Dear Editor,
I was really peeved to see this proposal “…to eliminate the ‘slip lane’ at the intersection of West Hill Road and replace the intersection with a roundabout,” rehashed in the Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. (VHB) “Killington Road Master Plan” as reported last week.
Creating a “roundabout” or “rotary” has been proposed before with the expressed desire to “calm” traffic which, in laymen’s terms, means create a traffic jam. Yet somehow VHB walks this concept back in the presentation, “Most traffic is on Killington Road … so the roundabout would essentially be a straight-through … and not a bottleneck.”
If it’s “a straight-through,” then why create it, at significant expense, to begin with.
I am fervently against the elimination of the slip lane as it keeps traffic moving smoothly at that intersection. It’s bad enough there’s a traffic light there which is only effective during winter weekends that otherwise just wastes people’s time sitting there waiting for it to change. The town should have bit the bullet and kept the capability to change the light to a blinking red in the off season but chose instead to make it a permanent traffic stop light. Now they want to put in a “roundabout.”
These changes seem to progress insidiously: first change the light to a more inconvenient system then build a roundabout to create further congestion. And for what reason?
To slow down traffic so people will impulsively pull into roadside businesses instead of sitting in traffic.
Not long ago, when this was first proposed, I canvased the West Hill Road neighborhood including Weathervane Drive and presented a petition to the Select board, signed by virtually every full-time resident in that neighborhood, which requested no further consideration of eliminating the slip lane be undertaken. And yet here we go again.
Vito Rasenas, Killington
