The intersection of Florida Road and North College Drive was down to one lane because of storm sewer construction. As a result, I had seen traffic backed up for a mile both ways on Florida.
Ordinarily, the detour route would be County Road 250 to 32nd Avenue to Holly Avenue, back to Florida. But that road segment is closed for improvement on 32nd, and the designated detour was the portion of Florida with that huge construction bottleneck.
So there was no reasonable detour route for either of these closures, and residents of northeast areas of Durango were left with no reasonable route to the business district.
There was no way I can see for emergency vehicles to reach the many residential areas northeast of the bottleneck, so the problem was not one of inconvenience only. The hole on the road at Florida and College should have been immediately covered by steel plating, and further work on this project abandoned until the work on 32nd street was completed.
Clearly, the commencement of construction of these projects at the same time is the result of poor planning for vehicular flow.
Richard H. Ruth
Durango
