Traffic-Safety ​“Quick Builds” Get $400K Boost

Royale Gibbs remembers well when a car speeding up Derby Avenue rammed into a tree and flipped over a triangular island and into the middle of the street. 

That was before the city, in a quick-fix effort to slow down traffic, painted the pavement around the island cerulean blue and put up a bevy of short plastic delineators.

“I remember this spot. This is definitely safer” now, he said.

Gibbs offered that road-safety assessment Wednesday afternoon while walking past a laundromat at criss-crossed intersection of Norton Street, Derby Avenue, and George Street.

Just one car lane and several painted-pavement feet away from Gibbs stood Mayor Justin Elicker, Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and a handful of top city transit officials and traffic-calming advocates. 

That group gathered by the triangular roadway island to celebrate the city’s coming receipt of $400,000 in federal aid to help cover the costs of what city Transportation, Traffic & Parking Director Sandeep Aysola described as a number of low-cost ​“quick-build” traffic-calming projects.

After some more community-input gathering, those projects will take place in speeding hotspots across the city on Blatchley Avenue, Bassett Street, Kimberly Avenue, Winthrop/Sherman Avenue, and Wintergreen Avenue. And, when in place, they will likely look similar to what the city put up at Norton-Derby-George last September and showcased on Wednesday: that is, painted intersections that narrow the roadway by reducing the number of vehicle lanes and that create a larger and more visible space for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the street with the help of plastic delineators. 

Those projects will be in line with the city’s pedestrian‑, cyclist‑, and bus-rider-boosting Safe Routes for All Plan, which the alders adopted last September.

“As you can see, it brings a level of placemaking to this area,” Aysola said about the West River safe-streets improvements. It ​“highlights the importance of this intersection. We reclaim the space by extending the curb.” There’s ​“more space for pedestrians to cross. It narrows the street, and helps with traffic calming. We put the delineators to create this diversionary movement.”

Is this exactly the same type of project that residents of, say, Blatchley Avenue or Bassett Street should expect to see on their blocks?

“There will be variations” based on the cost, he said. But ​“this is all low-cost. It’s not any major traffic improvements like replacing a traffic signal. It’s just going to be using low-cost materials” to make quick improvements that could lay the groundwork for larger changes to come.

Last year was a uniquely deadly year for pedestrians across Connecticut, Blumethal said. Seventy-five pedestrians across the state were killed by cars in 2022. 

“Roads can be safer,” he said. ​“It isn’t a mystery. It’s not science fiction.” He said New Haven can provide a model for the rest of the state on how to make streets like the Derby Avenue safer for all users of the road.

Walker-Myers agreed. ​“We care about slowing down cars. We care about pedestrian safety. We care about bike safety,” she said. ​“This is just another way that we’re saying everyone needs to pay attention” to making sure streets are safe to use for all.

Aysola said that there were 20,000 car crashes in New Haven last year, and 300 of those crashes resulted in ​“serious injures and fatalities.” Half of those serious-injury crashes, he said, involved pedestrians or cyclists. Interventions like the painted pavement and plastic delineators are ​“low-cost, fast to implement,” and make the roads safer.

After the press conference, Rich G. and Kenny Wilson, who were standing outside of the laundromat on the north side of the intersection, said they have not been impressed with the paint-and-delineator changes to the intersection that the city made last September.

“It kinds of makes a bottleneck” for cars that only have one lane to travel in each way now, Rich said. That narrowing of the roadway and the associated frustrations for drivers ​“just makes everybody go faster,” said Wilson. The two said they’d prefer to see more speed bumps instead of narrower roadways.

Gibbs, however, was all in on the city’s changes to Derby-George-Norton — and for plans to paint more pavement and put up more delineators elsewhere around town. Seeing that car crash at this very triangular island was quite the spectacle, he said. And that kind of crash hasn’t happened since. So as far as he’s concerned, the city’s changes are working.