You can’t turn left from West Elm Street onto Forest Road without taking your life in your hands, neighbors and government officials agree. They can’t agree on what to do about it.
Trying to drive across Forest Road from West Elm into his own driveway cost beloved Westville resident Jerry Gross his life last year.
Since then, Westville neighbors and city and state officials have searched for ways to make the curving, fast-moving intersection safer for drivers, bikers and pedestrians.
Doing so has presented its own set of problems, a veritable “Catch 22,” according to a state spokesman. He said that whatever you do to try to solve the safety riddle may in reality make the stretch of road more deadly, or at least less convenient for those who live and travel there.
The problem is that West Elm Street enters Forest Road in the middle of a curve. You can’t see traffic coming at you from the left until you are well out into the road. Even taking a right turn means you have to look practically over your shoulder to see if the coast is clear.
West Elm Street is a city street. Forest Road is a numbered state highway. That divergence of authority hasn’t helped.
Everyone involved — the state, the city, residents and those who use the intersection — agree something must be done. They are so frustrated that they say anything is better than current conditions.
But after taking the pulse of the neighbors, the city is going back to the drawing board “to take a pause here and look at the data in a little more detail,” according to the city’s traffic czar, Michael Piscitelli.
Driver error causes 98 percent of the 80,000 car crashes that occur in the state each year, said Kevin Nursick, the spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. If people were to obey the speed limit on Forest Road, the problem would mostly go away, he said.
Having said that, the road configuration, a downhill and a curve as it meets West Elm Street, makes at least two of the suggested solutions potentially dangerous, according to Nursick.
“If you put in a stop sign or traffic light, there isn’t enough space for drivers to stop before hitting a queue of cars standing at that sign or light,” he said. A car coming over the hill going north on Forest Road could rear-end the last of the line of stopped cars, so the cure would be worse than the disease, he said.
In addition, a three-year state study done from January 2005 through December 2007 counted only four angle accidents at that intersection, Nursick said. An angle accident happens when the front of one car hits the side of another. Neighbors said that’s probably accurate, but it doesn’t count the near misses.
A recent state traffic study, done this spring at the request of the city, showed only 9,900 cars a day traveled through that intersection, below the minimum traffic flow required for a stop sign or traffic light, he said. To put that in context, interstate highways get about 200,000 cars a day.
“We would not build a road that way now,” but we’re stuck with the road as it is, Nursick said. Reconfiguring the road would be impossible because it would cost millions and would require taking people’s property, probably with the use of eminent domain, something the state would not do, Nursick said. According to a history of Route 122, the road was old when it was given its its present numerical designation in 1920.
The state’s recommendation is that the city make West Elm Street one-way eastbound, away from Forest Road, for the first block.
Piscitelli said he sent a letter to West Elm Street residents (including Charlie Fabian (pictured) from Forest Road to Yale Avenue asking their views of the one-way proposal. The result sent the city back to the drawing board, Piscitelli said in a telephone message Wednesday night.
“We did receive a number of comments from residents on the street there, and at the current time, it looks like we are going to put the one-way effort on hold until we do two things,” he said.
“The first is that we are going to reach out to the property owner with the large tree [at the southwest corner of West Elm and Forest] and see if there is something we can do to improve visibility. We also are going to reach back out to the [state] Department of Transportation to drill a little deeper into the numbers to see if there is a way forward there through other traffic-calming measures.”
State DOT spokesman Nursick said during telephone interviews earlier this month that the state would not consider installing speed-measuring signs because they tend to increase speed instead of decreasing it.
Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen and Miriam Benson, who live near the intersection, emphatically oppose the one-way proposal. Benson said she favors improving the sight lines by removing bushes and trees at the corner. Previously, Piscitelli said the city could not cut down the tree without permission from the property owner.
In a letter to Piscitelli last month, Tilsen argued the one-way proposal would be more dangerous than the present condition.
“The proposal would force me and other residents to use that deadly intersection in order to get home each, every time, with no alternative, and would incrementally increase traffic at that intersection inasmuch as cars that would otherwise take West Elm St. westbound to that last block of West Elm St. would now have to use Forest Rd.,” he wrote.
Tilsen also said children on bicycles, who city law says must ride the same way as traffic, would have to ride along Forest Road to get home from, say McKinley Avenue and West Elm Street.
He said he might be forced to move if traffic is made one-way. He said he would prefer banning a left from West Elm Street to Forest Road or even to close off the intersection altogether.
Benson, the West Elm block watch captain, said she would prefer police enforce the speed limits on Forest Road and West Elm Street, as well as removal of the bushes and trees.
The one-way proposal also doesn’t sit well with some of the neighbors, although some do favor it or the more extreme measure of blocking access to or from Forest Road altogether, an informal survey Monday found.
“I’m opposed to the one-way proposal,” said Charlie Fabian, a West Elm Street resident after returning home Monday afternoon. He said he favors the no-left-turn proposal.
“There is too much traffic on this road already and this would create even more,” he said. Fabian also said he would favor stopping truck traffic on Forest Road.
“They do it on the Merritt Parkway, don’t they?” Fabian said.
Traffic also was a concern for West Elm Street resident Jon Hemstock (pictured).
“People rip down this road,” cutting through from Forest Road to avoid the lights and backups at Forest Road and Fountain Street. He said he preferred blocking off the street altogether, but was against the one-way street plan.
“It would make sense to make it one way,” said West Elm resident Fred Stolzman, walking his dog, Henry, along his street.
“Cars come flying down this road,” he said. He will drive the few blocks to Edgewood Avenue and access Forest Road from that road,” he said. That intersection has a traffic light.
Austin Edwards, who lives on Forest Road but was riding his bike along West Elm to a neighborhood market, said he prefers the no left turn proposal.
Ruth Gross, the widow of the man who died after a crash at that corner, said she doesn’t support the one-way solution, but thinks the idea of closing off West Elm altogether has merit.
“That sounds the best and the safest,” she said of closing off the street. “That way, you don’t have to make a left turn onto West Elm Street across Forest Road, which is a problem,” she said. But, she said, “Anything would be better than what we now have.”
She said people obeying the speed limit on Forest Road would help a lot. The road is posted for 25 mph, but that is not obeyed. She said she sometimes shouts, “25mph” at cars that whiz by.
“It doesn’t help, but it makes me feel better,” she said.