Save Our Lexington Streets (SOLS)

Fed-up with the surge in traffic here in Lexington? You are not alone.

Please join your friends and neighbors in our effort to Save Our Lexington Streets (SOLS).

How?

By petitioning our Town Officials for help controlling the overwhelming surge in traffic at Hancock and Adams Streets, as well as at other major stress points in Lexington, MA.

Our children should be able to leave school in the morning without their parents fearing for their safety.

Homeowners should be able to exit their parking spaces without unyielding cars whizzing past, horns blaring.

Joggers and power walkers should not be inhaling fumes from rush hour traffic backed up for blocks.

And seniors should be able to use Lexington's crosswalks without being forced into a game of chicken with streams of commuters taking shortcuts between Route 128 and Route 2.

But this is not the case.

Commuter traffic from these main routes has taken over to the point where noise, near-misses, road rage and crashes have become an onerous burden on residents, outweighing perhaps any other factor.

At the same time, the surge in traffic has put an ever-increasing burden on our police and fire departments.

One of the worst intersections in Lexington may be a good place to start taking back control of our streets: Hancock and Adams.

While there's a stop sign at the island (valiantly maintained by the Lexington Garden Club), that sign may as well not exist, because commuter congestion has turned it into a yield sign - if that.

Abutters find themselves penned inside their driveways, inching forward at great risk to themselves and others.

Children on their way to Fiske and Diamond Schools meet with a confusing impasse. A wrong decision could prove a disastrous one.

Flaring tempers and smash-ups are common. Police and fire/rescue find themselves called upon at regular intervals.

As one of our traffic experts commented at a recent meeting, "the island type intersection that's there now was fine for handling the kind of traffic we had forty years ago, but not now."

Now is the time to start modernizing our streets, creating solutions for today's problems. Let's begin this journey one beleaguered and overworked intersection at a time.

Lexington should be and can be a safer, more pleasant place to live. For this reason we would like to support a pilot study on how to best manage the traffic flow streaming into Hancock and Adams.

Hopefully, this will lead to informed discussion and debate, followed by prompt action, not only at Hancock and Adams, but ultimately in every one of our besieged neighborhoods.

Save Our Lexington Streets - now.