Thomas Breen photo
Pearl-Lincoln intersection, where a car recently hit a pedestrian.
A Yale business school student was hit by a car recently while crossing Pearl Street and Lincoln Street.
People who work and live near the busy East Rock intersection were surprised — that such collisions don’t happen more often.
Neighborhood Association President Nick Lloyd.
Nick Lloyd, the president of the Lincoln-Bradley Neighborhood Association, was going for a walk with two neighbors at around 9 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 7, when he saw a fire truck and an ambulance at the intersection, just a block north of his house.
A young woman, a second-year master’s student at the nearby Yale School of Management (SOM), was lying in the middle of the intersection.
Paramedics lifted her onto a stretcher, he remembered. They carried her into the ambulance and then rushed her to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
She had just been hit by a car while crossing Lincoln. She had been walking west on Pearl Street from Orange Street over to SOM’s campus on Whitney Avenue.
SOM Dean Ted Snyder told the Independent that the student was released from the hospital later that same day. She “is doing well,” he said.
Lloyd said the Feb. 7 accident was the first car-pedestrian collision he had seen or heard of on the block since moving there in 2011.
“It’s the only accident that’s happened,” he told the Independent. “Thank God.”
But Lloyd and his neighbors have long feared that a pedestrian would be injured, or worse, while crossing Pearl and Lincoln.
For the intersection seems uniquely ill-equipped for pedestrian safety.
Pearl and Lincoln: Most pedestrians ignore the sidewalk.
The intersection is a popular one for pedestrians, cyclists, and cars.
It sits just a block away from SOM, New Haven Academy high school, a church and nursery school at Christ Presbyterian Church, a cafe and dry cleaners at Pearl and Orange, and a 37-unit apartment complex at 516 Orange. Lloyd said that there are also 10 children under 10 years old who live on the block, which only adds to the frequency of young kids and young parents walking through that intersection.
Lloyd said that delivery trucks and school buses frequently pass through the intersection, as do cars whose drivers are looking to bypass traffic at the highway off-ramp and traffic light at Orange Street and Trumbull Street.
The unusual layout of the street often forces, or at least encourages, pedestrians to walk in the middle of the street amidst passing cars, buses, trucks, and cyclists.
There is only one stretch of narrow sidewalk at the intersection, on the southern side of Pearl Street between Lincoln and Orange. The other three sides of the intersection are taken up by parking spaces and pavement.
There is no indication to pedestrians walking down the sidewalk-less road from the business school that they have entered an active two-way road after crossing the intersection with Lincoln Street. And because there are no sidewalks behind the business school and virtually no cars travel up to that cul-de-sac, pedestrians feel comfortable walking in the middle of the road. Often while listening to music or looking down at their phones.
To top it all off, there are no stop signs, or crosswalks, at the intersection.
There is only a narrow stretch of sidewalk on one side of one block that, according to Lloyd, is often covered in snow, obstructed by the neighboring apartment complex’s dumpsters, and simply too difficult to see because of cars parked on the southern side of Pearl.
“Everyone in the neighborhood understands this is a complicated intersection,” he said.
Downtown Alder, and Lincoln Street resident, Abby Roth.
He and Downtown Alder Abby Roth, who also lives on Lincoln Street, said the intersection is in desperate need of stop signs and pedestrian crosswalks.
The student who was hit by the car on Feb. 7 wasn’t even walking in the middle of Pearl Street when she was hit, Lloyd said. Rather, she was reportedly crossing at the sidewalk, walking west on Pearl Street towards the business school. The driver simply didn’t see her because of cars parked on the southern side of the block. Plus, that car didn’t have to slow down, because there are no stop signs at the intersection.
Roth said that the neighborhood association has submitted an application to the city for two stop signs: one at Lincoln and Bradley, right by New Haven Academy, and one at Lincoln and Pearl, right where the SOM student was hit.
Whenever the neighborhood association meets, Roth said, “the main issue on every agenda is traffic safety.”
City transit chief Doug Hausladen told the Independent via text message that his staff is currently “reviewing whether the intersection meets the warrant for an all way stop.” The big question, he said, is where the sidewalks are at the intersection.
In 2012, Norman Chonacky, then the president of the neighborhood association, submitted a Complete Streets application with the city, requesting some kind of traffic safety improvements for the intersection.
“Pearl, Lincoln, and Bradley are ‘urban local roads’ that have come to be used as ‘urban minor artierials,’” Chonacky wrote. “They are residential roads populated by families with small children, a public school, a nursery school, and professional offices. They attract large and welcome numbers of pedestrians and bicyclists. But they are increasingly used by commuters as high-speed shortcuts, and by commercial and construction vehicles seeking to avoid the traffic lights at Orange/Trumbull and Trumbull/Whitney.”
In the 2012 application, Chonacky and the neighborhood association requested installing sidewalks on the north side of Pearl and eliminating the head-in parking along the building where Cafe Romeo used to be; extending parallel parking on the north side of Pearl all the way to the SOM gate; and installing three-way stop signs at the corner of Pearl and Lincoln, as well as zebra-striped pedestrian crossings; and barring.
The application, Lloyd said, went nowhere.
Pearl Street west on Lincoln, pointing towards Yale’s business school. No sidewalks in sight.
In 2014, Lloyd then posted a notice on SeeClickFix entitled, “West End of Pearl Street Is An Accident Waiting To Happen.”
In that post, Lloyd pointed out how the pathway from SOM dumps pedestrians directly into the middle of Pearl Street, the narrow sidewalk on the southern stretch of Pearl between Orange and Lincoln is often obstructed by dumpsters and covered in ice, the parking area on Pearl adjacent to Cafe Romeo is overcrowded and often double-parked with delivery trucks, and drivers use Lincoln as a shortcut around highway on-ramp traffic.
“Individually, these problems would be difficult to address,” he wrote, “together they are even more difficult. But the situation is somewhat dire, and we need to start coming up with solutions.”
The post has 11 comments, 1,226 views, and has been “acknowledged” by the city. Lloyd said that the city has never acted on any of the issues raised in the post.
Five years later, now that a car has finally hit a pedestrian at the intersection, Lloyd said, the same recommendations included in the original 2012 Complete Streets application are still needed.
Stop signs at the corner of Pearl and Lincoln. A zebra-striped crosswalk at the intersection. More and better sidewalks. Relocated parking spaces to allow for better sightlines.
“We just feel very frustrated,” Lloyd said, because he feels that the city has known about these problems, and done nothing about them. He said he hopes this accident will spur the city to act on concerns that he and his neighbors have had about the intersection for years.
SOM Dean Snyder said he supports the neighborhood association’s proposed remedies for the intersection. He said the school has communicated its concerns about the intersection to the university more broadly, the city, and even to Gov. Ned Lamont.
“The broader context for this accident is a policy problem,” he told the Independent by email. “As you know, New Haven is great at collecting parking revenues, but doesn’t enforce traffic laws. Why? Connecticut has a law whereby parking revenues are kept by the city but fines from traffic violations go to the State. So we end up with a very unsafe environment for everyone in New Haven – pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.”
When asked if the business school would help pay for any of the proposed pedestrian safety improvements for the intersection, Snyder demurred.
“I’m not sure,” he wrote. “As a middle manager – a dean of an individual school – I don’t know how Yale views such arrangements with the city.”
A university spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.