Police Commission members plan to have another traffic study performed at Pearl Street to learn what measures are best suited to holding down travel speeds on the 3,600-foot-long hilly, curving residential road that links Washington Avenue to Philo Curtis Road in Sandy Hook.

At the June 7 Police Commission meeting, Pearl Street resident Deborah Pond thanked commission members for having had police positioned at the street with radar equipment to enforce the traffic laws. Ms Pond urged the commission to consider installing speed tables on the street as a physical means to deter speeding.

The Police Commission is the local traffic authority.

Pearl Street area residents have told Police Commission members that motorists use Pearl Street as a way to avoid traveling through the heavy traffic congestion on Berkshire Road in the vicinity of Newtown High School.

Police Chief James Viadero noted that recent construction work on Route 34 (Berkshire Road) has resulted in more motorists traveling on Pearl Street.

The chief recommended that a third traffic study be performed on Pearl Street this summer to collect more data on the traffic situation there.

Commission member Brian Budd said that data to be collected during that July traffic study would be added to data collected from traffic studies that were done by police in April and December.

"We need data," he said. Such traffic studies collect information about the number of vehicles using a street and the speeds at which they travel.

Pearl Street resident Vincent Imerti thanked Police Commission members for the steps that police have taken so far to monitor and control traffic on the street.

Since last year, a number of Pearl Street area residents have urged that the town install speed tables on Pearl Street to hold down travel speeds.

In response to other speeding problems in town, the Police Commission in the past has had five speed tables installed on the southern section of Queen Street and four speed tables installed on Key Rock Road.

In the past, the Police Commission has reviewed extensive data on traffic speed problems in a given area before deciding that installing speed tables is actually the best solution to address a speeding problem.