Try to turn left at the flagpole. Drive by the high school on your way to work. Try to turn into traffic from any of the businesses near Exit 10. Suddenly, in this fast and distracted world, you will experience that rarest of luxuries: time to just sit and think. This is about the nicest thing we can say about traffic congestion in Newtown.

The town has been sitting and thinking quite a bit about this problem over the years, with most of the attention given to the traffic congestion in the center of town. Whether it is the “traffic calming” speed bumps on Queen Street or the succession of preposterous propositions for sorting out the vehicular kerfuffle at the flagpole on Main Street, every new solution seems to tug at the thread of an equally complex new problem just down the road.

Ultimately, it comes down to too many trucks and cars on too few lanes. Quantifying the collateral damage on the roads, as the Newtown Police Department has over the past three years, shows quickly the location of the worst trouble spots. For 2012–2014, the top three locations for motor vehicle accidents are Church Hill Road at Exit 10 (61 accidents), the flagpole intersection at Main Street, Church Hill Road, and West Street (55), and Berkshire Road and Wasserman Way, near Exit 11 and Newtown High School (34).

With both residential and commercial development reviving along Church Hill Road from the flagpole to Sandy Hook Center, the generation and attraction of traffic continues apace. Over the next decade, the impact of unmitigated traffic snarls in the town’s key economic areas could spell much more trouble for the Newtown’s well-being than the persistent frustrations we now feel at key intersections. It may come to pass that patronizing businesses in Newtown’s center may strike customers as not worth the bother of contending with all the traffic.

Looking for one-street, one-intersection traffic solutions is likely to prove fruitless if nothing is done to divert thru-traffic away from the center of town when possible and to upgrade the capacities and design of chokepoints all across town. It will require big solutions. Fortunately, the town has a partner in the state DOT, which already has a big solution for problems at Exit 11. The state outlined its plans for a new Exit 11 interchange at a public information session at the high school last week. It is expensive ($13–$15 million) and years in the future (the project’s estimated start date is 2019).

Setting aside possible improvements at the flagpole intersection, which are fraught with special considerations of the town’s identity and historic legacy, there remain opportunities both now and in the coming years to speed the flow of traffic in and around the center of town. Interior traffic access between parking lots and businesses on Queen Street and Church Hill Road are on the drawing boards for new development there. A longer-term goal should be to move forward with environmental and engineering studies necessary to determine the feasibility of opening a connector road from the end of Commerce Road to Wasserman Way, diverting some thru-traffic away from the center of town.

The time has passed for merely sitting around in traffic and thinking about these things. That is becoming an expensive luxury as the costs of not doing anything are mounting year by year.