Officials Pressed On Unsafe Streets

Roads aren’t designed safely. Cops don’t enforce traffic laws. The laws are unclear. Traffic culture is broken.

New Haveners confronted officials with that withering assessment of the city’s streets, where drivers struck and killed nine pedestrians last year and another two so far this year.

The occasion was a Safe Streets New Haven meeting Tuesday night that drew 50 people from throughout the city Safe Streets New Haven to the Betsy Ross Parish Hall on Kimberly Avenue in the Hill.

Organized in large part by local traffic engineer Ryan O’Hara, the nearly two-hour meeting saw pedestrians and cyclists and bus riders and car drivers voice their concerns directly to Mayor Justin Elicker, Police Chief Otoniel Reyes, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, Transportation, Traffic & Parking Director Doug Hausladen, State Rep. Roland Lemar, and a half-dozen alders who participated in the discussion.

The group focused its ire on the legal, structural, and cultural problems that make moving around this city so dangerous.

Those conditions led to nine pedestrians killed by cars citywide last year (including five in one month), and to two pedestrians killed by cars so far in 2020.

Click here to download a police crash data handout that notes that 186 pedestrians were struck by vehicles citywide in 2019. That’s 71 more than the 115 pedestrians who were struck citywide the year before.

Tuesday night’s gathering heard residents call for a panoply of traffic fixes: more and better lighting on the city’s darkest speedways, the enforcement of ​“vulnerable user” laws designed to protect pedestrians and cyclists, state legalization of red-light cameras, the narrowing of urban mini-highways like Whalley Avenue and Whitney Avenue, and the installation of speed bumps, raised intersections, protected bike lanes, and signalized crosswalks throughout the city.

“We’re here tonight not to point fingers but to help the city move forward and make this place we call home a lot safer,” O’Hara said at the top of the meeting. ​“We’re here as a group of advocates because we care.”

Participant after participant after participant also stressed that, in New Haven, people simply do not follow traffic safety laws. That’s true for pedestrians and drivers and cyclists alike.

“I think we have a culture of disrespect for traffic laws,” said East Rock resident and avid cyclist Lior Trestman (pictured).

Cars roll through red lights. Pedestrians cross in the middle of the street. Even police seem to turn on their sirens to move more quickly when stuck in traffic.

“It’s hard to hold yourself accountable when no other parties are following the rules.”

“I think you hit the nail on the head,” replied Chief Reyes (pictured).

“It’s a culture thing, and we need to work on that.” That happens through both education and enforcement, he said.

The police department’s recent state grant-funded ticketing of pedestrians for jaywalking proved misguided and incurred an understandable level of pushback, he said. But he added that the educational component at the core of that pilot project should not be dismissed out of hand: All residents need frequent refreshers on the laws that govern city streets.

Where that program went wrong, he confessed, was in its prioritization of issuing financial penalties to pedestrians over ticketing car drivers who also break the rules of the road.

“The lion’s share of responsibility needs to go to the person who can do the most damage,” he said in response to concerns from Hill residents Dora Brown, Thomasina Shaw (pictured), and Johnny Dye that wayward pedestrians are also responsible for the city’s hazardous streets.

“We can all agree that when a pedestrian makes a mistake, the consequences are far less than” when someone driving a car breaks the law, Reyes added. ​“We’re looking at the greater good.”

State Rep. Lemar added that he would most like to see a traffic safety education and enforcement push targeted at changing the culture around distracted driving.

Drivers who text or talk on their cellphones behind the wheel have become as dangerous and more common than those who drink and drive, he said.

“Distracted driving will cause the damage that drunk driving did,” he warned, unless if there is a legal and cultural shift towards ostracizing those who don’t pay attention while driving in the same way that there was several decades ago for those who hit the road while intoxicated.

Lights. Lights. Lights

Amidst the many environmental ills plaguing New Haven streets that were diagnosed Tuesday night, one of the most frequently mentioned was darkness.

“There are stretches of Whalley where you cannot see anyone,” said Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills Community Management Team Chair Nadine Horton (pictured at center). ​“You literally cannot see people until you are right on top of them.”

She said the 40-foot main thoroughfare on the western half of the city presents many problems for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone and everyone else who uses the street.

There are too many lanes and too few pedestrian crossings, both of which encourage drivers to hit 40 or 50 miles per hour while cruising down the corridor. And when there are crosswalks with pedestrian signals, those on foot have only 19 seconds to hustle from one side of the street to the other. That’s a difficult feat for the able-bodied let alone for the elderly and infirm, she noted.

The problem with Whalley Avenue that aggravates and terrifies her the most, Horton said, and the one that should be most easily fixed, is just how dark certain stretches of the avenue get after the sun sets.

The city’s most recent pedestrian fatality took place on just such a stretch near Norton Street.

“It makes me very angry because that was completely avoidable,” she said. ​“Unless we do something, someone else is going to die. It’s not an if. It’s a when.”

“Lighting is critical.”

Beaver Hills Alder Jill Marks agreed. ​“Lighting would be the main issue” for Whalley, she said.

She said her daughter was at the intersection of Whalley and Norton when the pedestrian was struck and killed on the night of Jan. 22. ​“She said, ​‘Mom, it was so dark out there you couldn’t see him lying on the ground.’”

“If we had the lighting, it would make things much safer.”

Longtime Westville resident Paul Chambers (pictured) said that he has noticed during his decades living in New Haven that drivers feel empowered to speed with impunity on wider streets like Whalley after the sun sets.

“Ten of the last 11 pedestrians killed in New Haven have been killed in the hours of darkness,” he said.

He called on the police department to dedicate more speed enforcement resources during their nighttime shifts.

“At night, drivers think they can get away with anything as far as speeding goes.”

East Rock cycling advocate Rob Rocke said, based on his experiences living in other cities, New Haven does seem to have a uniquely reckless car culture — particularly when it comes to cars running stop lights and rolling through stop signs.

One potential enforcement solution to such a problem is red-light cameras, he said. ​“It’s 2020. It’s time to embrace technology.”

Westville resident Andy Orefice (pictured) and urban planner Carolyn Lusch and Downtown Alder Abby Roth and Hill resident Thomasina Shaw, among several others, all agreed.

“I am for red-light cameras,” Shaw said. ​“Absolutely.”

“How Important This All Is”

When city department heads took their turns weighing in, they thanked the group for coming out on a weeknight to make clear that traffic just how high of a priority traffic safety should be for this — and any — administration.

“It reminds us how important this all is,” said Zinn (pictured).

The city engineer said that Howard Avenue is on the cusp of receiving a number of traffic safety infrastructure improvements, including raised intersections, new crosswalks, and a protected cycletrack south of Kimberly Avenue. The city is just waiting for the gas company to finish replacing the gas main beneath the avenue.

“We expect to be in construction this construction season,” he said.

He added that the city plans to put the Complete Streets application process soon in the form of a PDF that can be filled out electronically, and that his department will prioritize working with the Department of Public Works to implement Complete Streets recommendations the next time DPW goes out to repave city streets.

From the city transportation department’s end, Hausladen (pictured) said that the city was recently awarded a federal grant that will allow his department to hire an ​“active transit outreach assistant.”

That part-time position will pay $20 an hour for 10 to 20 hours of work per week. The job itself will involve traveling around the city, educating residents about all things transportation.

Hausladen said his department also recently installed new pedestrian signal heads at the intersection of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and Chapel Street, and will soon be installing new sidewalks elsewhere on the Boulevard.

The state-funded Edgewood Avenue cycletrack is now out to bid again, he said. When completed, that project will see 10 rehabbed traffic signals and one brand new signal along that 2.1‑mile stretch of Edgewood Avenue.

“I’ve made it clear already that New Haven needs to be safe in every way,” Mayor Elicker said about priorities he stressed both during his campaign as well as during his first four weeks in office.

“That includes safe from violent crime, but it also means safety for people around the city when they’re walking across streets, on their bicycles, and in their cars. This is a very important issue for us.”

Not only will the Complete Streets application process be made available online, he said, but so will the total number of submitted and outstanding Complete Streets applications.

He added that he has also spoken with Chief Reyes about including traffic safety crime statistics, including car crashes and lesser motor vehicle infractions, in the weekly Compstat meetings.

“The police department is cognizant of ensuring that enforcement is done in an equitable way,” he said. That means making sure that speeding enforcement is spread equally across different neighborhoods.

As for making corridors like Whalley and Whitney structurally safer, he said, that will require more substantive infrastructure changes. While the city is committed to those deeper, longer-term changes, they are more costly. ​“We have to look for funding for that.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of Tuesday night’s meeting.