Markeshia Ricks Photo
Westville neighbors living near the intersection of Chapel Street and Central Avenue were awakened in the wee hours of the morning not by an alarm, but the sound of a driver crashing into cars parked along the street.
The crash happened at about 1 a.m. this past Thursday, according to Westville District Manger Sgt. Renee Dominguez. The driver was on Chapel Street approaching West Rock Avenue when he struck two parked cars in his lane.
The driver struck the cars with such force that one car was pushed up onto the sidewalk facing the opposite direction. The other had one of its mirrors taken off.
The noise of the crash, particularly the incessant blaring of the driver’s car horn, brought neighbors like Kristin Nowak and John Jessen out to see what had happened.
“It was blaring for at least 30 minutes,” Jessen said of the horn. The driver was visibly drunk, Jessen said. The driver was charged with driving while under the influence, according to Dominguez.
Since then neighbors have been left to pick up the leftover debris and wonder what can be done to get driver’s to slow down in their neighborhood.
Nowak, who has lived near the corner of West Rock Avenue and Chapel Street for about a year, said the parked cars were hit with such force that they slammed into a retaining wall that is part of her back yard.
“I think it would be a good idea to do something,” Nowak said of traffic calming.
The crash is the third within the vicinity of the block bordered by Central Avenue, Chapel Street, Edgewood Avenue and West Rock Avenue in the last thee weeks. Jessen (pictured) said something has to be done before someone is seriously hurt.
Dominguez was able to pull data shows that there have been four accidents including the one last Thursday in the last 30 days. In one accident, a driver failed to stop at a stop sign at Alden Avenue and Chapel; another driver hit a front porch of a house with his van at the intersection of Chapel and Central Avenue after his wife complained of chest pains; and two drivers, both claiming the other ran a stop sign, crashed at West Rock and Edgewood avenues.
But for a caution light at the intersection of Yale Avenue and Chapel Street, drivers have a fairly unobstructed roadway from Ella T. Grasso Boulevard on up to Central Avenue. They don’t encounter another traffic light until they get to Forest Road. Jessen said had the Thursday morning crash happened during peak times, like when children are being picked up and dropped off from school, it could have been a lot worse.
“My kids wait for the bus on the corner,” Jessen said pointing to the corner of Chapel Street and Central Avenue on a recent afternoon as children rode scooters and walked along the sidewalk past the leftover debris from the early morning crash. “There are kids all over the neighborhood.”
Having lived on Chapel Street for about eight years, Jessen said, he has seen and experienced impatient drivers who attempt to pass a car believed to be driving too slow through the residential area.
“I get passed once a day,” he said of the drivers who refuse to slow down. And before the traffic light at Chapel Street and Central Avenue was installed some say things were even worse.
Jessen said he’d like to see traffic-calming measures including having cops in the area ticketing drivers for speed, speed bumps and possibly a roundabout to help slow down traffic in the area. He has contacted Alder Adam Marchand and State Rep. Pat Dillon in hopes of that they can get something done.
Marchand said that there have been several discussions about traffic problems at the intersection of Chapel and Alden Avenue, but he said the reality is that all of Chapel Street in Westville is problematic.
“Chapel Street is a wide street, and people have a tendency to go very fast,” Marchand said. He said in the short term, the city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department, along with the city engineer, are working on a solution for Chapel Street and Alden Avenue, but he said, “the rest of Chapel Street needs to be addressed.”
Zinn at a Westville/West Hills Management Team meeting.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said the city is looking at Chapel Street, particularly from Forest Road to Yale Avenue, as a corridor that needs traffic calming solutions. The reason the Forest Road to Alden Avenue side is getting some attention in the coming weeks is because neighbors in that area submitted a Complete Streets application long before he was appointed the new city engineer, he said.
The city’s Complete Streets process allows neighbors to tell the city what they see as the problems in their neighborhood and what they think the solutions are to make things better. (Read here about how city officials propose to do more Complete Street projects, faster.)
“People in the neighborhood are the expert of that neighborhood,” he said. “We are the technical experts.”
For the neighbors who live near Chapel Street and Alden Avenue that means that in the next week and a half or so, a radar speed sign that shows drivers their speed, which should be 25 miles per hour, is going up. The city also is collecting data on how fast people are going as they turn off Forest Road on to Chapel Street, heading down the hill toward Central Avenue, which is the only signalized street in the corridor, and considering whether improvements such as bump-outs and an island might slow drivers down on the wide street.
Zinn said the Complete Streets application from residents further down the street that describes the problems and possible solutions in as much detail as possible from the perspective of neighbors in that area would be helpful as the city prioritizes its projects.
He’ll likely be hearing from Jessen who said he wants to build a case with the city that something should be done in the area, and soon. “I know that other parts of the city have gotten traffic calming,” he said. “There is definitely support for having it done here.”