Colonie

It is a sunny autumn evening. I get out of work earlier than usual. I'm driving home to my family. Everything is beautiful.

Then, I see the long line of brake lights on the road ahead, cars stopped on Maxwell Road. Oh no! — a traffic backup that promises a 20-minute wait just to get to the light at Old Niskayuna. I mutter a curse.

More and more, this headache — the dreaded traffic jam — feels like an elemental part of the Colonie experience. It's hardly surprising that many residents aren't happy with it.

"It's the number one complaint I hear as I campaign door to door," said Frank Mauriello, the Republican challenging Paula Mahan in the race for supervisor. "Everyone is tired of traffic, and they feel their quality of life is starting to deteriorate."

The reason for congestion, of course, is growth; Colonie is a construction hot spot. It is already the region's corporate hub and it will almost certainly pass Albany as our most populous municipality within a few decades.

It would be encouraging and wonderful to see more growth happening in the region's cities. But Colonie is also an entirely appropriate place for development, given that it sits at the region's center.

Better that growth happen there than at the rural fringes, right?

Still, critics say the town is being overdeveloped as open space vanishes, and Mauriello, for one, is basing much of his campaign on a promise to stem the problem with a construction slowdown.

This is where towns across upstate New York rise up to object. We're withering out here, they say, and you spoiled brats dare complain about a little traffic? Isn't growth better than the alternative?

Indeed, Colonie's traffic problems are the product of success. People want to live and work in the town, and those who already do are happy to stay.

In that Siena poll of residents last year, 72 percent said Colonie is on the right track. More than 90 percent described it as a good or excellent place to raise children. And 71 percent even said they pay about the right amount of taxes.

(The 2 percent who believe they pay too little are free to pay mine.)

Numbers like that are like candy for an incumbent, and I'll go ahead and offer the safe opinion that Mahan is in good shape for re-election.

But if you want to sniff out discontent in the Siena poll, you can find it in the questions about congestion. Eighty percent of residents described traffic as a significant problem, and half called the pace of commercial development the same.

Enter Mauriello, who is the minority leader in the County Legislature.

"The community is going to grow. We know that," he said. "But we have to find ways to mitigate the traffic."

Mauriello describes what he's proposing as a development moratorium, but that's a misnomer. He wants a modest 20 percent cut to the pace of construction until the town completes an update of its comprehensive plan, and he ultimately wants to reduce the density of new residential construction.

Christine Benedict made similar arguments when she ran against Mahan two years ago. "I'm not against development," she told me then. "But it needs to be done properly, and we're not seeing that right now."

A few weeks later, Mahan cruised to re-election with 55 percent of the vote.

More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

Today, the supervisor counters Mauriello's criticisms by noting that the town is studying ways to improve traffic flow and by suggesting that he's partly to blame for the problem. Mauriello was on the town board, Mahan says, when it allowed greater construction density.

"He's basically misleading people," she said, "by talking about things that he actually put in place."

Don't let the election season back-and-forth obscure an unpleasant reality: Traffic is not going to get any better.

Sorry for the pessimism, but congestion is an especially intractable problem, especially in growing suburbs with relatively low population density.

Public transportation isn't a realistic option in much of town. New or wider roads usually encourage more development and driving, and widening roads in residential areas would be unpopular anyway.

Even if Colonie curbed development entirely — an impossibility — traffic would grow due to drivers cutting through from other growing towns. And let's be honest: The way most of us get around — one person per 3,000-pound vehicle, usually — is absurdly inefficient. It all but guarantees traffic jams.

All of us who drive are part of the problem. As the saying goes: You're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.

The flip side is that congestion in Colonie and elsewhere in the region remains mild by the soul-crushing, traffic-hell standards of most larger metropolitan areas.

As bad as traffic in Colonie may seem, it's not Long Island. Yet.