Community Organizations
Lake Avenue Bridge Greenwich over Merritt Parkway black and gold metalwork restored

Merritt Parkway Partnership Wins National Award for Bridge Project

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The recent rebuilding of the Lake Avenue Bridge over the Merritt Parkway in Greenwich has earned Connecticut a new award. A state agency, nonprofit group and business which all cooperated on the project to rebuild the bridge, part of the Merritt Parkway National Scenic Byway, won the 2020 Byway Organization’s Leveraging Services Award bestowed by the National Scenic Byway Foundation project. — an announcement from the Merritt Parkway Conservancy on behalf of the organizations in the partnership

Cited for their collaboration were the Connecticut Department of Transportation, the Merritt Parkway Conservancy, and contractor Mohawk Northeast Inc.

Maintaining and repairing scenic byways, which are both transportation corridors and tourism and quality of life assets, often generate conflicts between competing missions of safety, efficiency and aesthetic stewardship among agencies responsible for their immediate upkeep and the communities who use them. “The next two generations of drivers on the Merritt will live with the way we treat it today,” Conservancy executive director Wes Haynes wrote to the foundation in appreciation for the award. “Returning this bridge to structural soundness and the way it looked when it was built in 1940 demonstrates that goals of safety, efficiency and aesthetics can be met through collaboration when everyone pulls in the same direction.”

The project required taking the bridge out of service to completely replace the structural steel.

Opinion
Merritt Parkway James Farm Road Bridge

Merrit Parkway Conservancy Supports ‘No Truck on Highway’ Warnings on GPS Apps

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The Merritt Parkway Conservancy appreciates and fully supports U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s strong initiative requesting providers of GPS navigation software to add no-truck warnings for roads where trucks are banned. For most of the last 80 years, you could drive your car on the Merritt Parkway with reasonable confidence that you were safe in a stream of other cars, protected by prominent signs at each entry point prohibiting trucks. — text from the Merritt Parkway Conservancy

And it is safe to say that 95 years ago, when Congressman Schuyler Merritt advanced his vision of separating car and truck traffic with a new route restricted to cars through his Fairfield County district he never imagined a future when artificial intelligence would invite trucks to join you in the flow, unleashing them as unguided missiles, threatening your life, limb and your surrounding environment. But that moment arrived during the past decade, and this is the problem that Senator Blumental’s positive action aims to remedy — getting trucks off the Merritt Parkway where they do not belong — by convincing the GPS service providers to fix the problem they originated and have refused to correct to date. GPS software can be programmed to prevent routing trucks to prohibited roads, and responsible carriers subscribe to such commercially available accurate systems. But most free apps loaded on smart phones—now the navigational norm and widely popular—are not.