Laura Glesby Photo
Darko Jelaca has a vision for this intersection.
Yet another driver barreled down Whitney Avenue, crossing the New Haven-Hamden town line far faster than the 25 miles-per-hour limit.
“TWENTY FIVE!” Darko Jelaca shouted at the car, having just made it to the corner of Whitney and Cliff after darting across the avenue.
The city's "final preliminary" design proposal for the intersection.
For more than seven years, Jelaca and his neighbors have been advocating for a crosswalk and pedestrian island at that intersection outside Edgerton Park.
The nearest crosswalks are minutes away, by the park’s northern end or two blocks down at East Rock Road. According to Jelaca, pedestrians frequently cross the road where there are no crosswalks by Cliff or Burns streets — including at least one dog-walker around noon on Monday.
Jelaca, an engineer who lives near the intersection with his wife, two kids, and his dog, has seen multiple car crashes on that stretch of the avenue between Cliff and Burns.
The intersection caught the city’s attention when neighbors posted about it on a SeeClickFix thread first created in mid-2016 and revived multiple times over the years, including last week. Jelaca posted that he wants the city to create a crosswalk there, with button-activated flashing walk lights. He wants the painted buffer at the center of the road to be raised and transformed into a pedestrian island, so that people crossing the street can pay attention to cars driving in one direction at a time.
In the nearly eight years since, the city held multiple community meetings about the intersection. Jelaca’s kids grew from young children to teens. And the street has seen no changes.
In the meantime, the city has been working on a big-picture plan to overhaul traffic safety along Whitney Avenue — a proposal involving all of the measures that Jelaca envisions at the Cliff Street intersection, plus a protected bike lane that would narrow the road.
According to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, “We’re finishing up the design in the first half of 2024,” along with a separate project replacing the avenue’s traffic signals.
He wrote in an email to Jelaca that the city has installed speed bumps along some of the side streets prior to implementing the Whitney Avenue interventions based on feedback from the public.
Zinn said in an interview that he expects the traffic calming measures to materialize on Whitney Avenue sometime in 2025. “This is a really exciting project that will do a lot,” he said.
In an email to fellow Safe Streets New Haven activists, Max Chaoulideer argued that the city’s long-term goals for Whitney Avenue shouldn’t get in the way of more immediate fixes like the ones Jelaca has proposed.
“We’ve seen large planned projects that get stalled out get in the way of needed short term improvements for a long time,” he wrote. “Hopefully we can set a different precedent here.”
Jelaca’s largest concern about the intersection is the speed of the cars that drive through.
Several years ago, Jelaca borrowed a baseball speed gun to measure how fast cars were driving down the corridor. The 19 cars whose speed he measured were speeding at 45 miles per hour on average, with the fastest car reaching 58 miles per hour.
That seemed about accurate on mid-day Monday. As cars zoomed by, Jelaca turned to Tom Kearns, a cyclist whom he’d flagged down to ask about the street’s safety.
“How fast do you think they’re going?” Jelaca asked, referring to a car that had just passed.
“Oh, easily 50 miles per hour,” Kearns said.
“This street kinda sucks,” added Kearns, an E.R. doctor who regularly cycles down Whitney Avenue. He said he supports a crosswalk at the Cliff Street intersection.
Jelaca noted that the fatality rate for pedestrians hit by cars increases exponentially based on how fast the car is driving. At 45 miles per hour, a pedestrian would have about a 50 percent chance of survival, according to the London Department of Transport.
He believes that a crosswalk would not only make the intersection safer — it would also send a message to cars driving into New Haven that “this is a walking city,” that it’s time to slow down.
Jelaca introduces himself to Tom Kearns, a cyclist who quickly got on board with Jelaca's proposals.
35, 40, 55 mph... Who cares?
Anything over 25mph will probably kill a pedestrian or cyclist. Separate cars from everyone else