Officials Ponder Safe Pedestrian Route to Main Street Sidewalk from Down River Road

Town officials are trying to figure out a safe way for residents on Down River Road to hook up with the Main Street sidewalk, providing a route to the village center.

The first step, according to Tiger Mann, assistant director of the New Canaan Department of Public Works, is to see if there’s a way to get those pedestrians at least as far as the treatment plant driveway—just halfway to a crosswalk at Harrison but at least clear of the blind curve north of Woodland.

Motorists trying to get out of Down River Road have almost no hope of making a left, unless it’s nighttime and they can anticipate northbound traffic by their headlights. One resident of the road says half the families there have school-age kids and that all residents want to be able to walk to town by hooking up with the sidewalk on the other side of Main Street. The challenge is: How do they get to it safely? Credit: Michael Dinan

Michael Stayman of 36 Down River Road, one of nine homes on the street, told Mann and other members of the Traffic Calming Work Group at their most recent meeting that as of now, residents are taking their lives into their hands by running across to the sidewalk on the west side of Main right at Down River Road.

“We don’t have any other way because the road is on the opposite side of Main Street from the sidewalk,” Stayman said at the meeting, held Oct. 14 in the training room at the New Canaan Police Department.

“So as we come out of the road, we have to cross to get to the sidewalk, so we are crossing there anyway, and when we are coming out in our cars, there’s not enough time,” Stayman said. “The cars are coming around the corner and I’m just waiting for someone to get hit.”

A matter taken up by the town after the Main Street sidewalks went in, officials have tried several ways to slow down motorists traveling northbound. Just after Woodland, they come around a slight incline and curve, and Stayman said they’re traveling far faster than the new speed limit of 25 mph (it used to be 30).

“Cars do not go 25 miles per hour, they do not go 30 miles per hour,” he said. “They are coming around that corner too quickly and it’s dangerous to exit.”

Town officials are going to look at what can be done to provide a safe walkway for residents on the east side of Down River Road to get toward the crosswalk at Harrison Avenue, the nearest reasonable and safest way across Main Street to the sidewalk. Credit: Michael Dinan

Stayman said he personally witnessed police doing selective speed enforcement there, and saw eight motorists ticketed in one hour. The town also has installed a sign notifying northbound motorists that there’s an intersection ahead, and even required the homeowner on the corner of Down River and Main to trim back the trees that had been blocking some of the sightline.

But nothing has materialized into a consistently effective traffic-calming measure, Stayman said.

The problem of the speeding motorists exacerbates the difficult prospect of crossing Main Street on foot to get to the sidwalk.

Stayman suggested perhaps a crosswalk could go in there, but police Capt. John DiFederico, a member of the traffic group (along with fire, DPW, emergency management and CERT) said that’s a bad idea because it would give those pedestrians a false sense of security.

“Much as a stop sign or speed bump often don’t help slow traffic, a crosswalk is definitely the wrong answer to help slow traffic, because now you are putting pedestrians out into harm’s way to slow people down, which we don’t’ want to do,” DiFederico said.

DiFederico did say the town could put out speed sentries that inform motorists of how fast they’re traveling, installing it on Main Street south of Down River Road. The sentries also capture data on motorists’ speed, DiFederico said.

Mann said that the best solution to getting pedestrians safely to the Main Street sidewalk would be if they could travel north on Main on their own (east) side of the road and either get all the way to Harrison or at least get to a better sightline area. He’s investigating those prospects.

Here’s a map of the area: