The Safety We Seek

The first of Newtown’s so-called “traffic calming” devices was installed on Glover Avenue last week. The raised crosswalk, made of polyvinyl chloride plastic, is supposed to safeguard children crossing from the Meadow Road neighborhood to the sidewalk that runs along the north side of Glover Avenue. That location went from having no marked crosswalk to having a highly visible bump in the road designed to jar drivers out of their inattention and complacency about pedestrians sharing the road. Another similar crosswalk will appear on Queen Street this week or next near the middle school. Anything that brings an extra measure of safety to an area where kids and cars routinely mix sounds like a good idea, but Newtown may find that this new reliance on the gadgets and devices of traffic calming may offer a false sense of security that may itself be a hazard.

Armed with a new traffic calming ordinance from the Legislative Council and a Queen Street Area Traffic Improvement Plan from the Police Commission, the Public Works Department plans to install the first two crosswalks as “an experiment,” according to Public Works Director Fred Hurley. If they prove to be practical and effective — which is to say that snowplows don’t scrape them right off the road and we don’t see an increase in rear-ender accidents from people braking unexpectedly for the bumps — then six more such crosswalks are slated for installation along the length of Queen Street from the commercial district to Mile Hill Road.

We doubt, however, that these devices, whether they prove effective or not, will eliminate the underlying problems that make traffic so hazardous in the borough’s commercial center and throughout Newtown: speed and congestion. A slowdown and bottleneck in one place creates a speed-up and added congestion somewhere else. Strapping down Queen Street and Glover Avenue in a corset of raised crosswalks is going to force more vehicles onto Main Street, where there are far more hazards and accidents to begin with. It may also lull us back into complacency by thinking that a few crosswalks have solved the problem. Consideration of these peripheral consequences needs to be part of the assessment of the success of this “experiment.”

There is no substitute, no matter how brightly colored or jarring, for plain old traffic enforcement by Newtown’s Police Department. The department has already stepped up its efforts this year with extra traffic enforcement patrols. Continuing, even augmenting, that effort, along with existing school crossing guards and a vigilant populace — both pedestrians and drivers — will ultimately give us the extra safety we seek.