Thomas Breen photo
Building out new speed humps on Long Wharf Drive.
Three new speed humps are being built on Long Wharf Drive, as part of the city’s latest attempts to deter drag racing on the waterfront roadway.
Mayor Justin Elicker and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn visited Long Wharf Drive Thursday morning to take a look at the new road safety construction project underway near the neighborhood’s food truck hub.
With the help of contractor Laydon Industries, the city is building out three raised crosswalks — each elevated between three and five inches from the road — as a deterrent to dangerously fast driving on the two-way road by the New Haven Harbor and the highway.
“These will make it not fun at all to speed at this site,” Elicker said.
Mayor Elicker: These will make it not fun to race here.
Elicker (pictured) and Zinn said that the city has long contemplated putting speed humps on Long Wharf Drive due to frequent complaints about drag racing and large crowds at that site seemingly every weekend of the summer.
What pushed the city to act now, Elicker said, was the drag racing event last Saturday that drew over 400 people to Long Wharf — and kept police officers occupied trying at the same time that a fatal shooting took place a mile-and-a-half away on Rosette Street in the Hill.
“If police didn’t have to be here managing a large crowd and trying to get people dispersed,” Elicker said, they’d be able to spend more time addressing even more serious issues elsewhere in the city.
Zinn: First in seasonal speed hump construction push.
“We started seeing a lot of very large” gatherings of cars and people on Long Wharf, Zinn said about the urgency of putting the speed humps on Long Wharf now. “It really became a public safety issue.”
He said that his department will be rolling out new speed humps to elsewhere in the city throughout the fall. This Long Wharf installation is just the first of the season. Returning to why Long Wharf got the city’s priority attention, he said, “We had an imminent life safety issue that we wanted to address.”
Elicker said that drag racing in the city is not limited to Long Wharf Drive. He also frequently hears complaints from neighbors about drag racing on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and on Rt. 80. Unlike those two state roads, he said, Long Wharf Drive is owned by the city — giving the mayor and city engineer much wider latitude to impose speed humps, and to do so quickly.
In addition to the newly built speed humps, which Zinn said should be finished by Friay, Elicker said the city has increased its police presence at Long Wharf, has encouraged food trucks to shut down early so as not to encourage late-night gatherings at the site, and the city will be shutting down parts of the street this weekend.
“But it’s clear we need to escalate things even more,” he said, as the jackhammers behind him blared away on the new raised crosswalks.
