mr Geckle has utilized his considerable political influence, including relationships nurtured as head of the Fairfield Hills Authority, to get special treatment for his goal to reduce traffic, speed, and noise on Queen Street.

The facts.

1. Queen Street South traffic is estimated at 5,900 vehicles daily, traffic on Church Hill is 17,000 and Glover at over 12,000.

2. The Queen Street Traffic Study cost over $40,000. Our first selectman recently indicated that because of this year’s reductions in the town budget he will have to reduced road maintenance in Newtown next year.

3. Queen was restriped at considerable costs, while requests to stripe Wendover Road were rejected on technicalities. No other roads in the study area were restriped. Traffic speed machines have been used extensively on Queen, reducing the town’s ability to police speed throughout Newtown.

4. Newtown Shopping Center has been asked to direct trucks off Queen and onto Church Hill, creating major bottlenecks into the shopping area. Turning onto Queen from Church Hill will become more difficult and dangerous at this accident-prone intersection.

5. Attempts were made to reroute school buses onto Route 25, thus putting children in harm’s way just to reduce traffic and noise on Queen.

Current efforts include dead ending Queen Street forcing residents to take a longer and slower route to the shopping area, narrowing the Queen Street entrance from Wasserman/Mile Hill effectively backing traffic up to Reed Middle School, placing speed bumps on Queen to discourage use of the most direct routes into the shopping center, and rerouting traffic into the Church Hill entrance of the shopping area, one of the worst bottlenecks in Newtown. The real question is what problem is Mr Geckle and the town really trying to solve? Closing Queen Street to other residents of Newtown will make all of our lives more difficult, while making part of Queen Street, the part Mr Geckle lives on, a little less busy.

The real problem is planning for the current and future traffic flow into Newtown’s shopping area. Queen Street is a major commercial street with numerous commercial buildings at one end, a day care center in the middle, and an office complex at the corner of Wasserman/Mile Hill Road. Queen Street has a long-term role in the management and distribution of traffic into the center of town. Queen Street needs to handle it fair share of traffic. The traffic study currently being conducted needs to earnestly deal with our long-term issues of traffic management and speed reduction and stop trying to accommodate Mr Geckle’s fantasy that Queen Street is in rural Vermont.

Don’t close Queen Street. All of Newtown deserves convenient and well-planned access to our shopping area.

Bruce W. Walczak

12 Glover Avenue, Newtown                                         March 20, 2006