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Ever since Rt 1 opened … I have dreamed of this day when more than a single lane would carry traffic from northbound SR 1 onto 95…..
It has now been a week and here is a list of problems needing immediate attention.
1) It is very difficult and dangerous to enter northbound SR 1 from the 273 exit off of Christiana-Hare’s Corner Road, then cross two lanes of fast moving traffic within a tenth of a mile, to head north onto 95.
2) This weekend North -7 was jammed by people used to getting in the right lane to make a right exit. That access is blocked and those people had to go through to Churchman’s Crossing, get off, go under Rt. 7, take the left and then enter northbound 95 off Southbound 7. Warning signs of New Traffic Patterns did not cut it. Something like ALL TRAFFIC FOR 95 NORTH GET IN LEFT LANE RIGHT NOW, would be appropriate.
3) Anyone leaving the mall from its south exits to go north, gets dropped on the through road underneath 95 with no access to northbound 95 Insufficient sign-age is available at those exit points, and most people used to going home a certain way, are suddenly surprised to be stuck in a traffic jam, of many similar very confused people. Then having to follow the above mentioned route to get out of it. NO ACCESS TO 95 WILMINGTON PHILADELPHIA OR NEW YORK would be the appropriate tone such a message should take at those exit points on the South end of the Christiana Mall. Another sign could direct them to the northbound side, where the exit north on 95 is open for business.
4) The left ramp dropping Northbound I 95 cars into the left lane of 95 is very dangerous. The narrow cattle shoot at the bottom of the ramp tends to slow cars just as they enter the very high speed lane of north I 95. The cars enter at 65 mph or under and much of the traffic is moving in that lane at 80-90 mph. High speed drivers are used to hugging the left lane. As soon as the lane opens up, they pull over into the left lane, right behind a car doing 55-65 mph. If blocked on their right, a crash occurs…. This is the most dangerous part of the flyover project. Immediately portable signs should be warning northbound I 95 traffic that slow traffic WILL BE approaching from the left.
5) Which brings up this interesting conundrum. We need to rethink our concept that the fastest traffic must always be on the left. For to have slower traffic move to the right then move back to the left to take the Wilmington side of the 95-295 split, defeats the entire purpose of dropping the lane on the left side. Any vehicle, car, truck, whose maximum speed is 65 and is coming from SR 1 and heading to Wilmington, wants to stay in the left lane and follow it all the way to Wilmington.
On this stretch of highway, across Churchman’s Marsh, it makes sense for the high speed traffic to fly down the center. Signs on both the right and left, reminding motorists that slow traffic keeps to the right, keeps to the left, are in order here. Otherwise the tendency to run on the left at speeds well over the speed limit (but against which the State Police are powerless to contain), will send fast moving traffic straight into the backs of slow moving vehicles simply stuck taking the only way into Wilmington from Northbound SR 1 onto 95….
The answer is to warn northbound traffic on Interstate 95 that slow moving traffic will be entering both the left and right lanes, and that fast moving traffic needs to be in the center three lanes…..
Until then, taking the trip north into Wilmington is pretty scary ….. as you keep one eye in the rear view mirror on those fast moving cars coming up on your tail from behind….
If you are like me traveling through this interchange is exciting since with every commute, and nightly lane closure, something new and different has been erected.
It has gotten hard with all the complexity, to visualize just where each bridge and ramp will lead…
Hope this helps… It does make one proud of Delaware, … “where roads get thought out first…..”
Photo Courtesy of www.oldwilmington.net
It is a question of degree.. Who has the more authority within the current moment. A brand new administrator elected by the choice of the people over his predecessor, or…. a plan put in place and carried out by a previous administration.
Bottom line. There are no rules here. Depending on which side you seem to be on… will affect your outlook. The decision is both right and wrong for either side, depending upon which criteria one will use to decide.
Examine the first.
An Administrator is elected. He comes in and takes over his office. One of the planks he ran on was to reverse a certain act of his predecessor. When the people had a choice of electing a person who was for the proposal in question, and one who was against it, they overwhelmingly went for the one who was against it….
Now the second.
An Administrator inherits a problem from his predecessor. He applies considerable effort to get a deal made and moved forward. It goes through all proper channels. It is legalized by a vote on Council. It is the Council and thereby the County’s official policy. A schedule has been drawn up. Funding approved. It is in effect, in the middle of being completed…. Since it was set in stone before the new administrator comes in, he has no right to interfere…..
Can a chief executive overrule a previous Council’s decision? Well. Romney certainly was going to with Obamacare.
