Laura Glesby Photo
Safe-streets advocates at recent memorial for crash victims.
CT-N
Lemar at hearing: Traffic violence continues, must be stopped.
Safe streets advocates fed up with the daily danger of walking or biking in New Haven “traveled” to a state hearing Wednesday to support a proposed speed camera law that would automatically send tickets to drivers who hurtle through school zones and road-repair sites.
Roughly a dozen city residents turned out virtually to testify in support of that proposed legislation Wednesday during a virtual meeting of the state legislature’s Transportation Committee.
The five-hour-plus public hearing — the first such discussion of newly proposed bills to take place this state legislative session—was held online via the Connecticut Network (CT‑N) and YouTube Live.
Wednesday’s virtual state committee hearing.
The primary focus of discussion and debate Wednesday was Raised House Bill 5429: An Act Concerning Pedestrian Safety, Vision Zero Council, Speed Limits In Municipalities, Fines And Charges For Certain Violations, The Greenways Commemorative Account And Maintenance Work Zone And School Zone Safety Enforcement.
The state legislative committee members must now deliberate on whether or not to change the language before voting to move the proposed bill out of committee. It would then advance to the full state House of Representatives and state Senate for more debate.
The 33-page draft bill can be read in full here. It represents the latest attempt by Transportation Committee House Chair and New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar at wielding his committee leadership position to promote alternative transit infrastructure upgrades, increased speed enforcement, and overall improved traffic safety for people who do not use a car.
It also comes at the end of another year of street violence and deaths. Over 65 pedestrians and cyclists were killed by cars statewide in 2020, including nine pedestrians and two cyclists in New Haven.
Thomas Breen photo
Speed radar sign on Dixwell Ave.
“We are continuing to see extraordinarily high rates of speed, levels of distracted driving, and the fact that people are driving larger and heavier vehicles” means that there have been more fatal crashes, Lemar said. Roadways continue to be perilous public spaces, especially for “vulnerable users” not in a car.
The proposed bill covers quite a bit of traffic safety territory. It would grant pedestrians the right of way at crosswalks so long as they indicate their intent to cross the road; create a statewide Vision Zero Council charged with charting a path towards no more transportation-related fatalities; and increase fines for drivers distracted by phones or other electronic devices while behind the wheel.
The two most-discussed sections of the bill during Wednesday’s hearing were sections that would allow for “automated traffic enforcement” — aka speed cameras — in school zones and maintenance work zones; and that would allow municipalities the ability to reduce speed limits on locally-owned roads to 20 miles per hour, down from the current state-mandated minimum of 25 miles per hour.
The “speed cameras” are a new iteration of a cause New Haven traffic-calmers have fought at the Capitol for over a decade: electronic enforcement of deadly speeding. The previous iteration championed “red-light cameras” that could theoretically document a wider range of offenses; civil-rights and civil-liberties advocates repeatedly killed bills that would have allowed New Haven to install them.
Over 10 New Haveners spoke in support of the proposed bill during Wednesday’s live-streamed hearing; 140 New Haveners submitted written testimony in favor. One New Havener submitted written testimony in opposition.
The proposed bill would allow for the use of so-called “automated traffic enforcement safety devices” within maintenance work zones, defined as any limited access highway where maintenance work is being performed by the Department of Transportation. Any driver whose car was photographed speeding 12 miles per hour or more above the posted speed limit would receive an automated speeding ticket in the mail.
Sign prepared by safe-streets advocates listing names of cyclists and pedestrians killed by cars.
It would also allow for the Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, in consultation with the state transportation commissioner, to establish a pilot program that would give up to 10 municipalities statewide permission to set up speed cameras in school zones within their respective municipalities a period of five years. Anyone whose car was photographed traveling 11 miles per hour or more through a speed camera-watched school zone would then receive an automated speeding ticket by mail.
The law explicitly states that speed cameras will record images of cars’ license plates only. They “shall not record images of the occupants of such motor vehicle or of any other persons or vehicles in the vicinity at the time the images are recorded.”
