Left by the wayside

It’s good to hear Transportation Commissioner John Melrose acknowledge that the crumbling, narrow, hilly and twisting 53-mile stretch of Route 1 between Topsfield and Houlton is one of the worst sections of road in the state.

It’s not good, however, to hear that the Department of Transportation has no plan afoot to significantly improve the only major road (for lack of a better phrase to describe something both vital and utterly inadequate) in the northern Washington/southern Aroostook area. Not this year, not next year, not during the next 20 years.

That’s because, as Mr. Melrose told the more than 160 people who gathered in Danforth last week to describe the problem in harrowing detail, no one from the area was on the regional transportation advisory committee that worked with the DOT to set priorities for short and long-term road projects.

That’s an unacceptible explanation for an inexcusable situation. First, if the advice of the regional advisory committee was that crucial to transportation planning, the DOT should have seen to it that the entire region was represented. Second, and more to the point, it should not take a volunteer citizens’ committee to make road-building professionals aware that a substantial portion of the only theoretical highway in a large chunk of two counties is unsafe at any speed and has been for years.

At the Danforth meeting, a physician’s assistant told of a ride so rough that ambulances enroute to the Houlton hospital have to pull over and stop so emergency personnel can perform life-saving procedures. A business manager described how, when riding in his delivery trucks, the seat belt is all that keeps him from getting thrown through the windshield — not in a crash, just in “normal” driving conditions.

In some parts of Maine, such threats to health, safety and commerce would be cause for immediate and concerted action. In northern Washington/southern Aroostook, it’s cause for a few miles of work here and there during the next few years and the vague promise that, although there is no money budgeted for more, maybe some money can be shifted around. Or, more likely, maybe not.

At the meeting last week, Rep. Barry Gillis of Danforth pretty well summed up local sentiment: “All we have is Route 1 and we’ve been left by the wayside every time.” To suggest that folks in this long-neglected region are somehow at fault because they weren’t represented on an advisory committee seems rather like blaming the stranded motorist for having a flat tire.