Congress had passed it, the Supreme Court had legitimized it, and Romney was going to make it obsolete with the stroke of a pen, based solely on the argument that it was the wish of a mandate of the voters putting him into office.
If it would work for the president, it must also be effective and allowed, under the new New Castle County Chief Executive.
It therefore, is not only legal, but ethical, contrary to the opinion of one certain Danberg who resigned in protest as county attorney on Wednesday.
A leadership role demands that a leader leads. For a leader to have to swallow every poisoned pill his predecessor were to leave him, puts not only him, but his department and the province he oversees…. at risk. That would be harmful to all society, if something was locked in stone by every outgoing administration…. Were that the true will of the people of New Castle County, to have Barley Mill Plaza go forward, then Paul Clark would now be the executive, not Tom Gordan…
Either way the decision goes, someone gets hurt. If the decision is to go forward, then those residents around that area who are the victims of a fabricated traffic study, are doomed to suffer. If the decision is to be stayed, and reworked pending a new traffic study, then those who have invested into the plan, are the ones doomed to suffer.
So someone has to get hurt! The question is …. who?
First it was Donald Trump’s amateur fillies… now it’s the professionals… Delaware has lost twice to California…
In the Ms USA pagent, Delaware’s own Katie Hanson, lost to Ms California who naturally, took the crown… When it came to Thoroughbreds, Delaware did a little better……
Delaware’s Havre De Grace, took the lead and California’s blind luck, just came up in time for the wire.
Even when he drew even with Havre de Grace, Gomez said he was unsure Blind Luck was going to get past her.
It may seem unfair that “great big ole California” beats out the state with the fewest number of counties (only 3) … but, if you compare populations, the simple fact that quite often Delaware and California are pitted neck to neck just before the final wire, it is fair to say that with California’s population of 37,253,956 versus Delaware’s of 897,934 it takes roughly 41.49 Californians, to match up to and equal one Delawarean….. 🙂
We may be small, but we ARE tough!
I know this is rather an unpopular thing to say today, but its true…
My exuberance was brought on by going down Interstate 95’s brand new fifth lane during the middle of morning rush hour…
Anticipating the usual 45 to 50 minute commute, bogged down through Churchman’s marsh, I breezed to work 20 minutes early, It was only 5 minutes over theoretical!!!
I know that deep within the administration there were battles to not spend the money on the improvement, but Ruth Ann stuck to her guns and the project went forward…
When the return trip lane is finally complete, I figure that she has saved me 2/3 an hour every working day… My math calculates that it is just under seven 24 hour days that she has saved me…
That’s a lot of time.
I love her….
photo by SUCHAT PEDERSON, News Journal
If you didn’t heed my earlier post and shift all your assets over to fixed rate, you still have time. Not much, however according to this.
I laugh every time a republican says “Deficits do not matter.” Obviously these republicans do not work in a bank. I don’t know about you but my bank hires hundreds of people to call and tell creditors the exact opposite every day. Outrageously, if banks followed Republican mantra, this country would be, not just between a rock and a hard place, but in a rock itself………..
Not to sound naive, but there is a propensity to use borrowed money in order to finance growth. Realistically, without borrowed money, economic stability would be a broken dream. Borrowing provides a framework to spread expensive costs over time and make those high ticket items, finally affordable. Translated to real time: one can buy a house much easier by getting a loan and making payments over thirty years, than they can by pinching pennies for thirty years and buying the house with cash. Plus they actually get to enjoy the result over the time they are paying it off, despite the fact that the total amount paid over time with interest, will be much higher. So borrowing is not “all bad.”
So in this capacity, when financial maggots crawl all over the federal budget figures, one can consider where this remark is coming from. It comes from Dick Cheney.
The average American in 2005 paid $3179.00 on something that doesn’t matter, if one takes the original author of the remark seriously. (Hopefully no one but E-ZPass Mike Castle is taking him seriously anymore). Let us hope we can all get our creditors to agree.
“I don’t care how much you say I owe! National policy under a separate entity (Vice President’s Office) of the Federal Government, dictates that whatever I owe,… doesn’t matter!….Go ahead! …Sue me!…..I’ll bring up that the very government you are using to sue me, itself doesn’t even subscribe to the principals on which you are suing me. It will never make it to court… …….”
Dream on.
So we are stuck with a deficit. Is that all bad?
Get this, and with tongue in cheek, I say this sounds so partisan it literally scares me…….. Deficits do not really matter under a Democratic president, but they do under a republican president! I am laughing even as I write this.
What? Is that not the most partisan statement ever written on a Delaware blog!……I can hear Dave now……”Got the facts to back that up?”
