Sunday, July 02, 2017

NYSDOT-Utica FAIL!

No doubt NYSDOT will claim that we experienced an "unprecedented" storm event to excuse the flood-FAIL near the newly opened Court St. interchange yesterday where cars were literally abandoned in 4' of water and people had to be rescued with ladders. Maybe the storm event WAS unprecedented. . .

But FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION when you are talking about THE main N-S traffic artery in Utica. 

Those poor people in cars on the Arterial entered a flood zone and were TRAPPED there. They could not turn around against oncoming traffic, access to the lanes going in the opposite direction was blocked by a Jersey Barrier, and cross-streets had been cut off.

The City of Utica and its Common Council is as much to blame as the State. Only worried about securing the $63M project, they allowed the State to further disrupt Utica's street grid -- a grid with built-in redundancies so that when one street is blocked for whatever reason you can simply go over a block to use the next one.

Luckily no one died this time.

Time for the State to stop ignoring the negative impacts its projects have on City Streets. (Your proposed 5-S remake is a bunch of the same garbage, NYSDOT!)

Time for the City to stop worrying about losing the $$$ value of State projects, and to start defending its street system, and the interests of its residents and businesses. (Allowing the cut-off of streets crossing 5-S further damages the grid and makes businesses that much harder to get to).

City and State need to stop operating as if they are in separate silos. 


3 comments:

Strikeslip said...

(Thanks Anonymous 419 -- I fixed the link).

Brett said...

Today Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi, D-Utica, said
“We’re experiencing 100-year floods every four years now.” So, did the DOT build this new weather pattern into its design? Seems not! So should we trust the NY DOT to provide infrastructure to the Downtown Utica hospital concept? They made an error on Utica's pedestrian bridge - that someone said cost an extra $750,000 to fix, they had the fatality on the Marcy pedestrian bridge, and a traffic fatality in the work zone just flooded last year. I suggest we all say #NoHospitalDowntown you can learn more at www.NoHospitalDowntown.com

Anonymous said...

So when does the public payers get to use the AUD. When was the last time they even offered public skating at the AUD.