First Post: Roads and Stripes (DMM #1)

Hello to the reading audience of Dryden Democrats (I'll have to ask Mary Ann to update the header)!

A few hours after the election results were made public I received my first constituent phone call. I quickly started to search for the answer and here's a brief synopsis for the public.

Issue: Stripes on roads faded and missing from some town roads

Notes: In the last week with all of the precipitation and changes in temperature we in Dryden had a lot of fog roll in. The most noticible fog was on the roads and driving visibility was around 20 feet in some places (sometimes less!).

Answers (via Mary Ann Sumner, Town Board Member and Jack Bush, Dryden Highway Superintendent):

• When a municipality decides to stripe a road it then has to continue to maintain the striping
• There was a time when none of the Town roads were striped
• As with everything in the Highway business it is expensive
• Last year approximately 18 miles were striped and the year before 22 miles (There are 163 named roads in the Town making a total of 117.3 miles of Town highways)
• Every year it is difficult to get the striping companies to stripe Town roads
• They are limited to their window of time to apply paint to the roads because of weather conditions & equipment failure
• State & County roads become higher priority obviously because of higher traffic counts and miles being painted
• The Town does not own a paint striping truck & it would not be cost effective to buy one
• The Town uses the contractor that has the Bid with Tompkins County
• This year has been a difficult one for the contractor who received the bid because of rainy weather & a truck breaking down & it looks like they may not ever get to us
• Three other contractors have been contacted by the highway department and they are all behind because of the weather
• The weather will continue to get colder & snow will fall; this probably will mean no striping this year

Jack mentioned that he recieved 5 phone calls on Tuesday because of fog on Monday night. When he personally was driving through the fog he knew he would be getting calls. He tries to be proactive with highway issues however he is at the mercy of both the striping contractors & mother nature.

For a complete set of Town highway projects completed in 2005 and the goals for 2006 see the Town of Dryden Highway Department homepage and scroll down:
http://www.dryden.ny.us/hiway.html