Leonard Honeyman Photo
Paul Nye was awakened after midnight so this stripe could appear outside his house. He wants the city to draw the line on painting roads so late.
The city’s transportation director has issued a mea culpa to Westville neighbors like Nye — not for the work itself, but for not informing them that the work was imminent.
Nye (pictured on West Rock Avenue, where he lives) and his partner, Dominic Carew, said they want not just an apology, but a change in policy.
Nye, the comptroller of the New Canaan Country School, and Carew, who works for the state, said they were jolted out of bed Monday morning at 1:30 and again at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday by loud trucks idling for what seemed like a long time near their hillside home a few doors from the Edgewood School.
“I never got back to sleep,” Carew said. “This is unacceptable. They wouldn’t do this in Woodbridge.”
Woodbridge Town Operations Manager Warren Connors said in a telephone interview Wednesday that most of his community’s line painting is indeed done at night, when there is less interference from traffic.
“In our town, it’s always done at night, up until midnight,” he said.
It’s not that the painters are doing anything wrong, said New Haven city transportation chief Michael Piscitelli. It’s that he forgot to warn residents that it was coming. “We screwed up and should have given the residents a heads-up,” he said.
“I have to apologize to the residents and send a letter of apology to the alderman,” Piscitelli said. The line painting, otherwise known as striping or pavement marking, is being done in conjunction with the upgrades to the traffic signals in the Westville area.
At issue is the need for the trucks to operate on roads as clear of cars as possible. That’s for two reasons: The paint needs to dry without being spread all over the road by car tires. And the trucks have to drive a specific pattern to get the work done.
“They are working in motion and cannot move for a car coming in any direction,” Piscitelli said.
A spokesman for the president of Safety Marking Inc., the Bridgeport-based companydoing the line painting, agreed.
“If this work was done during day, it would cause a traffic jam that nobody would want to be in,” he said. The epoxy paint takes from 15 – 45 minutes to dry.
The company, which is the largest in the Northeast at what it does, gets few complaints, he said. “If there is any pavement marking done, chances are we are the ones doing it,” he said. The sound of the trucks is no louder than that produced by any other diesel engine, he said.
Nye and Carew said there are plenty of alternatives.
“Why don’t they close the street down?” Nye said.
“They do that for every other thing around here,” Carew said.