Common Ground Plants Signs For Safer Streets

“We have to worry so much about the cars going fast, we can’t learn how to spell!”

The remark by Common Ground High School freshman Aubrey Bido and her classmate Aaliyah Jones was jokey about the misspelled word on Bido’s sign,“Yeild” for ​“Yield,” but the occasion was anything but.

In fact, the message — and the West Rock safe streets sign-making workshop it sprang from — pointed to a matter of life and potential vehicular death.

Wednesday morning, Bido and a dozen freshmen at the renowned agriculture and ecology-themed high school in West Rock used one of their annual days of service – traditionally the day before Thanksgiving – to call attention to the tragedy-about-to-happen that is the looping speedway, without any traffic calming signage or infrastructure, by 358 Springside Ave. in front of their school.

“We’ve had officials here,” said Common Ground Director of Community Impact & Engagement Joel Tolman, and there’s been a Complete Streets application in the pipeline for at least six years, ​“but lives are at stake, the process is just too slow, so we decided to raise the temperature.”

By that he meant alerting the press and calling in Melinda Tuhus and Lior Trestman, long-time members of New Haven’s Safe Streets Coalition, to help coordinate the making and deployment of signs right along the curving speedway adjacent to the school’s main entrance. 

The work unfolded on a beautifully bright morning both in the classroom and then on the strip of Springside Avenue by the school’s bus stop, across the street from the Wintergreen Avenue bridge. As the kids brainstormed, lettered, and then planted their signs, at least a dozen cars sped by at (according to this reporter’s estimate) 40 mph or more in the clearly marked 25-mile-per-hour zone in front of the school.

About three quarters of the 230 kids attending Common Ground, said Tolman, take CT Transit public buses up to the bucolic 20-acre campus. When school is over, the kids can safely board the bus at the stop adjacent to the school grounds.

However, in the morning, when they arrive, the city buses unload their cargo of students across Springside. Then in large groups, the students must negotiate the avenue, sometimes both in front and in back of the idling bus, looking left and right, with poor sightlines all along the curving road in both directions.

“This is a tragedy waiting to happen,” said Melinda Tuhus, a long time activist with the Safe Streets Coalition, who was on hand with markers and encouragement.

Tolman was at pains to point out that city officials like the local Alder Honda Smith and the city transit department’s director Sandeep Aysola are aware and involved.

Tolman said that Aysola was recently out at the school and assured him that the problem is very much on the department’s radar. ​“The city is working on an evaluation of the safety needs of all the schools,” he said, ​“and he’ll get back to us,” Tolman reported.

What prompted the activism, Tolman explained to the students as they worked on the posters Wednesday, was one of the Common Ground staffers, the lead farmer at the school, Deborah Greig, was hit by a car on Springside, dragged, and injured. That was in 2017. And since then at least one student has been struck by a car while riding a bike to school.

Then four years ago, as part of re-routing buses to make the general West Rock community safer and easier to connect with the rest of the city, at least the bus drop-off was repositioned from the far end of the Wintergreen Avenue bridge. That had required the kids to cross the un-sidewalked bridge over the creek and then to negotiate Springside.

Now the gauntlet is a little shorter but no less perilous. 

For the cohort of Common Ground students who take advanced classes nearby at Southern Connecticut State University, the walk is not only across speeding Springside, across Wintergreen Creek, but also another half a mile of largely along un-sidewalked streets.

“It’s named as a priority in the City’s plan, but there’s not a lot of action in the plan,” Trestman about traffic calming efforts near Common Ground.

“It’s obviously not a priority,” added Tuhus.

And the kids, many of whom had near-miss stories they related, shared those frustrations and anxieties, which they embodied in their signs.

Yet did the kids think the signs would really help?

“It’s crazy,” said Kennice Dennie as she held a sign reading: ​“Slow Down/It Really Won’t Hurt You” 

“Trucks, cars don’t slow down when you get off a bus. I don’t think they care. I can only hope,” she added.

Another student said her experience is that younger drivers especially don’t care. ​“They just want to have fun,” at risk of putting the Common Ground kids in serious danger.

“You got to be a bad person to see this sign and not slow down,” said Javeah Glasper. Her sign read ​“Slow The *@#% Down.”

“I’m not sure it’ll work,” said her collaborator Charlese Clark, ​“but it’s a good try.”

“You can only do so much,” said Aubrey Bido of the ​“Yeild” sign. ​“A pathetic appeal just might influence people,” she said with a smile about the misspelling.

Tuhus said that the coalition, as a follow-up to the sign-making activity, has just recently sent a letter to Mayor Elicker, the Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking, and other officials to highlight the pressing urgency of the traffic situation at Common Ground. 

The recent repaving of the road – remarkably without any visible new signage, cross-walking, or even other low-cost cosmetic traffic calming remediation as of part of it – has only resulted in faster driving around the curves at both ends of the campus, Wednesday’s safe streets advocates warned.

As part of his senior project last year, Common Ground graduate Christopher Albert (with Georgii Larkov) put together a full traffic calming plan. If you want to learn more about his plan, you can reach him at [email protected]. Or to get involved as an advocate, email Joel Tolman [email protected]