South Frontage Deaths Drive New Haven Turnout
In addition to winning the vocal support of Mayor Justin Elicker and city transit chief Doug Hausladen Wednesday, speed cameras earned favorable recommendations by city residents and workers who have felt the impact of local street carnage firsthand.
Rich Belitsky (pictured), a former deputy dean for education at the Yale School of Medicine, harkened back to April 19, 2008, when 27-year-old, fourth-year medical student Mila Rainoff was struck and killed by a car while walking at the intersection of York Street and South Frontage Road.
Her view of oncoming traffic was obscured by a truck leaving the loading dock at Yale New Haven Hospital, he said. A car at the intersection sped up to beat the light.
“Mila was just steps from reaching the curb” when she was hit. She died of her injuries the following day.
Balitsky was the one who had to make the call to her parents in California to let them know about her daughter’s death. “It was the most difficult and heartbreaking phone call of my professional career. A feeling that has never left me.”
He promised them that he and the school would do everything they could to make that intersection safer. Thirteen years later, little has changed, “and this remains a very dangerous intersection,” he said.
He stressed his support for the speed cameras pilot as a tool for “doing something to decrease and hopefully stop the speeding of vehicles, which is critical to ensure pedestrian safety and many like it throughout the state.”
Yale Law School students Helia Bidad (pictured) and Andrew Granato also testified in support of speed cameras. They cited another traffic-related fatality at the corner of York and South Frontage as one of their primary motivations for virtually attending the state legislative hearing.
The traffic death that prompted their attendance took place not in 2008, but in October 2020, when their 25-year-old classmate Keonho Lim was struck and killed by a truck at that very same spot while on his bicycle.
Bidad said that for 15 hours she and her classmates knew nothing about which of their classmates had died except that he was 25 and a second-year student. She recalled frantically texting and calling everyone she knew who fit the description to see if they were OK.
“I broke down in tears upon learning the news,” she said. “The next traffic death could be you or me, through no fault of our own, but through the policy and infrastructure inadequacies in the state of Connecticut.”
Granato (pictured) said that he fit the very description provided by the city and the university to students before Lim’s name had been made public. He received text after text after call after call that day, asking if he was still alive.
“It was a thoroughly unnerving experience to say the least,” he said.
“I’ve lived in Iowa, Ohio, Illinois. The situation with traffic safety here in New Haven is worse than I’ve ever seen.”
A pilot program for speed cameras, they both argued, would be a cautious and effective way to deter speeding. And it wouldn’t infringe on people’s privacy by focusing solely on their license plates, and not on the drivers behind the wheel.
City Point resident and federal public defender Andrew Giering (pictured) zeroed in on that point in his testimony in support of speed cameras.
He called it a “necessary reform in policing” that would “take the human component out” of traffic stops.
Rather than having armed police officers staked out on city streets and charged with exercising their own discretion on when to stop someone and when to press charges, speed cameras would send out a ticket to anyone and everyone who violates the law.
He called it a “consistent, fair, and comprehensive” enforcement tool, and one that has been proven to reduce speeding in New York City school zones.
Downtown Alder Abby Roth (pictured) agreed. “The New Haven Police Department just doesn’t have the capacity with all of their other responsibilities to carry out the consistent enforcement necessary to end speeding,” she said.
Automatic enforcement reduces potentially volatile, discriminatory, and even deadly traffic stops while still deterring speeding, she argued.
She said that, in New York City between 2014 to 2018, 81 percent of drivers who received a speed ticket from cameras didn’t receive a second. Traffic-related deaths in school zones decreased by 55 percent.
“Walking to work, I daily witness the racetrack and chaos of South Frontage Road,” she said about the intersection where Rainoff was killed in 2008, Melinda Trancredi was killed in 2017, and Lim was killed in 2020.
She urged the legislature to consider expanding the pilot to not just school zones, but also areas near hospitals.
“Traffic safety is the issue I hear the most about from constituents,” she said.
