“People come flying through this intersection,” Marty Feldman was saying. Just then a dozen cars zoomed through the intersection, oblivious to the flashing yellow light.
Feldman (at center in photo) was one of three parents waiting at Edgewood and Alden Avenues in Westville for their children to be delivered by school bus from camp one afternoon this week as traffic whooshed by on Edgewood.
Two girls passed by and tried to cross Edgewood to the bus stop a few yards farther to the north. Despite the worn set of crosswalk stripes at the intersection, nobody stopped to allow them to cross, although the law was on their side. They waited until no cars were passing, then quickly crossed the street.
It’s been that way for years, but that will soon change. Before those campers go back to school, there will be a full traffic light at that intersection complete with walk signals, city officials said Tuesday. Play video for parents’ reactions.
The intersection is part of 22 Westville-area intersections that will either get new lights or be upgraded, said Mike Piscitelli, the city’s director of transportation, traffic and parking. A Grand Street intersection also will be upgraded, he said.
In a couple of weeks, the Cedar Hill area along State Street will see 14 new or upgraded traffic lights, he said.
Those lights will be connected by fiber optic lines to the city’s traffic department, on the ground floor of the Kennedy Mitchell Hall of Records. Instead of the in-road traffic indicators, which have largely been either dug up by contractors or tarred over, there will be video traffic detectors on poles to show how many cars are using the intersections, said Bijan Notghi, the city traffic engineer in charge of the project.
The city isn’t paying any of the $4.5 million it will cost to do the 22 Westville intersections plus one at Grand and Jefferson, or the $3.3 million for the 14 Cedar intersections, he said. State funds are used for the traffic-signal projects, he said.
The city will pay $1,000 each for pre-emptors that give the green light to fire equipment. The state will pay the other $4,000 per intersections for the devices, which pick up strobe-type lights on the fire trucks and change the lights.
The work is being done by Ducci Electrical Contractors of Torrington. Ducci workers are shown installing fiber optic cable on Fountain Street near the post office.
Some intersections will have cameras that will record traffic on video, but no “red-light” cameras, since the state General Assembly has not approved those for Connecticut, he said.
Last year, a number of intersections, mainly in the Newhallville neighborhood and the areas around Southern Connecticut State University, were done at a cost of about $5 million, Notghi said.
He said the new lights and fiber-optic connections will make it possible to respond more quickly to changing traffic conditions, such as a light going on flash or an accident or weather conditions. The signals can be changed to respond to changing traffic flow, although “we can’t do that every five minutes,” he said.
The parents waiting in Westville for their children were happy to learn about the light project, plus those planned for Fountain Street and McKinley Avenue, plus upgrading of the lights at Fountain Street at Forest Road and Fountain Street at Forest Road. They also spoke of the need for traffic enforcement.
“There is a need to reinforce traffic regulations by enforcement,” said Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen (at left in top photo), another parent waiting for the bus.
Feldman noted the girls having to wait for a pause in traffic to cross the street even though they had the right of way. He compared that situation to street life in Amherst and Northampton, Mass., where “you would be in real trouble if you didn’t stop for pedestrians.”
“The lights are fine, but they won’t make people drive any better,” said Cathy Schwartz (at right in top photo), who’s married to Feldman. “I’ve never seen people drive worse than in New Haven,” she said.