Residents complain that detours and delays around town have been dragging on so long that locals have just accepted it as normal. At what point does ongoing road disruption become local government negligence?
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Add your commentThe real scandal here is that half this road work is actually the gas company and the water authority doing their own separate projects that just happen to overlap with DOT work. So you get this cascading disaster where nobody is coordinating with anybody else and residents pay the price. I went to a village board meeting in March and brought this up and basically got a shrug. A SHRUG.
I've lived on Mason Street for going on 23 years and I genuinely cannot remember the last time I drove a normal route to the grocery store. We've just... accepted it. My neighbor Karen calls it 'the Newark obstacle course' and honestly that's the most accurate description I've ever heard. At some point acceptance stops being resilience and starts being learned helplessness. That's where we are.
I want whoever thinks this is fine to try running a small business on one of these corridors for six months. My cousin had a flower shop near downtown and foot traffic dropped so badly during the worst of the construction she had to close early three days a week just to cut costs. She ended up shutting down entirely in February. So yeah, it is a quality of life issue, it's also an economic survival issue, and I'm exhausted by people acting like the only ones affected are impatient drivers.
Just moved here from Rochester about eight months ago and I thought the construction was a temporary thing when I signed my lease. My landlord definitely did not mention it was basically permanent. The detour on Route 88 adds like 12 minutes to every single trip I take. Small number but multiply that by every errand every day and it starts to feel like the town is punishing you for existing here.
Negligence? No. Annoying? Absolutely yes. There's a difference and people keep conflating the two. Infrastructure doesn't fix itself and these roads were genuinely in terrible shape. I'll take two years of detours over a busted axle any day.
Fun fact: Route 88 through Newark is actually technically a county road not a state highway so the village has almost no control over the timeline whatsoever. People keep yelling at village hall about it and they literally cannot speed it up. Blame Wayne County. Direct your energy correctly people!!
ok so genuine question for anyone who actually knows — isnt most of this work being funded through state DOT money that had a specific project window? like the village didnt just decide to tear everything up for fun. some of you are acting like the mayor personally dug up Union Street with a backhoe
My dad used to bring me to the diner on Milliken Road back in the late 80s, smooth roads, whole thing. Newark felt like a real working town. Now you take your car through here and it feels like a war zone. I moved away to Canandaigua in 2019 and I drive back to visit my mom twice a week. Every single visit something new is torn up. EVERY. SINGLE. VISIT.
Quality of life crisis is a strong phrase. Children in this country deal with actual quality of life crises. Sitting in traffic for an extra ten minutes because your road is getting repaved is called Tuesday.
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