Can Speed Table Calm Killer Intersection?

Wary Beaver Hills neighbors showed officials a killer intersection — and heard a new proposal for slowing what’s become a speedway.

The intersection is at Goffe Terrace and Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. Two crashes were reported there in 2015. The sound of motorcycles speeding through a neighborhood where children play in the streets has raised serious concerns among residents. And in 2013, a Buick Century traveling at three times the 25 mile-per-hour speed limit crashed headlong into another car at the intersection of Goffe and Grasso. A 22-year-old woman was killed. The driver of the Buick was charged with first-degree manslaughter.

The intersection was a climactic stop on a neighborhood tour Wednesday night led by Beaver Hills Alders Brian Wingate and Jill Marks.

“That’s a bad intersection,” said Wingate, who lives a few blocks down Boulevard. ​“It’s a big deal, because we lost lives on that street.”

The alders and neighbors walked six hilly blocks from the corner of Goffe and Crescent Street to the Goffe-Boulevard intersection to discuss speeding in the neighborhood. City Engineer Giovanni Zinn and transit chief Doug Hausladen joined the walking tour to answer questions from neighbors and propose solutions to the problems under discussion.

“Without infrastructure that’s doing its job,” Hausladen told the group, ​“our quality of life is inherently diminished.”

Talking Traffic

As the group made its way up Goffe Terrace, Hausladen and Zinn stopped at each intersection to listen to neighbors’ concerns. One resident noted that a stop sign on Colony Road was too far back for drivers to see oncoming traffic. Another neighbor complained that a patch of sidewalk was missing from the side of the road.

Zinn, who recorded each complaint on his iPad, told the Independent that meeting community members on the street rather than in a school auditorium makes his job easier: He can readily identify problems, and doesn’t have to consult Google Maps every time an unfamiliar intersection comes up.

At the corner of Goffe and Ellsworth, Hausladen stopped to give neighbors a short history lesson about misbegotten traffic policies of decades past, including an initiative to widen lanes that had effectively encouraged speeding along the Goffe Terrace corridor. He described his current work as the process of undoing those mistakes.

A collective sigh rippled through the group as the neighbors approached the Goffe-Boulevard intersection.

State Rep. Toni Walker, who lives on the Boulevard, said that drivers speeding through the intersection have twice wrecked her car while it was parked along the street.

“We’ve had cars come flying down the hill,” Walker said. ​“At night, we have people come here so fast.”

“It sounds like motorcycles,” she added. ​“This is the drag race, they’re doing tricks.”

According to Hausladen, the Goffe-Boulevard intersection has also been unpaved for years — meaning that cars kick up rocks and dust when they speed by.

In New Haven, three separate agencies — the transportation department, the engineering department, and public works — collaborate on street projects. And Hausladen, who oversees only the transportation branch, told the Independent that he wasn’t sure whether public works had already resolved the paving issue.

“We’re about to find out,” he said, as the group approached the intersection.

“That’s how we usually find out about these things,” Zinn added with a wry smile.

The Path Forward

It soon became clear that public works still has plenty of work to do: the intersection is lumpy and uneven, with rocks collecting in the fissures between patches of pavement.

Zinn told the neighbors that the high volume of traffic on Goffe Terrace would probably rule out an easy solution like speed bumps. Instead he suggested a different strategy: raising the Goffe-Boulevard intersection six inches above normal street level to create a slightly raised and textured ​“speed table” that would force passing cars to slow down.

A speed table at the intersection of Whitney Avenue and Audubon Street has reduced traffic problems there. Edwards Street has one too. According to Hausladen, a similar project at the the Goffe-Boulevard intersection could actually make the paving delay seem like a blessing in disguise, because it would be wasteful to tear up a newly paved patch of street.

Zinn said it is too early to speculate about possible costs. But, he added, speed tables, which take about a week to physically construct, are usually pretty expensive. Engineers will have to examine a number of factors, including drainage costs and the hilly design of the intersection, before the city commits to building the table. And with the current construction season set to end in November, it may prove impossible to finish the project before next year. 

Zinn — who said he would also want to vet the plan with more community members — vowed that his department will make the Boulevard-Goffe intersection an priority.

“We want to address this within the next year,” he said. ​“That’s probably the first thing that we’ll look at tomorrow morning.”