HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO I-84

Happy Birthday to Interstate 84.  You’re now 64 and you look every mile of it… truly the ouroboros of CT highways

Last week marked yet another birthday for Interstate 84 in Connecticut, first opened on December 16, 1961, a milestone that deserves candles, cake, and perhaps a moment of silence for every commuter who has ever thought, “How is this highway still not finished?”

Back in the 60’s, I-84 wasn’t just a highway.  It was a promise.  The sleek, modern “Yankee Expressway” would whisk drivers effortlessly from Danbury to Hartford and beyond.  Congestion would vanish, they said. Town centers would breathe easier, they hoped.  America would drive happily ever after, wouldn’t they?

Spoiler alert: ‘they’ were wrong.

The early 1960s were the golden age of highway hubris. The federal government was handing out interstate money like Halloween candy, and Connecticut happily obliged by deciding that U.S. Route 6, a perfectly serviceable road that inconveniently (at least to drivers) passed through towns, had to go.  

What better solution than a wide, limited-access highway careening over and through over hills, rivers, and Hartford neighborhoods and downtown alike? 

When the first 15-mile stretch opened between the New York line and Sandy Hook, officials celebrated as if traffic had been permanently solved.  It hadn’t even reached Hartford yet but optimism was cheap, and costly concrete was plentiful.

By the time I-84 finally lumbered into the capital city years later, the damage was already baked in.  Entire neighborhoods were carved up in the name of progress. The highway bent, twisted, doubled back, stacked lanes on top of each other, and introduced a master class in left-hand exits, the traffic engineering equivalent of juggling chainsaws.  And we’re still debating how to fix all that… the topic for a future column, if not a thesis.

Consider the Waterbury “Mixmaster” where I-84 crosses Route 8, a traffic interchange so messed up that national traffic engineers hold it up as an example of what never to build again.  And that’s before CDOT spends $3-5 billion to replace it.

And yet, every decade since the ribbon was cut brought the same response to the ever-worsening traffic: Just widen it.

Traffic backed up? Add lanes. Still backed up? Add more lanes. Still bad? Rebuild interchanges, add HOV lanes, re-stripe everything, and promise that this time it’ll work. This logic has been faithfully applied for more than six decades — making I-84 not just a highway, but a self-sustaining traffic experiment in futility.

So as I-84 blows out its birthday candles, it stands as a living monument to “induced demand”, the transportation principle politely explained in planning textbooks (yawn) and painfully experienced by anyone who’s crawled through Waterbury at rush hour (ouch):  the more road you build, the more traffic shows up to fill it.  Like magic. Or mold.

To be fair, I-84 has aged exactly as expected.  It’s constantly under reconstruction and needed repairs, perpetually congested, and somehow always remains essential despite being deeply flawed, much like Connecticut itself.

So happy birthday, I-84.  Sixty-four years young.  You were built to end traffic and instead, you’ve given us a lifetime of it.