The blankety blank traffic

The Valley got a little meaner this week when the local daily decided to take a swipe at Selectmen (and former State Senator, School Board member and now coach) Mark Hounsell on the by-pass issue. Hounsell took the bait and responded with a clever rhyme (people said) in which he obliquely accused the paper of not caring about Berlin and Gorham, oddly enough. Who does care about Berlin and Gorham? Nobody, clearly, but that is a topic for another day.

I think the Daily has it right. $60 million is enough to buy half the homes on Conway Lake (the west side anygate) but it doesn’t buy a whole lot of highway. Last summer I timed the crawling pace from Beep Beep Deli to the Conway light and it was ten minutes every time even when we had to wait for the Seybold Express to blow through. That doesn’t seem awfully long. Not like trying to get into town/North Conway on a rainy summer night. I’ve seen traffic backed up to the Albany church. But that’s only once in a while and if you’ve been up here long enough, you know how to get around if you’re not smart enough to stay away or arrange your schedule so you don’t end up in that snarl.

Come to think of it, I do feel badly for the poor guys in trucks and busses that come down from the Grand bois du Nord. But is that worth the money? When they get to their teeming destination they have to put up with the same thing.

The “study” that has been going on for more than three decades is a farce. They have been talking about it, and having meetings up the ying yang and have even bought up land for it and now it isn’t going to happen. Why isn’t it going to happen? Because it’s not worth it. Then what the Sam Hill was the “study” for? It certainly wasn’t free. Are their reports to be had by the public that can tell us why they made all those people move out of their houses when they didn’t really have to? Some of them were in there for generations. I know they spent tens of millions on the “study”. Who is responsible for this “study” to no where? The whole bloody thing gives me an eyeache.

Some of us feel strongly that the reason everything is so crowded up here and tarted up like route 1 in Saugus is because we keep widening the roads so more people can come faster and then have to wait in line when they get here. I suppose that makes sense to people other than Billy Marvel and me, but its foolishness. The views to the mountains are scarred with McMansions and condos. The strip looks likes one outside of Cleveland or Phoenix and even the Catholic cemetery has lost the hedge between the stream of cars and those trying to rest in peace. My peeps are in that place and it fairly pisses me off.

Then I remember: Carroll Reed built an empire from a little ski shop in Jackson and sold out to a huge conglomerate. He set the tone in North Conway Village and it’s still pretty good. He also set the pace for making it big off the tourists. There’s nothing we can do to stop all these people coming up, I suppose. But do we have to make it easier?