Vehicular ​“Chaos” In The Heights

Nearly 200 neighbors have signed a petition demanding changes at a problem intersection after speeding drivers twice crashed into the same property in four months.

The crashes occurred at the intersection of Clifton and Russell streets in Fair Haven Heights, where Kristy and William Manning live.

The first crash occurred in September. A speeding t‑boned car crashed through their fence, narrowly missing their young kids inside the house.

They fixed the fence, posted the crash pix on SeeClickFix. They appealed to the city for a four-way stop. The city did a study and determined that the intersection’s crashes are not severe enough to warrant the change.

On Jan. 6 another crash occurred at the same spot. This time the t‑boned car not only again took out the just-fixed fence — it careened, out of control, across the lawn. It ended up in the driveway.

So the Mannings have taken up the pens and the clipboards. Along with Kristy Manning’s parents, who still live on Russell Street where she was raised, they have assembled nearly 200 Heights neighbors’ signatures on a petition demanding the four-way stop.

They plan to bring the petition, themselves, and their neighbors to a Feb. 14 Traffic Authority meeting, where city transit chief Doug Hausladen plans to recommending the stop.

“The main issue is speeders coming over the crest of the hill and down Clifton,” said William Manning.

Clifton has no stop signs. Cars coming from the east, over the crest of the hill, appear with suddenness. They regularly exceed the 25 mile-per-hour posted speed limit, said William Manning. Comfortable with the stop signs on Russell, drivers roll through, or barely pause, or miscalculate the speed of the Clifton cars, which race downhill as they leap over the crest. They appear quickly the intersection, and the t‑boning results.

“It’s just chaos,” Manning said during an interview this week at a busy school bus-drop off time around 3:15 p.m.

“We don’t allow our kids to play in the yard or take their bikes out,” added Kristy Manning, who bought the tidy house on the northwest corner of the intersection 14 years ago.

The intersection has always been active. The growth in families with kids, especially at the growing Eastview Terrace community down the hill near Bella Vista, has dramatically increased the school bus and other vehicular traffic moving through the area.

As their sons Perseus and Marcellus got off two separate school buses, the Mannings pointed out school bus stops on all four corners of the intersection, along with CT Transit bus stops in both directions on Russell.

A free-for-all ensued when buses arrive all at once and kids exit while backed up cars wait. The above video shows bus drivers put out their mobile stop signs, and cars lined up waiting, as kids cross diagonally and in other directions.

Many of the petition signers described the morning rush and afternoon drop off of kids as so dangerous they simply have decided not to let their kids use the intersection, Kristy Manning reported.

In the fall after the September crash on their property, Acting Police Chief Anthony Campbell did deploy motorcycle cops on the Clifton Hill to ticket speeders. The Mannings credited Campbell with bringing the issue to the attention of the traffic and parking department, which did a study of the intersection and posted the results on SeeClickFix.

The results of the city study referenced the necessary condition for putting in a four-way stop as 10 accidents within two years, which standard Clifton and Russell met. However, those accidents need to be right-angle accidents, that is, t‑boning. Apparently not enough of the ones at Clifton and Russell met that exact t‑bone standard.

It doesn’t look that way from the Mannings’ vulnerable living room. They reported all too often having to shield their kids — they also have a young daughter, 3‑year-old Iris, from peering out the window at the screaming, bloodied faces of people emerging from crashed cars a short distance outside.

After hand-delivering the petition to city offices, Kristy Manning heard from city traffic and parking chief Doug Hausladen, who elaborated that state and federal requirements also had to be met to warrant a four-way stop, as spelled out in the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices. He did say other measures might be taken: for example, removing some shrubbery on the northeast corner that might improve sight lines.

But then his staff revisited the issue after the Jan. 6 crash. It performed traffic counts, turning movement counts, sight line and geometric-condition evaluations. Based on the data, Hausladen said, his staff now has a basis for a ​“sight line warrant,” rather than a ​“crash warrant.”

“Because the site distances are not great enough as cars come over the hill, the city’s traffic engineer will be recommending to the Traffic Authority that a four-way stop with an advanced warning sign on the hill would be appropriate,” Hausladen reported.

Whatever the technical basis, the Mannings are hoping the traffic commissioners OK the request.

The Mannings said they are not naive. ​“Even the police officers say it’s [that is, adding two more stop signs on Clifton] not going to prevent all accidents, but it’ll reduce [them],” Kristy Manning said.

“Any vehicle coming over Clifton, if it’s hit by a stop sign blower ends up in our yard. I no longer feel safe here,” said William Manning.

He said if it’s a choice between living with the constant threat of accident and hearing blaring horns and hissing tires of near-misses, or listening to people cursing each other because they can’t figure out who has the right of way at the four-way stop, he knows what he’d choose.

“It shouldn’t get to the point,” said Kristy Manning, ​“when someone is killed.”