Sort of……
Now I know no republican will have respect for this person: Joseph Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University and Nobel Laureate, economics 2001 for he has not been officially “approved” by “the party”, but the rest of you might…..
[W]e shouldn’t focus on deficits themselves. What really matters is the country’s balance sheet, its assets and its liabilities. Consider a company. You would never say, oh, this company is borrowing a lot and therefore, it is a bad company. You would always say what is it borrowing for? Is it for investment? You want to look at both its assets and its liabilities. You want to look at its balance sheet. Well, when we talk about the deficit, we’re talking about only one part of that balance sheet. We’re talking about what’s happening to the liabilities, what it owes, but not to what it’s spending the money on.
Now republicans…..that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Anyone who has ever looked at a balance sheet would implicitly recognize that the borrowing costs, or interest paid upon a debt, fall into the liability column. So using Stiglitz and analysing the Cheney Tax Theorum throught that programming, one can assume that the following is true:
$1.6 trillion in tax cuts? Doesn’t matter, and not just because of the revenues they bring in, but because, really, what is an extra GDP percent or two worth of deficit? A comma in history. No matter. Greater spending increases under this administration than any in the history of the country? No worries — we can borrow to pay for it and our credit is good (until it isn’t). The additional borrowing costs? They don’t matter (see Theorem).
So why are deficits good under Democrats and not good under republicans? It depends on what one spends the money on, stupid…….
Some of us are blessed with a spouse having a fine business sense. After we turn over our money to them, they invest wisely, and wow, we have done quite well…….Others of us, are less fortunate……..once our spouses have their fingers on our money, they spend it on stupid stuff. In both cases our income stayed the same. (“Honey, here’s my check.”) But there is a great difference between the two net worths over a period of time …..(We are how much in the hole?”)
So when money is borrowed for investments it is good. When it is borrowed for frivolousness, it is not.
Therefore in the current political environment — or until the next election — republicans like E-ZPass Mike Castle, or those who are deficit-indifferent, with much fanfare, applaud the leveraging our of our national resources to support the policy priorities of this administration!
By the time he leaves office, President Bush under the Saruman influence of Dick Cheney, will leave us paying upward of $50 billion more a year in deficit financing costs than when he took office. And for what?
Hurts, (my fiscal conservative friends), doesn’t it…..
Wall Street Journal buried this deep within their pages: Banks Delay Sale Of Chrysler Debt As Market Stalls
In plain English it means that banks have decided not to fund the Chrysler deal. The deal will still go through, mind you, but the risk will be absorbed solely by those underwriting the deal, and the 12 billion will not be spread to investors as has been done in the past. “The market has dried up.”
This does not bode well for Newark. Why? Because the cost of money, or the interest rate for the twelve billion, has just risen. That means that all costs, supplies, labor, and facilities, must be tightened even tighter in order that corporate is able to pay for the increased financing.
Plain talk: their mortgage, which was already 200 million a year, just hit the ARM plan and may go as high or higher than 300 million!!
That money was sorely needed to invest in environmentally friendly and marketable vehicles. They do not have that option and will have no recourse but to buckle down, hold on, and hope to survive a financial ride as scary as the Ka.
One can only hope that Kia or Hyundai is interested in opening shop in Delaware…..It will be a new experience for the local UAW to be sure, but Toyota seems to treat Americans more fairly than does our own……..At least foreign autos are sensitive to America’s needs and do not foot drag when it comes to creating cars that American’s WANT to buy…….
Anyone who clicked on the above links saw a difference in profitability among all those manufactures. Delaware needs to send someone to South Korea today. Secure jobs are often found within secure companies.
So what does this mean to everyone else? A lot. Here is how it breaks down.
Cheap money is no longer available. It is what has been driving up the stock market. Next time someone tells you it was republican tax policy, bitch slap them. (smile) If borrowed money is cheap then one can afford to spend more in the acquisition of a corporation, because on the bottom line, the cost is the same. Similar to the housing boom which has now ended, the monthly mortgage is the same on a house costing 250,000 at a 3% rate as an 80,000 house at 9%. Just as house prices soared, so did the price of corporations, pushing the market upward……….
Well, ladies and gentlemen. That push has stopped, as of yesterday…….The Fed may react someway and save us from a crash similar to the last time money was not available…..1929.
The political implications are obvious. This could not have happened under a competent Al Gore administration. But I will leave that for someone else to expound. Right now my broker is shut down, off-line, and not answering calls………
I just hope I can shift everything over to “fixed” before everyone else catches on…………………….
kavips 
