A Bridge Too Easy

On October 1st, family scallop season opened on Nantucket. For as long as anyone can remember, this was a quiet affair: a few dozen year-rounders in waders, a couple of retirees in skiffs, a few kids in their parents’ waders learning to work a push rake. You could hear a scallop rattle into a basket from across the harbor.

This year there was content. People posed in waders they’d bought that morning, talking to an iPhone on a tripod planted in the eelgrass. A man doing street interviews asked passersby which part of the scallop you’re supposed to eat, and his followers hung on every answer.

It is the third week of October. The island is supposed to be empty after Labor Day, and it no longer is. I have thought hard about how we got here, and I’ve reached an unpopular conclusion. The problem is not the influencers, the ferries, the geotags, or the brand trips. The problem is that getting here is too easy, and the state is about to make it easier.

The Only Thing That Ever Worked

Every summer, all of Massachusetts agrees on exactly one thing: the Sagamore Bridge is a nightmare. It’s ninety-one years old, with four narrow lanes, no shoulders, and on a bad Friday a backup on Route 3 that reaches toward Plymouth. People plan their lives around it. They leave at 4 a.m. They leave Thursday. They still talk about the year they sat in front of the Christmas Tree Shops for three hours. Everyone wants it fixed.

Everyone is wrong. The Sagamore traffic is the only thing on this coast that has ever worked. Every weekend it asks every person headed for the Cape one question: how badly do you want this? And for ninety-one years, a meaningful number of them have looked at the brake lights, sighed, and gone to Maine. That isn’t failed infrastructure. That’s a test of fortitude.

Meanwhile, the people who want the Cape preserved — its character, its pace, its authenticity — are the same people demanding a faster way onto it. You cannot love the slow pace of a place and also insist on arriving quickly. The traffic is the slow pace. It’s the first honest Cape experience you’ll have, and it’s free.

The Flyover Incident

In the good old days, the Sagamore rotary sat on the mainland side of the bridge, where Route 3, Route 6, and 6A met in a circle built in the 1930s. By the 2000s this beautiful little circle of hell was packed with 75,000 cars on a peak summer day. On Friday afternoons the backups ran for miles, past the driveway of the electrical supply store. Locals timed their errands around it. Tourists went around it the wrong way. By every account it was a disaster. It was also perfect.

In 2003, Governor Mitt Romney’s administration proposed replacing it with a “flyover”: Route 6 dropped underneath, and Route 3 ran over the top and straight onto the bridge. It opened in October 2006 at a cost of $60 million. The state had promised that a summer Saturday trip from Route 3 across the bridge would drop from 27 minutes to six. A deputy transportation secretary called the reviews “extraordinary,” and crashes at the bridge fell by half in a year .

Opponents had warned that easier access would mean more development, and they were right. The owner of Ye Olde Spirit Shoppe, by the old rotary, watched his business fall by half, because the cars that used to sit in front of his store now went by at highway speed. The man who ran Little Red Tow Truck told the Globe, in the middle of July, that business was “dead slow.” That rotary used to keep a tow truck company busy all summer.

Meanwhile, everyone else came over the flyover. The canal bridges carried fewer than a million crossings the year they opened. They now carry more than 38 million  a year. This summer, a Nantucket shop put a “No Influencers” sign  in its window, and an influencer showed up in the comments asking how the shop could still call itself feminist. I’m not saying the flyover caused that. I’m saying no one has proven it didn’t.

$2.1 Billion to Lower the Drawbridge

So naturally, the state is doing it again, at thirty-five times the price. MassDOT’s $2.1 billion plan  is a pair of new spans with wider lanes, real shoulders, and proper ramps. Construction starts in the winter of 2027–28, and all traffic moves onto the new bridges in the winter of 2036–37. Two billion dollars, and every cent of it goes toward letting more people in.

Gatekeeping Is Just Keeping the Gate

Nantucket has tried. The Sconset Bluff Walk is a public path that runs along the edge of private lawns, and by this spring it had become a set for outfit videos shot in front of other people’s hydrangeas. The Siasconset Civic Association proposed turnstiles . The Select Board said no, and the town said it had no legal authority to restrict a public way. What the island got instead was recommended hours, 8:30 to 7:30, which nobody has to follow, and “Bluff docents,” who are allowed to educate you and not allowed to stop you.

A docent. For a footpath.

The instinct was right. The location was wrong. You don’t put the turnstile at the end of the trip, after someone has already paid for the fast ferry. You put it at the beginning, at the canal, where turning around costs nothing.

The Gauntlet

So here is my modest proposal. Cancel the new bridges and give the $2.1 billion back. Then make the crossing harder.

Start by rebuilding the rotary exactly as it was, unmarked exits and all. In 2006, its last year, there were 128 crashes on and around the bridge, and the flyover cut that roughly in half. People call that progress. I call it sixty-odd drivers a year who never learned the Cape is supposed to cost you something. Little Red Tow Truck gets its business back.

Then add a toll. The canal bridges have never charged one, which explains a lot. One booth, cash only, right lane only. Anyone filming the line turns around. Anyone filming the turnaround turns around again. The booth is staffed by docents — real ones this time, with the authority the Select Board wouldn’t give them.

That will help, but it won’t be enough, because the bridge will still be there. So stop fixing it. The Sagamore is ninety-one years old, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns it, concluded years ago that it’s worn out. Believe them. Don’t patch it. Close a lane when a lane needs closing. Lower the weight limit every few years. When the canal opened in 1914, Cape Cod technically became an island. It’s time it started acting like one.

People will call this elitist. It isn’t. Anyone can cross. All it takes is the fortitude to sit in the traffic, and the people who have it are the people the Cape is for. I would know. I came over that bridge on the Friday before the Fourth of July, at three in the afternoon, in a Buick with no air conditioning, behind a boat trailer the whole way from Plymouth. Four hours. I didn’t film it. I didn’t post about it. I sat there like someone who wanted it.

Next October

Picture opening day next year. You can hear a scallop rattle into a basket from across the harbor again. A kid in her grandfather’s waders pulls up her first scallop, and the only person who sees it is her grandfather. The man with the street interviews is in Bourne, on his fourth lap of the rotary, asking the car next to him which exit is Hyannis.

Nobody’s going to tell him.