1 Small Step For Safety. 1 Giant Leap For West Rock

Walking to school is going to become a lot safer in the near future for students like Common Ground seniors Angel Mercado and Luis Diaz, as a half mile of new sidewalks connecting Brookside Estates and other developments with their Springside Avenue charter school are en route — as part of a suite of traffic safety improvements coming to the semi-rural West Rock corner of the city.

Mercado and Diaz joined city and state officials Thursday morning to announce those coming infrastructure upgrades. In addition to the brand new Brookside-connecting sidewalks, they’ll also include a new pedestrian foot bridge across Wintergreen Brook and a sidewalk continuation down to the campus of Southern Connecticut State College.

Both students said they have had close calls/near misses and actual bumps with cars while respectively biking and walking to school from their neighboring Brookside Estates and other West Rock residences. 

Their advocacy and that of the whole student body at the environmental and farm-themed Common Ground High School have played a large and indispensable role in those life safety-enhancing changes on the way.

Thursday morning, just outside the new bus stop by their school, the boys were on hand to participate, along Mayor Justin Elicker, West Rock Alder Honda Smith, and state DOT Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto, in a brief but broadly meaningful celebration marking $669,600 worth of street improvements coming in the next year or two.

That money was scored through the city having won a Connecticut Community Connectivity Grant from the state Department of Transportation that was approved earlier in the week by the Board of Alders.

It will pay for the major Phase Two improvements of the project — a new five-foot wide concrete sidewalk along the western side of Wilmot Road and Wintergreen Avenue that connects to Springside Avenue (and Common Ground High School) and also runs down to the campus of Southern.

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said that the road over the Wintergreen Brook is too small to accommodate a sidewalk, so an adjacent weathered steel pedestrian bridge is to be erected instead. 

Plans call for six or eight two-foot prefabricated segments to be plunked down on the south side of the venerable brownstone bridge that now crosses the brook immediately across from Common Ground’s bucolic campus.

All of this was a positive, satisfying and emotional outcome for the students like Angel and Luis, their colleagues, and Common Ground staff, one of whom, as far back as 2017, came all too close to being seriously injured, but who transformed their fears and anxiety into what has amounted to a seven-year campaign. 

They created signs, mounted a grassroots effort to call attention to the dangers, marched down to the whipping traffic and dangerous bus stop on Springside, attracted press coverage, and eventually achieved results.

“A rare opportunity to right an historical wrong to connect neighborhoods” is how City Engineer Giovanni Zinn described the long generational absence of adequate transportation and safety infrastructure in a part of the city that Mayor Elicker described as a wonderful yet a challenging combination of ​“city and forest.”

“It took these kids,” added West Rock Alder Honda Smith, ​“to give it a serious push, and we should thank Giovanni and the city for listening.”

Phase One of the project, about $40,000 of city money, has already been completed, which has included less capital-intense improvements such as a safer bus stop, a crosswalk, three speed humps on Springside Avenue, and bright, visible new yellow/black signage.

“We already feel safer every day,” added Joel Tolman, Common Ground’s Director of Community Engagement and Impact (and an avid bicycle advocate), and the long-time staff leader in the traffic calming and safety campaign.

Then he put specific details on how the growing sense of safety via the coming infrastructure is going to help bind the community together:

The approximately two dozen Common Ground students, like Angel and Luis, who live in the nearby developments, can walk or bike to school without dodging and worrying about cars.

The little kids at Brennan/Rogers (the elementary school on Wilmot Road) will be able to walk along the coming new sidewalk (forget arranging school buses) to hang out in activities on the Common Ground farms and to have more experiential experiences with the animals and other activities on the campus.

And the approximately 40 Common Ground juniors and seniors who take courses at Southern will be able to get there more safely, thinking about their course work while walking instead of wondering if a speeding vehicle might hit them from behind.

And the whole of the neighboring communities — many of whose families do not own cars — will be able to travel more easily and safely leading to more opportunities to come to the school’s market days, seedling sales, and other activities.

“This neighborhood is beautiful and strong, yet isolated,” Tolman added. But soon it will be a lot less so. ​“We all deserve to walk, bike, and bus safely.”

Eucalitto said New Haven’s community connectivity grant is a piece of an already $50 million that has been distributed statewide through that program.

Zinn cautioned that because of administrative issues — some of the areas in the project, like the new pedestrian bridge over Wintergreen Brook, are in wetlands that require special permitting — actual construction is not likely to begin before early in 2025.