City Seeks Solutions To Car-Crash ​“Disease”

With car crashes up in the city, the duo who try to make the streets safer say more needs to be done at an intersection where two pedestrians have died in less than a decade.

That was the message city traffic chief Doug Hausladen and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn delivered to the members of the Board of Alders Public Safety committee Thursday night during a wide0ranging discussion on the operations of the Office of Transportation, Traffic and Parking.

Though they were called to City Hall to share updates about street lighting, signage and parking enforcement, alders also wanted to talk about the death of 42-year-old pedestrian, Melissa Tancredi of Waterbury in a crash Tuesday at the intersection of York Street and South Frontage Road.

Tancredi, a Yale-New Haven Hospital employee, was killed when a car left the roadway and struck her on the sidewalk. Morris Cove Alder Sal DeCola asked if the city can do more to protect pedestrians at that intersection.

He said he was at the intersection earlier in the day and observed that in an accident situation there really is no place for a car to go but into the corner. DeCola suggested putting in a temporary barrier to protect pedestrians.

“There’s nothing to protect the pedestrian,” he said. ​“What we did with other streets, maybe it’s time we put something on those four corners to at least buffer the car before it hits somebody because that left hand turn, if somebody loses brakes its only going to go right into the corner.”

Zinn said there are a number of challenges not just with the intersection but with the design of the entire corridor. How to meet all of the demands in that area needs ​“a longer conversation,” he said.

Hausladen told alders that the number of car crashes in the city are trending upward, following a national trend. (The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a call to action last year after more than 35,092 people died in traffic crashes, ending a five-year downward trend.) In fiscal year 2014 New Haven had 6,600 car crashes. In 2015 the city had 7,800.

The numbers were surprising given the size of the New Haven, he said. The cause, in Hausladen’s estimation: speed and distracted driving.

“Distracted driving is huge,” he said. ​“We look at crashes as preventable diseases. It’s something we can do more about.” In addition, to ongoing projects to make roadways safer for all users including bike riders and pedestrians, he said that includes providing more education for everyone.

Hausladen said after the death of fourth-year Yale medical student Mila Rainoff at that same intersection in 2008, a ​“Yale Medical Traffic Safety Group” formed to make the intersection safer and to advise pedestrians on how to cross safely. The city has been participating in that group. That group is slated to hold a public meeting next week in the wake of Tancredi’s death.

He said the city has been committed to traffic calming ​“as a way of business” and has been working through a steady process of ​“unwinding” previous street design through projects like Downtown Crossing to slow down traffic in that part of the city. He described it as unwinding of a design principal that sought to move cars out of cities as quickly as possible. But he acknowledged that the process takes time and a lot of financial investment.

“It speaks to the fact that engineering in the last 50 – 60 years was designed for getting people in and out of cities as quickly as possible,” Zinn added. ​“It is really very tough and is a big investment.

Hausladen said that having another pedestrian die at that intersection in spite of all the work that has transpired since Rainoff’s death, though they happened under different circumstances, is painful.

“it hurts,” he said. ​“It’s 2017.”

Hausladen said his own activism on the issue of safe streets was sparked by the death of Rainoff and that of 11-year-old Gabrielle Lee, who was killed on Whalley Avenue. Given the technological advancements in cars and the coming technology of cars with the capability to ​“talk” to traffic infrastructure, fatalities are headed in the wrong direction, he said.

“It’s not acceptable that we have as many crashes as we do in our city,” he said.

“As we keep doing infrastructure projects, we hope to create better habits of drivers that will have a multiplier effect,” Zinn added. ​“We actually take pedestrian deaths particularly hard and we think in the coming months you’ll really see us stand up as a community to say that these 35,000 deaths in the U.S., whatever portion is in New Haven is completely unacceptable.”