Paul Bass Photo
Laydon crew on peanut-prep duty Thursday.
The Great Peanut’s staging ground is beginning to take shape in Westville.
That’s one way of looking at the novel design of a traffic-calming project for which construction has begun at the treacherous intersection of Yale Avenue and Chapel Street hard by the Yale Bowl and Westville Music Bowl.
The city has blocked off the intersection to through-traffic as a crew from Laydon Industries gets to work reconfiguring the roadway for five new islands.
When they finish, four slender triangular-ish islands will slow drivers at all four approaches to the intersection.
Then a larger peanut-shaped roundabout will appear in the middle of the intersection itself.
Planned peanut roundabout.
That’s how it should look in the end upon the anticipated spring completion of the approximately half-million-dollar city-funded project. (See design above.)
On Thursday morning, the Laydon crew members were working first on the perimeters. They set about building a retaining wall at the northeastern edge of the intersection by Edgewood Park and getting ready to remove and replace a catch basin there to allow for reconfiguring the street around one of the future island approaches.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said the road will remain closed to through traffic for at least several weeks as the crew does as much of the prep work as possible before it gets too cold. Then the crew will complete the work, and close the streets again, in the spring.
Zinn explained the design’s “strange geometry.”
Usually roundabouts are … round, he noted. As in a circle.
That works at intersections where all four approaches to the intersection arrive at a 90-degree angle.
At Chapel and Yale, the heavily traveled streets collide at different angles.
“No matter where you place a circle, some approach would be way too tight, or so smooth people can just speed right through it,” Zinn said.
So the city decided to “stretch out the center of it.” He called the resulting peanutish shape “two foci of an ellipsis” offering “each pair of approaches an ideal approach to the roundabout.”
Zinn said he expects the resumption of the work to proceed quickly once the weather warms up.
Paul Bass Photo
Retaining wall rises by park's edge.
Paul Bass Photo
The aftermath of one of the more than 50 crashes in recent years at Chapel and Yale.
The city could have saved $500K by turning the flashing yellow to flashing red on Chapel St running east and west.