By James V. Horrigan
Staff Writer
Cul-de-sacs. Dead ends. Some people love them, others don’t. The way one feels could depend upon a couple things, including whether the person lives on one. If you do, perhaps you are a big fan; but if you’re involved in town planning, you might feel otherwise.
Then there are people like Cory Fellows, who get pulled in both directions.
As a homeowner and parent of three children under 5, he knows cul-de-sacs have their benefits. The three-year resident of Scarborough said there is an undeniable appeal to residential streets with low, or no, through traffic.
“When my wife and I were looking for houses, whenever we saw one in a low-traffic area it was a major plus,” he said. “Everybody likes the image of kids being able to play basketball or street hockey on the road in front of their house. And people take a particular dislike to living on streets that are, or become, a cut-through to other streets.”
However, Fellows is also a member of the planning board and sometimes has to look at the issue from a different perspective, too. In that regard, he’s a lot like Town Planner Dan Bacon, who from a professional standpoint finds little merit in cul-de-sacs.
“I can’t think of a benefit in terms of the larger community,” Bacon said. “They’re less efficient in terms of services, if you look at plowing the road, collecting the trash. And they’re more challenging when it comes to fire access or emergency response.”
But Bacon, a father and homeowner, wants to make sure his feelings aren’t misconstrued. He knows first-hand that dead end streets do have some benefits for the homeowner. He lives on one in Cape Elizabeth.
“I understand the ‘neighborhood-liness’ of dead end roads because you know everyone who’s driving by your house. But there are lots of benefits to interconnection, to neighborhoods with streets laid out on a grid,” he said.
Local developer Rocco Risbara III, who recently appeared before the planning board with a preliminary plan, including cul-de-sacs, near Trail’s End in the Holmes Road section of town, echoes that sentiment.
“From a development standpoint, we’re always interested in sales and homeowners seem to like cul-de-sac lots very much and will pay a premium for them, so we tend to prefer that kind of development,” he said.
Fellows understands how he feels; developers respond to market demands. It’s not the responsibility of the developer to run counter to those demands, he said.
Fellows said the Risbara family’s deep roots in the town benefit everyone.
“They have an appreciation for what’s here and they’re not just looking to maximize their density for the sake of maximizing their profit.”
From his standpoint, Risbara said he understands why municipal planners like Bacon feel the way they do.
“Towns like to have connectivity, simply for maintenance and plowing purposes. Fire and rescue sometimes come into play, too,” he said.
Risbara, who has been an area homebuilder for more than 20 years, doesn’t see anything changing from the developer’s perspective. Cul-de-sacs, he said, have always been popular; but he can’t escape the fact that the issue is prompting more and more discussion among local planning boards.
“Some towns want more connectivity, especially the town of Gorham,” Risbara said. “They try to stress it. Gorham hasn’t said you can’t do cul de sacs anymore, but when there’s a chance to tie into an abutting neighborhood, they like to do that.”
Since 1991 Cape Elizabeth has prohibited the construction of dead end streets longer than 2,000 feet or serving more than 20 homes in an effort to promote interconnectivity. In 2006, reacting to a developer’s plan to connect two dead end streets in order to avoid the prohibition, Cape Elizabeth voters approved a referendum prohibiting the creation of “short cuts,” as defined by town ordinance as any “through road that creates a shorter distance for vehicular travel between any two points on arterial, collector, rural connector or feeder streets.”
Although Bacon said Scarborough isn’t yet at the same point as Gorham and Cape Elizabeth, he points out that dead ends or cul-de-sacs will not be permitted in two major new developments, Dunstan Crossing, which is under construction off Route One near the Saco municipal boundary, and Eastern Village, which will be located between Black Point Road and Commerce Drive, behind the Maine Veterans Home and the old Bessey School. Although the latter is still in the design/permitting phase, over the next decade the two projects together could lead to the construction of several hundred new single-family homes in Scarborough.
“It’s what they call a traditional neighborhood development,” Bacon said. “All the roads are on a grid; there are no dead ends. Everything is interconnected.”
Although Dunstan Crossing and Eastern Village are the only developments in Scarborough where the theory is being tested, Bacon said he wouldn’t be surprised if the town’s Comprehensive Plan is amended to include future developments in other parts of town as well.
“We’re actively promoting interconnections and writing regulations to either encourage or require grid or interconnected streets,” he said. “Where it is possible we want to minimize the number of dead end streets.”
Fellows feels the same way, but realizes that just as you cannot force two particular individuals to be friends, you cannot force homeowners to be neighbors, no matter how close their geographic proximity.
“Keeping in mind all the legitimate concerns about cut-through traffic, we understand that there are people who bought their homes on a cul-de-sac because they wanted to. It’s easy to see how they would be resistant to having roads punched through,” he said.
But there’s a larger, more social issue to deal with, he said.
“I think some of our efforts at residential connectivity might be construed as an attempt at social engineering, and I wouldn’t necessarily want people to interpret it that way,” Fellows said. “There’s an undeniable benefit when neighborhoods are connected more with each other, but it’s obviously not our job or the town’s job to try and dictate where everybody lives.”