After recounting his own experience losing a friend and fellow cyclist to a fatal car crash in Wallingford, East Rock resident and local safe streets advocate Max Chaoulideer (pictured) said that speed cameras would “reduce speeding, greatly reduce injuries and death, and offer a transparent and data-driven” method to reducing street violence.
“Our streets are not safe,” he said. “They’re not fair. And they’re not sustainable.” While redesigning roads to promote lower speeds and vulnerable user safety must be a long-term vision for ending traffic fatalities, he said, “in the meantime, we need to enforce the most basic traffic safety parameter: Speed.”
The only person who spoke up in opposition to speed cameras during the first four hours of Wednesday’s hearing was Andrew Matthews, the head of the state troopers union. He cautioned that automated enforcement would replace trained, professional state police officers with privately-owned cameras. Matthews argued that would represent an unconstitutional outsourcing of necessary state police work.
The only New Havener to submit written testimony in opposition to the proposed bill was Chris Garaffa. They cited privacy concerns around speed cameras as the primary source of their opposition.
“My fears regarding this bill center around the storage and access by private entities and government agencies of the location of a person at any given time,” they wrote. “While the privacy aspects of the bill are a good start, they could be much stronger to guarantee privacy of people using public roadways in Connecticut.”
Lower Speed Limits? Or Better Infrastructure?
The New Haveners who attended Wednesday’s virtual committee hearing also overwhelmingly backed the proposal to allow municipalities to reduce speed limits on locally owned roads to 20 miles per hour.
Mayor Elicker described the proposed bill as “a major step in giving in giving our city the tools it needs to enforce the law.”
Current Stamford public transportation chief — and former New Haven top transit official—Jim Travers (pictured) took the opposite line.
He warned against giving municipalities the unfettered ability to reduce speed limits without going through the current approval process required with the state DOT, which he said provides necessary “checks and balances.”
Travers also argued that reducing speed limits is not the most effective approach to reducing speeds. Better traffic infrastructure is, he said.
During his time in Stamford, the local administration invested in retiming traffic signals to correspond to the city’s base 30 mile-per-hour speed limit.
“This has singlehandedly been one of the most successful endeavors of this administration,” he said. It’s reduced travel speeds by 14 percent across the city overall, and by 42 percent in some of the areas that previously saw the most egregious driving.
“Allowing municipalities to lower speed limits without any oversight in my opinion is dangerous,” he said. He encouraged the committee instead to “provide funding options for improved signalization work, to redesign roadways and particular intersections in a safe and efficient manner.”
“Enforcement alone will not fix these problems,” he concluded. “It has been proven that we must look at the entirety of the transportation network to fix this problem.”
Later in the committee hearing, Lemar said that the state Office of the State Traffic Administration (OSTA) itself recently concluded that local transportation departments are better suited to determine the unique needs — including speed limits — of local roads than is the state.
The New Haven legislator stressed that this section of the bill does not require municipalities to change their speed limits. It simply gives them that option if they feel that they have the local talent and expertise.
“Not everyone has to use it,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to force Mr. Travers’s hand if he doesn’t feel like he’s capable of coming up with” his own speed limit plan for his city. “A lot of communities do have the capacity and engineering talent,” he said, and should be allowed to act on their own.
We still have to see what line the Black & Puerto Rican Caucus takes on this. Back in February when some of us pushed Roland on automated enforcement, his response was that it had been tried before and that the Caucus had come out against it, so there wasn't much to be done. I'm glad he's come around to trying again -- and it seems like things went well at the committee level today, which is great -- but I'm still nervous about what the response will be from the people who opposed this stuff in 2012.
I also think that Travers makes some good points re: signal timing, etc. Speed limits in the U.S. are all over the place, with lots of sudden and seemingly arbitrary variations, and (perhaps partially as a result?) they are very often treated as advisory. There are a lot of levers to pull here, but on the speed front specifically, some kind of coordination with the state seems like a very good idea.