Nick Aceto: Design Matters

As a community shaped by outdoor recreation and a deep connection to the natural landscape, it’s troubling to see how often new development fails to reflect those values.

Over and over, we see oversized buildings, highway-scaled roads with no safe accommodation for people walking or biking, and subdivisions that erase the very character that draws people here. Recent tragedies have brought this disconnect into sharper focus. The fatal crash involving a cyclist at Route 16 and Eastman Road isn’t just an accident — it’s a symptom of a larger planning problem. We have highly engineered infrastructure designed primarily for cars, layered onto a growing community where residents and visitors increasingly want to walk, bike, push strollers and move safely without a vehicle.