Derby, CT road widening
Derby, CT road widening
Derby, CT is a small, working-class, post-industrial town with a population which has been stagnant at about 12,000 for more than six decades.
The geniuses over at the Connecticut DOT decided that this obviously meant that the town's Main Street needed to be widened, by twice the size, destroying a number of historic buildings and uprooting numerous small community businesses in the process. That red stripe on the far left of the "After" pic is the new edge of the street.
Congrats. Your small peaceful town is about to become a gas stop on the side of an interstate highway expansion.
Either it will boom and you'll all be gentrified out. Or it'll bust and dwindle away to literally a gas stop.
Flip a coin.
I'm sure the local business community (on the side that wasn't torn down) was all for it because it would bring so much more traffic to their business, but they'll soon discover they lost all foot traffic and nobody driving will stop either because they're going too fast to even see that there's a business there.
well, let em suffer then.
I see it mostly depending on where the Walmart goes..
Cars (2006)
They widened it to add protected bike lanes, right?
They should remove the buildings on the other side, too.
Businesses can then operate directly out of the bed of a semi truck, and housing is provided by rental RVs.
For recreation, you can race from one stoplight to the next, or coal-roll some cyclists.not that we would propose any locals be forced to cycle. convict cyclists will be imported.
The before photo already had far too much road for a small town.
Lol, they demolished half the town for this?
well, yeah; cars gotta live somewhere.
half of the eight houses yes
Just one more lane bro. All your problems will be fixed.
They needed to fix that overhead cable that didn't meet in the middle.
it's a screenshot from streetview where such issues often occur when the images are stitched together
Beautiful stroadside shopping
But think of the profits (those go to few individuals, elected people included). Very very short term profits that overall cause a net loss for everyone.
"Historic" buildings
Found the Eurosnob.
Yes 🗿
Hey now, some of those are 30, nearly 40 years old!
Probably in the Derby CT history books.
Are you sure it was the Connecticut DoT? It sounds like the mayor sold out your city.
This looks like a before after, but in the wrong order
Let's face it, those buildings were making traffic worse.
/s
probably true. they gave people a reason to go downtown after all.
Gross
It looks a little awkward during construction but it'll all come together nicely once they put those buildings back up
Narrator: Those buildings were not put back up
Sad truth is more people drive through that town than to that town.
Old buildings like that can have massive maintenance, repair, and sustained costs while also being undesirable for businesses for a lack of modern infrastructure. Given the field behind them, these weren't central to the town and likely a good call to tear down.
How the space was used after that's a different discussion.
If Europe can keep their historic towns looking nice for literally thousands of years, we can keep a building for longer than 70.
The vast majority of buildings built 1000 years ago, have fallen apart already.
The ones still around were built extremely well. Much better, than our 70 year old buildings.
Survivorship Biasa lot of 20th century construction was absolute dog shit, though.
It's a few hundred year old town that refuses to grow. It's not a historic site. It's just some old town that uses to exist due to the historic limitations of transportation.
A town that's been stagannt for 60 years doesn't yell "I'm important"
The space will be used for a parking lot (originally was supposed to have a cycletrack, but that was deleted as well).
The project cost is $25 million. There will be long-term pavement maintenance costs that comes with the wider highway, not to mention the giant parking lot that is going in. There will be lost property tax revenue, and more death/injury. So it is highly doubtful the refurb costs of the buildings on that block would have been remotely close to all that.
A town that has been stagnant at 12000 people for 60 years doesn't spend, hell, doesnt have $25M to spend, for a project like this. There has got to be more to this story because this just doesn't make sense
Knock down buildings and widen a road, spending a lot of money and ruining infrastructure, to put in a parking lot in a town that sees no growth?
It would been wonderful if they could've at least used the parking lot to host a farmers market.
You'd be amazed on the cost to refurbish even moderately older buildings. The last time I was looking at one it was $3 million for the plumbing alone in one building from the 1940's to be able to support CRAC units without risking soil in the lines.
City or state would have had to pay to buy the properties anyway, though. Then the money spent on the widening could easily have been spent to modernize and update (or otherwise improve) the buildings.
They're also building an apartment building about 1/2 a block from there that is walkable to the commuter rail and bus station. The road was widend but it also razed some derelict building for the Greenway park. Just over the hill from these pics they re-did the bridge across the river with wide a walkable/rideable sidewalk.
Tldr: Yes, wider road, but lots of good stuff added too.
Even completely blind guessing, over even a 5 year gap, I'll bet the price of tearing them down was less than half the costs to the local community as keeping them and adding enough incentives to make businesses actually move in.
They could've totally used the space differently after, but tearing down was very likely the smart call.
If the road is a state route, the construction costs may even have been moved to the state tax budget and significantly save the local community money. The year on year costs wouldn't even be a fair fight at that point. They may have even made the road expansion as an intentional call to leverage the state tax burden to alleviate local tax burdens. Not knowing the area, I'm not gonna judge the call.
"Post-industrial" is just another way of saying that the town has no reason to exist anymore. Bulldozing half the town is half way to finishing the job and that needs to be done.
Yeah, fuck the people who live here and likely can't afford to move elsewhere, amiright? We should just "finish the job" and force them out because we need another highway, damn it! /s
When small towns start disappearing, it's often because they are no longer economically or socially relevant. Decline of local industries, reduced agricultural activity, lack of job opportunities, population migration...
The town is clearly on a downward trend. 60 years with no growth is not a positive thing.
Business owners just don't randomly sell because the DOT wants to widen a road.
The town is already gone.
Permanently Deleted
okay but people could, like, live there and have lives and stuff. or they could have before, at least.
