There’s an amusing, and telling, feature on Clifton Park’s Web site. It shows a moving cartoon image of a chicken and asks, “Why did the chicken cross Route 9?” then answers, “In Clifton Park, we believe in being neighborly, and we hope you’ll take a moment to cross Route 9 to visit our friends in the Town of Halfmoon!

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In other words, it’s an invitation to view Halfmoon’s Web site — which, given the current parlous state of the intersection of routes 9 and 146, is the only safe way to visit Clifton Park’s neighbor to the east. And that’s in a car! If you are a chicken — or, more to the point, a pedestrian or bicyclist — you would have no chance of crossing that road without meeting your Maker.

For sheer pedestrian unfriendliness, it is hard to beat the area around Northway Exit 9. You basically cannot get there, or around once you are there, without a car. And so congested and convoluted is everything — the malls, restaurants, big boxes and other retail — that it’s not so easy with a car, either.

Is it possible to re-engineer this no man’s land, to make it safer, less congested, more attractive, more connected, and navigable by those on foot or bicycle as well as in an automobile? Looking at the land use and transportation study released last week, funded by the Capital Region Transportation Committee and the two towns, the answer appears to be yes.

How? By building a network of walking paths and bikeways that actually connects destinations. By planting trees, for shade and visual relief, and installing benches and more attractive street lights. By relocating parking lots so they are hidden behind buildings. By putting in raised, landscaped medians along routes 9 and 146 to separate oncoming lanes of traffic and to generally slow it down. By reducing the number of driveways. And, yes, by creating some of those dreaded (but effective) roundabouts, where people now sit forever at traffic lights and/or make dangerous turns.

This area is never going to be Saratoga Springs, or even the “downtown” that Malta is planning. But with some fairly modest changes, it can be better than it is now. That’s not hard.