As I sat in room 114 of Westbrook High School (the city’s council chambers) Monday night watching a plan to close the Stroudwater Street Bridge in Westbrook turn into a heated exchange between citizens, city councilors, the mayor and Maine Turnpike Authority officials, the problem with traffic in the communities to the west of Portland was never so apparent.

To anyone who didn’t know better, Stroudwater Street would appear to be a quiet country road on the outskirts of Portland, where cars pull over to the side of the road to watch Lew Randall’s cows give birth or take in the last few open fields close to Portland. Those familiar with the road or traffic patterns around Portland know, however, it’s one of the prime commuting corridors between Westbrook and Portland.

And that’s part of the problem. Roads like Stroudwater Street were never intended to be central routes for commuters.

Westbrook and Gorham are facing the same problem when it comes to traffic – too many cars are trying to get through these communities on their way to work and home with too few viable routes to do so. As communities to the west of Portland grow, the problem is going to get only worse.

As we report in a story on page 1 this week, with the lack of a bypass in Gorham, commuters have started finding their own way to avoid Village traffic congestion. The problem is the roads they’ve found aren’t adequate for large volumes of fast-moving traffic.

The roads are narrow and lined with homes and children playing in the yards. Frustrated that their quiet neighborhoods are transformed into throughways, homeowners like Carla Eagles have started trying to take back their streets.

Eagles stands out in her driveway each morning with her son waiting for the school bus and waiting for cars moving dangerously fast. When she spots the latter, Eagles rushes to the curb to signal to the car to tell it to slow down.

While her fervor is commendable and her directions something motorists ought to heed, drivers aren’t likely to slow down, unless they are presented with a more viable route or a physical road block. That’s why neighbors fed up with commuters misusing their streets need to band together to urge town and city councilors to install speed tables or some other device to slow traffic, and commuters fed up with getting to work late need to urge state and federal legislative delegations to support projects like the Gorham bypass and the reconstruction of William Clarke Drive.

People in Gorham have been talking about a bypass for nearly 30 years, and, of course, members of Maine’s congressional delegation have offered their annual assurances again that this is the year. They will forgive citizens like Eagles for being a bit dubious.

“Ask anyone around town about the bypass. The famous Gorham bypass – sure,” she told an American Journal reporter this week.

Westbrook has a budding star of its own – William Clarke Drive. Considering the difficulty the city is having paying its existing debts on downtown projects, that money is going to have to come from the state or federal government.

If citizens want to see these problems solved, they’ve got to let their legislative delegates know, no matter how futile the request may seem.

Brendan Moran, editor