By ABBY GOODNOUGH in the New York Times Published: July 30, 2010: WISCASSET, Me. — The summer traffic backups in this village of old sea captains’ homes are infamous in Maine, lines of inching cars and trucks that seem to extend all the way into autumn. The Sottnik family, on vacation from their home in Parker, Colo., eating lunch after standing in line for more than an hour at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset, Me. An employee finishes assembling one of the lobster rolls for which Red’s is famous. The sandwich sells for $14.95. Some blame gawking drivers, or the short, tight curve of U.S. 1 heading into town, or the lower speed limits in the historic district. Others say it’s the fat, buttery lobster rolls at Red’s Eats, a seafood shack with a fanatical following that sits hard along the highway here, just before the bridge out of town. “I’ve seen people stop their cars and jump out just to take a picture,” said Frank Risell, who owns a bed-and-breakfast in Wiscasset. “Day and night, it’s a problem.” For at least half a century, townspeople have fervently debated how to solve the traffic problem. They have considered putting a pedestrian bridge over U.S. 1, removing the parking spots along it or even spending $100 million to build a bypass around the town, an option that gained momentum this spring when federal officials approved a route for it. But Mr. Risell is among a handful of people circulating an even bolder idea: moving Red’s, which, in various incarnations, has drawn crowds to the corner of Main and Water Streets since the 1930s. “My message to Red’s,” said Morrison Bonpasse, who lives in neighboring Newcastle and leads a community group opposed to the bypass option, “is, ‘You’re a wonderful business, you’re good people, but please, you have to move.’ ” His group, Route One Alternative Decisions, dismisses the proposed bypass as a waste of money — and eventually of gas, since it would take drivers on a longer route. In addition to moving Red’s, they want a pedestrian bridge or tunnel, off-street parking and other less costly alternatives. “It just seems like an awful lot of money to waste on a seasonal issue,” Mr. Risell said of the bypass plan. “In the middle of winter, you could go out and sleep on Route 1.” Others, including Sean Rafter, a ninth-generation Wiscassetite, want a bypass but not along the federally approved route, which the Army Corps of Engineers in May deemed the “least environmentally damaging” of three proposed corridors. Mr. Rafter — who, like Mr. Risell, lives near that route — said it would keep traffic too close to town, ruin the view of the tidal river that borders it and displace too many residents who would have to surrender their land. He, too, would like to see Red’s move. But state transportation officials, who have studied the traffic problem for decades, said the lobster shack was only a small piece of it. “The vehicles are already pretty well stopped at that point,” said Kat Beaudoin, chief of planning for the Maine Department of Transportation. “So it’s hard for us to conceive that that is all of the problem.” Debbie Cronk, who took over Red’s with her siblings after their father, Allen Gagnon, died in 2008, has refused to even respond to the idea. “I don’t want to give them any ammunition,” she said minutes after Red’s opened on Thursday, a line of customers already snaking around the corner in sweaty pursuit of the $14.95 lobster roll. “It’s an institution. It’s an icon.” Ms. Cronk said she would not reveal where she stood on the bypass issue because her customers were divided over it. She did, however, say that business has been “fabulous” this season, that Red’s was just written up in a Norwegian newspaper and that her new book, “Red’s Eats: World’s Best Lobster Shack,” written with Virginia Wright, was doing well. Ms. Beaudoin said that some 25,000 vehicles passed through Wiscasset on peak summer days, compared with roughly 15,000 in the winter, and that the state hoped to move ahead with the bypass project. “If we walk away today on the basis of Wiscasset’s dislike,” she said, “we are not coming back. We would have such a hard time reinitiating the process and getting through the environmental regulations. It’s not getting any easier, and the money is getting scarcer.” Shopkeepers on Main Street, as U.S. 1 is known in town, are as divided as everyone else on the bypass. Some think it would hurt business to divert traffic around the town; others, like Robert Snyder, an owner of American Antiques & Folk Art, said it would save Wiscasset. “We want people to come to town,” Mr. Snyder said, “but we also want the right kind of business. Nobody wants more and more and more tourists. Nobody would benefit from that — except maybe Red’s.” Even Red’s customers, he posited, must not like “sitting there and getting truck exhaust blown in their face.” The shack is too tiny for indoor seating, so diners eat at picnic tables out back or stand on the street — a less attractive op

German regulations for traffic signs go by the catchy names »Richtlinien fur die wegweisende Beschilderung auf Autobahnen« and »Richtlinien fur die wegweisende Beschilderung au?erhalb von Autobahnen«.