I appreciated your recent editorial urging DelDOT to pay closer attention to concerns raised about its proposed Kings Highway project by local residents and businesses.
Once construction on this proposed project begins, hundreds of us who live on and near Kings Highway will find going about our everyday lives or conducting business anywhere outside the Lewes city limits to be a years-long nightmare. During construction and lane closures, any effort to reach Coastal Highway, particularly headed southbound, will ensnare us in interminable traffic backups, whether we take Kings Highway or try diverting to Savannah and Wescoats roads. The effects of incoming emergency vehicles to Beebe Healthcare don’t seem to have been considered by DelDOT either.
Any regular Kings Highway user is also familiar with an environmental reality on which DelDOT has been virtually silent: namely, the huge lake that forms on the southeast side of the roadway near Clay Road following every rain or snow event. DelDOT’s plan is destined to be more expensive than it claims because the agency has not explained how it will address these wetlands.
Curiously, DelDOT’s drawings describe stormwater management facilities for this project merely as potential, with such facilities located roughly a half-mile away from this ponding site. We deserve a full explanation of precisely how DelDOT plans to deal with this issue. Is the agency considering displacing these enormous quantities of stormwater by simply pushing them farther toward where a proposed shopping center allegedly intends to locate? Whether it’s that or moving them to a management facility, what are the consequences for the local environment of moving or removing these wetlands, including for any birds or other wildlife, or for local water recharge needs given the road’s proximity to Lewes BPW’s well fields?
A few minutes spent at Kings Highway and Gills Neck Road will make it quickly apparent that ample room already exists at that intersection for a roundabout. If after genuine consultation with the parents of young drivers at Cape Henlopen High School and, as another letter writer suggested, with officials at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, DelDOT concludes that a roundabout there would make for safer and more efficient traffic flow than the existing traffic signal, perhaps that and a roundabout at Dartmouth Drive could satisfy everyone’s needs.
But two roundabouts are enough. Five is overkill. And a wider roadway, with all the bells and whistles DelDOT has proposed, will prove to be an absurdly expensive solution in search of a problem – which, if one exists at all, should be paid for in time, money and inconvenience by those who created it, and not by the rest of us.
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