Students returning to Southwest next fall will confront gridlock.  In an admitted attempt to prop up property values on Lincoln and Sunset Avenues, the Town of Amherst will block off two of the six roads that provide access to campus.  Lincoln Avenue, which once ran pass the Student Union and connected with North Pleasant Street in the vicinity of the Grad Tower, was once the primary road to campus.  It remains the only realistic way to reach the 1013 parking spaces in the five lots it empties into.
Not surprisingly, there are several thousand cars that use Lincoln Avenue each day, during the morning and evening hours it isn’t uncommon for there to be a steady stream in excess of 10 cars per minute.  Sunset Avenue, the street that runs along the upper side of Southwest, will also be blockaded to prevent vehicles from accessing campus.  This will have a major impact on “move-in” as Sunset will be one-way in the opposite direction.

Town Manager Larry Shaffer has openly stated that it is his policy to prevent people from using Amherst roads to access UMass, instead wishing people to drive through Hadley.  Traffic on campus is so bad now that it is not uncommon for Route 9 to back up all the way to the I-91 interchange, Mullins events routinely back it up a half mile or more down I-91 itself.  Property owners on Lincoln and Sunset Avenues, including one man who bought a house for a million dollars – sight unseen – over the internet, are upset because they can not sell their houses for more than they paid for them.

Larry Shaffer has also stated that he will continue to enforce anti-student housing bylaws even though he has a legal opinion that doing so is unConstitutional.  He recently was the subject of an ACLU challenge to his attempt to prohibit the Fourth of July Parade and before that imposed a controversial $1 “tax” on the Boy Scout Christmas Tree fundraiser.

Ed cannot be reached by email.