It's good to have rich friends in high places.

This is true not just for people.     

Take the Merritt Parkway, for instance.

The gracious highway, which opened in 1934, through congested Fairfield County has an impressive guardian angel: Peter Malkin, the wealthy New York real estate investor, widely known as an owner of the Empire State Building, and father-in-law of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. Malkin also is chairman of a nonprofit called the Merritt Parkway Conservancy.

The conservancy, at the ready with a lawsuit at any suggestion of change for the beloved greenway, is a fierce guardian angel, with generous donors in a part of the state where pockets are deep.

Indeed, Gov. Dannel Malloy's ambitious, 30-year, $100 billion plan to improve Connecticut's failing transportation infrastructure does not lay a single widening finger on the parkway.

Widening Interstate 95, which is bursting at the seams in congested, expensive Fairfield County, where acquiring more land will be a legal nightmare and torturously expensive, is quite specifically on the planning boards.

And yet the state already owns a wide right of way with the Merritt Parkway: At least 300 feet for its entire length, wider in some places. The existing parkway generally is built only on the northern half or third of the right of way.

In other words, the state already largely has the land to build a whole new highway in the part of the state where highway congestion is the very worst.

Malloy is good, when he fires up the rhetoric machine, at telling us why transportation improvements need to begin right away.

"Our roads are relied on by companies to ship their goods, and transport their employees to work. Right now, those commuters are each spending an extra 40 hours a year in traffic due to unnecessary congestion," the governor said in his 2015 budget address.

"In Fairfield County, it would be an understatement to say that the stretch of I-95 between Bridgeport and Greenwich experiences significant traffic congestion ... Additional lanes and new access points are needed to open up this vital accessway to New York."

The governor wants legislators to put all the new tax money raised for transportation into a "lockbox," a budget assurance given to no other budget priorities, such as aid to cities, for instance.

It looks like the Merritt Parkway itself, another vital accessway to New York, already is in a Malloy lockbox, not to be considered at all as a potential solution to the crushing congestion nearby on I-95.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Merritt Parkway, too. It's beautiful and a remarkable survivor of its time, the physical embodiment of an interesting concept: a limited-access highway with significant architecture that can be experienced through your windshield as a park.

I'm also not convinced that widening highways won't just bring more cars.

Still, as the governor would have us believe, the economic future of the state is at risk. Can a pretty thing be saved, when the stakes are that high?

Maybe it should be. But the public, which is being asked to pay, should have a part in the decision.

Proponents of the Merritt succeeded in getting it listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1990s. That would be a challenge to trying to move the 1930s parkway into the 21st Century.

But it is not insurmountable. After all, the Malloy Administration is paying consultants to plan a state park at Seaside in Waterford, including one proposal to completely demolish the Cass Gilbert buildings there that are listed on the National Register.

Using the wide existing right of way surrounding the Merritt should at the very least be part of the mix in considering how to plan a way out of the state's transportation congestion morass.

After all, as the governor will tell you, this is very important.

And if we can't widen or double or change the Merritt in any way, maybe we ought to start charging people a lot of money for the privilege of using it.

If it's that beautiful, how about a $25 toll to drive on it?

This is the opinion of David Collins.

D.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct