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Heed their Advice

I attended the public hearing in Guilford on Nov. 1 on the application of the Shoreline Greenway Trail group to begin building its planned 26-mile, continuous, off-road paved bikeway from Hammonasset State Park in Madison to Lighthouse Point in New Haven, with a 0.7 mile section along Route 1 in Guilford to the intersection with State Route 146.

This small section is projected to cost upwards of nearly $1 million in taxpayer funds, and yet there is no publicly available plan to show where this so-called trail of 10-foot-wide, chip-sealed asphalt will go next on its 4.5 mile trip across the entire breadth of Guilford. Its proponents expressed themselves at the hearing as being unconcerned with this lack of a publicly available completion plan and full route through Guilford, but they urged the immediate expenditure of our public tax dollars to get work underway, just the same.

Thankfully, two world-recognized authorities on urban studies and regional planning, Professor Dolores Hayden of Yale, and Professor Robert Yaro of Penn, were also at the hearing, and spoke forcefully about the need for a full plan that considers all the aspects of constructing a bike road like this one, as well as its effects on many different values and resources, before any such partial construction should be approved.

We are lucky to count two such eminent planners and true greenway authorities as residents of our town of Guilford, and should heed their valuable advice: no map, no plan, no approval.

Lewis E. Burgess

Guilford