Seven Minutes in Hell
It's time to decide what we want from Route 6
The Fast and Infuriated
The drive across Fairhaven on MassDOT Stroad 6 from the New Bedford bridge to Narragansett Ave is 1.6 miles. This is a commercial strip and a hub of activity.
The posted speed for much of this road is 35 mph. According to Google, this drive should take five minutes. I’ve timed myself driving it several times, and I’ve never done it that quickly. Depending on how many red lights I hit, it usually takes me between six and seven minutes. That means I usually travel at an average speed of about 15 mph when I cross town this way. But while that’s my average speed, I’m never actually driving that speed. Like most people on this stretch, I drive much faster (30-50 mph) or wait at a light (0 mph).
When I am waiting at the light, I am sometimes grumpy. When the light turns green, I hit the accelerator to transform my 3,000-pound steel carriage into a deadly projectile that rips across town. My fellow drivers and I fiddle with our radios, talk on the phone and pick our noses (I see you!) We’re unaware that as we speed up between lights we’re destroying the safe routes to school, drastically increasing air and noise pollution and damaging our neighbors’ and our own health and mental health in the process.
As we speed up to catch that yellow light and cross Sconticut Neck, we’re contributing to the killing of our neighbors. I know this sounds like hyperbole, but do you really think the other drivers who killed other people here woke up intending to do so? Have you never swerved to avoid a pothole or been distracted for a moment when your wallet drops into that black hole every car seems to have between the front seats? The fact is that when we all drive at deadly speeds every day through the busy heart of town it creates an environment where people die periodically.
None of us intends to do the damage we’re doing to our community. Stroad 6 is a system that makes all of us piss on the town we love. I know that’s a nasty metaphor, but the actual impact of this piece of infrastructure is inarguably far more toxic.
Stop the Madness
Assuming that we don’t want to participate in the daily degradation of our town, is there anything that can be done? Or is this stretch of stroad just the price we pay for progress? I mean, one possible benefit of all that excess capacity means that we almost never see congestion, right? The other benefit from a driver’s perspective might be that we’re able to reach near-highway speeds between lights, which I guess at least gives us the feeling that we’re getting to our destination quickly.
Returning to my cross-town driving metrics though (and I encourage my neighbors to run this same experiment!) it’s clear that Route 6 is not actually efficient at getting us where we need to go. Remember that our average speed crossing town is about 15 mph. That’s because those stroad-induced high speeds necessitate traffic signals. Traffic signals bring our travel speed to zero and, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, actually cause what little congestion we have on this stroad. Also traffic signals are wicked expensive.
MassDOT is working its way down Route 6 as we speak, spending big money “improving” the stroad section by section. The MassDOT folks claim to want real community input, though from what I’ve seen, they mostly tend to feed the stroad , with some concessions (“complete street!” “stroadside trail!”) to active transportation that I’ll assume come from a genuine desire to do some good alongside the madness.
When MassDOT turns its attention to our community, we need to give them a very clear message. If they are going to attempt to address the damage this MassDOT Stroad does to our community, it’s time to show some creativity, courage, and honesty. That honesty starts by sharing what they already know— there is no world in which a road — designed for ease of speeding, can also serve well as a street — a platform for building wealth that encourages a diverse range of commerce and human activity and treats the automobile as a guest, not the boss. If everyone in town wanted a (third) highway, then MassDOT would need to redesign Route 6 in a way that cuts off access— eliminate the driveways, business frontages, lights etc, and turn it into another easy way for drivers to get from New Bedford to the Cape. I don’t know of any of my neighbors who want this.
At least for the 1.6-mile stretch that I discussed earlier, we need Route 6 to actually become, as it’s actually named, Huttleston Avenue. We need it to be a street. Our demand for MassDOT should be very simple:
Help us to reduce the design speed of this corridor to 20 MPH or slower.
That’s it.
I realize this isn’t an easy demand to fulfill. Doing this would require true courage. It would require those leading the project to level with folks about the fact things that community members sometimes request— more and wider lanes and beefed up signalized intersections— are the very things that create the danger, alternating congestion and high speeds that those same community members want to avoid.
What we Gain
Before we get into any technical conversations about how a 20 mph Huttleston Ave might be accomplished, we need to ground ourselves in the benefits to the people who live here. At the top of that list is the fact that it will save lives. MassDOT Stroad 6 currently kills people at a rate of about one person every two years. Imagine for a moment that every two years our town held a lottery (Shirley Jackson style) to determine who got killed. Imagine that you, your family members, and your neighbors all had to participate and that any one of you might draw the slip with the black dot. You’d want to end that lottery, right? Would fear of peak-hour congestion or the loss of the ability to speed between lights prevent you from speaking out against this barbaric practice?
In addition to ending the biennial Stroad Death Lottery, Operation Huttleston Avenue would yield other important benefits:
Increased Quality of Life for All Fairhaven Residents:
significant reductions in noise and air pollution
greater mobility for everyone, including kids, seniors and the disabled
additional room for green space, parks, and plantings, all of which would be accessible to everyone in town
Long-Term Financial Sustainability
increased property values along this corridor
increased access to businesses
the ability of restaurants to have outdoor dining, which drives revenue for these restaurants and surrounding businesses
with the elimination of crashes, a significant reduction in calls to local emergency services, freeing our police, fire, and ambulances up for other work and saving money for the town
reduction of road maintenance costs for the town
It’s also possible that converting MassDOT Stroad 6 into Huttleston Avenue would have no impact or even a positive impact on the time it takes to drive across town. With design speeds of 20 mph, signals can be replaced with roundabouts and other alternatives, allowing for a more continuous flow of car traffic.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast — Navy SEAL maxim
Start with Design Speed and Work from There
I’m not going to wade into the details here of how a 20 mph Huttleston Ave might be accomplished through thoughtful design, but most of you are familiar with the basics by now. My purpose here is to put a stake in the ground for where the conversation should start. I see no reason why the smart, highly-paid state engineers (and contracted firms) can’t sharpen their pencils and create a design option for Route 6 that would make it a street worthy of Fairhaven. Even before we get to that, I see no real reason why the town couldn’t test some of these ideas along sections of this stroad, giving us all the chance to see and feel what might be possible.
I don’t know who the next person to be killed on Stroad 6 will be, but we owe it to them to start acting now to prevent their death. I don’t know what cool business might open along this route if there were more foot traffic here, but I want to find out. I don’t know exactly what our town would do with dramatically more financial resources in the future, but I’d be excited to vote for higher teacher pay, better resources for our police and firefighters and the other investments more revenue and lower costs make possible. Now seems like a good time to start dismantling Stroad 6. Think about it, the next time you’re waiting on the light.