Mike Gaipa admitted he came by to sunbathe and check out women. Kim Nguyen, a third-year medical student, wanted to honor Mila Rainoff.
They ended up painting side by side helping to beautify an intersection near the medical school and make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
They were among 25 people who painted large blue and green elm leaves at Cedar and York streets right in front of Yale-New Haven Hospital on a sun-filled Sunday afternoon. It was the city’s first-ever grassroots “intersection repair.”
It took place a block away from South Frontage and York, the intersection where a driver struck and killed Yale Medical School student Mila Rainoff last year, helping to set in motion a citywide “traffic-calming” movement.
Even before Rainoff’s death, said Erica Mintzer, “everyone had their story of how horrible the intersection was.” Mintzer was one year behind Rainoff in medical school. She’s a principal with the Yale Medical Traffic Safety Group, which organized the intersection repair event.
“She was such an amazing and inspiring person,” said Mintzer (pictured with West River activist Kevin Ewing), “people wanted to do something.”
The something they settled on turned out to be a technique, “intersection repair,” pioneered in Oregon, said Jon Romanyshyn, another of the organizers. People come together to beautify an intersection. One of the corollary results is to slow cars down: Drivers pause, wondering what that big design is.
One of the day’s painters, Fair Haven Alderwoman and traffic-calming leader Erin Sturgis-Pascale, described the colorful “repair” as less confrontational and more sanctioned than the “witching” event she pioneered in Fair Haven. “Our witching engaged drivers more,” she said. At that event she approached drivers and offered them cookies over a discussion of sharing the road.
No cookies for drivers were evident at Sunday’s event. The painters made sure to don safety vests (provided by city transportation czar Mike Piscitelli), grab cans of #5 exterior latex green and blue, and brushes. There was some discussion whether “intersection repair” was primarily a community organizing or a traffic-calming tool.
This afternoon it was academic, as passersby such as Mike Gaipa and medical students pitched in, along with a group of kids from a local summer program.
Mintzer was at pains to point out that the event was meant in no way to exploit the memory of the much loved and admired Rainoff. “It’s not a memorial,” she said. “We wanted to do something positive, constructive that really has an impact.”
The group picked the intersection at Cedar and York because it’s the heart of the medical school campus where people hang out and eat lunch.
Rainoff’s death in traffic on South Frontage Road, combined with the death of 11-year-old Gabrielle Lee on upper Whalley Avenue, catalyzed grassroots traffic-calmers’ campaigns. They in turn convinced the Board of Aldermen last October to pass a Complete Streets Order. A safety education program called Street Smarts is part of that initiative.
Kim Nguyen at first came by Sunday because she thought the intersection she was to work on was Frontage and York, where Rainoff had been killed. Might that intersection one day be grassroots repaired?
That was on the mind of Kevin Ewing (pictured with Mintzer). His intention was to come by York and Cedar often in the coming weeks to see if the intersection was indeed slower as a result of the artistic efforts.
“If it can work here,” he said, “there are other spots where we can make a change.” He said that grassroots intersection repair was at least theoretically a good approach “if the city can’t afford something permanent.”
Ewing said he’d like to see some intersection repair where the Ella Grasso Boulevard meets Route 34 and also near the Barnard School.
Piscitelli and the city, said Romanyshyn, had been tremendously helpful, providing vests, cones, barricades, and lots of support.
The exterior latex paint and design by Lisa Anamasi should last about six months, said Kim Heard, of Yale University’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety.
That’s fine with organizers. Repainting every half year or so would bring the community together once again. That, they said, was as much the point as the calming.
As he personally calmed some traffic near the activities, the city’s Mike Piscitelli had nothing but praise for the Yale students. He didn’t rule out similar projects even at busy state roads, as Ewing had suggested.
Some cars were already slowing down as the first coat of paint was applied, according to Kim Heard. A few drivers paused to ask what was going on. Would they continue to slow down, she asked rhetorically, “when we’re out of the road? I think so.”
Piscitelli said, “We’ll look at other intersections on a case by case basis.” He pronounced the city’s first intersection repair “a good first step.”