A local teen killed trying to cross Route 6 on his bike. A town doing its best to share in the grief of the bereaved single mom.
The police quickly determine that nobody is at fault. Nobody is charged. Nobody is to blame. But it feels like maybe the summer crowding itself is somehow to blame. People talk about the traffic on Route 6, how swollen, stressful, fraught—how crazy– it has felt this summer. We talk this way every summer.
In fact the seasonal traffic feels like an accident waiting to happen.
An accident can be a terrible thing, but there’s a relief in knowing it’s just an accident. What can you do? Accidents happen. Just chalk it up to terrible luck, to fate, God’s will be done, whatever.
But if the perception is that a certain condition, the crowding, is an accident -waiting-to-happen, that changes things. “Accident” absolves all parties of responsibility. “Accident -waiting- to- happen” conveys the irony that an accident-waiting-to-happen, if it happens, is not an accident at all. It implies that somebody should do something about the situation. If you spot a rotten board in the deck and don’t replace it and someone sticks a foot through and breaks an ankle it probably won’t be considered an accident.
Given the recent spate of stories detailing its troubles, the Pilgrim nuclear power plant is coming to seem an accident-waiting-to-happen.
Entergy, the company that owns Pilgrim, has decided to close down Vermont Yankee, having decided that it’s too expensive to run it safely. The question probably on the minds of a lot of Cape Codders learning this news: Hey, what are we, chopped liver? How about applying the same logic to Pilgrim, especially given the lack of an evacuation plan for Cape Cod.
On the front page of this paper a few days ago was a story on how Entergy has made available, as it is required to do, a fresh supply of potassium iodide (KI), which helps to protect the thyroid from the effects of radioactivity. If a meltdown occurs, the KI will help alleviate part of the effect. But the net effect of the story is to reinforce the sense that Pilgrim is an accident waiting to happen.
If there’s a meltdown at Pilgrim [killing us, sickening us with cancers, rendering this peninsula unliveable indefinitely] it’s doubtful that it will be regarded as an accident. There will be blame. Of Entergy, of the NRC. And perhaps to a certain extent of ourselves for having,most of us, been too willing to play the role of victim.
With Pilgrim the assignment of responsibility might be clear. But what does it mean to say about deaths on the highway that summer crowding is to blame? People are saying that we should have more crosswalks, additional traffic lights, maybe a pedestrian overpass.
Locals showed up in force at a hearing last year to oppose Cumberland Farms’ ambition to enlarge their store and add a gas station. The main argument was the folly of adding further congestion to the very area where this accident occurred. It’s already too dangerous, we said, and the planning board turned down the company. But the fact is we ourselves as a town, a community, have never insisted on crosswalks or other pedestrian aids, on reduced speed . Or even just signs more compellingly urging care for human life. If some of this is not d irectly in our power because it’s a state highway, we probably could have done more to compel the state to do the right thing.
So summer crowding is to blame—and maybe an insufficient response to summer crowding.
A culprit here may be the romantic concept we have of ourselves as rural town and of Route 6 as a rural highway. Crosswalks and slower speeds have a suburban feel and seem inconsistent with the highway concept. We might have to jettison the idea of “country highway” to address the reality of the need to slow things down, at least in summer.
I’m sad to read this. I haven’t been to the cape in a while (as one of those summer crowd avoiders by nature). I have strong memories of watching for the crosses along Rt 6 and seeing parts of Rt 6 go through major revisions in recent decades. I was just searching for information about all the old crosses and road improvements, only to find this and realize that the improvements they already made were only a drop in the bucket.
I see “Traffic Calming” in places where it is an intrusion into the ‘regular flow’ of traffic, done only to receive grant money to assist with the repaving or whatever repairs were needed. Only to find this article showing where Traffic Calming needs to be put in place! Why do these other traffic calming projects come where they are not needed, and not where they are so desperately needed?
You are right about the “romantic” concept of the roads on the Cape being part of it’s charm, but reality has struck, and changes are needed. Good luck.