I want to see people oriented to trains or more efficient modes of travel rather than this personal, private ecosystem that people can just drive at violent speeds and to other people when they’re not careful. … Cars are not that good. We’re just promoting car culture by fixing the highways and not investing in train or light rail or bus of whatever the f** you want bikes. We should radically improve all our bike infrastructure. That’s my opinion. We shouldn’t be spending this much money on highways, we should make really awesome bicycle infrastructure around our car infrastructure. – Bridge St. Neighborhood Resident
“The reality is what you get from the traffic light is you get a lot of idling. Yeah. And you also get a lot of braking. Traffic going at 60 to 70 miles an hour is going to make less noise than traffic that is starting up and stopping and starting up and stopping.” – Howard Weissberg, Deputy Director Middletown Public Works
“There is a lot of air pollution caused by stalled and accelerating vehicles, and there is congestion on other streets. We’re in favor of removing the traffic signals to reduce these pollution issue.” –John Hall, Jonah Center for Earth & Art Executive Director
I feel like there is more pollution coming from paused cars than there are from moving cars. Right? … That is something that folks talk about, that lights compound traffic… Traffic sitting there during rush hour in either direction just means more pollutants and more sound pollution. .” – Diana Martinez, Middletown Resident
I don’t like hanging out in Harbor Park because trucks go by, and it’s like, I live next to the highway already. – Bridge St. Neighborhood Resident
What they really need to do is plant a lot of cedars or similar, like blue spruce all along the highway. … You’d block the view [of the highway] a little bit and they’ll be shade. It’s very bright in the summer. The trees would absorb a lot of the pollution… and buffer the sound and the pollution. And just the waves of pressure coming off the vehicles sometimes can be a little bit unpleasant. Trucks move a lot of air. – Bridge St. Neighborhood Resident
Part of the problem with my neighborhood and Harbor Park is because of the way that traffic lights create pollution hotspots. So, you’ll get a little more faster traffic moving by, but you probably won’t get as much concentrated bad air quality, which, I guess is a trade off—more noise pollution but less air pollution. – Bridge St. Neighborhood Resident
