Traffic Officials Respond to Church Street Residents’ Call To Eliminate New Double-Yellow Centerline

Voicing frustration at times during a meeting with traffic officials Tuesday, residents of Church Street agreed to wait until next year to find out whether a double-yellow line recently painted down the center of their road could be nixed from future post-paving plans.

Since a new centerline appeared on Church Street last month, residents have said it’s speeding up motor vehicle traffic and is out of character with their neighborhood. 

Andy Towers told members of the Traffic Calming Work Group during a special meeting that local Realtors also have been unanimous in their feedback that “living on double-yellow line road is less desirable for people and their families than one that is not.”

“Certainly we are all concerned with kids and the pets and everybody and I understand and respect that you guys have a job to do,” Towers said at the meeting, held in the New Canaan Police Department’s training room. 

“The reality is this attacks our bottom line if the perception from the people that are in the business is that people don’t want to or are less apt to buy houses on streets with a double-yellow line and all of our net stakes are connected to that, I would think there would be recourse for our group to address that. It just seems as though, what is the difference between throwing down two yellow lines in the middle of the road and saying you owe us $200,000, you owe us 6 percent or 5 percent or whatever the numbers are? You are hacking into the value of our property. There is no question about it. You’ve got the people in the business, selling these houses, verifying that unanimously. That has to be addressed. There had to be some recourse for the people whose livelihood is attached here, because that is the reality.”

The Work Group is an administrative team of officials from public works, police, fire, emergency management and parking that fields requests for traffic calming measures in New Canaan.

Responding to Towers, Police Deputy Chief John DiFederico noted that the town two years ago had heard the same argument from Silvermine Road residents, connecting double-yellow lines to real estate values, but that no data backing up that assertion materialized.

“Quite honestly, I never saw proof,” DiFederico said. “There is no substantive data.”

Towers responded: “Where is the proof it is not? The reality is, it is our money.”

DiFederico said that what amounts to a perception on the part of some residents is not actionable.

“You are demanding recourse on what your perception is,” he said.

DiFederico and Public Works Director Tiger Mann told the Church Street residents that, in fact, double-yellow lines themselves are a traffic-calming measure—motorists have been shown to slow down when there’s a painted centerline for the same reason that they slow down when there’s a white “edge line,” namely, because the road feels narrower.

Even so, the centerline that appeared in October on Church Street is expected to be dug up by Eversource next year, when the utility company installs natural gas there, and after it’s repaved, Mann said, the town would take the residents’ objections to the centerline under advisement.

Church Street resident Barbara Newman said it was a waste of money to pave the road over when town officials knew it would be dug up again in any case. 

Mann answered that it wasn’t a waste of money “because Eversource is going to come back and take care of it.”

“The problem I had was Church Street is 10 years old, OK? So at 12 years old, the pavement starts to ravel and starts to fade away and starts to have a considerable amount of problems to it. If I actually pave it and I put on a micro thin overlay on top, which is what I did, I then take that road and I save it for seven to 10 years, minimum. If I don’t, that pavement structure is gone in two years and I have to take it all out again. So now what I did was I preserved the entire stretch of pavement—you have something nicer to drive on, granted people are speeding on it now—but you have something nicer to drive on and I protected the asset. Now, coming forward, Eversource is supposed to put in a gas line next year. Say they don’t—I protected the asset. Say they do—I still protected the asset and three years from now, Eversource has to put that coating back on again. But in the interim the pavement doesn’t fade away and fall apart. Because I would lose the asset. I don’t want to lose the asset.”

Mann said he balanced both Eversource’s schedule and the town’s own paving schedule in moving forward with paving Church Street.

“Ten years ago, I did Church Street, we put a new sidewalk in, granite curbing, the whole bit and you were due and just because they are going to be there that doesn’t mean I should not do what we should do to protect it. And at that point in time, because of the concerns for the past 10 years, we put in a double yellow line. Granted, next year they are going to cut it and they will put a gas line in. Next year or the year after. Then at that point in time I will have to repave it again, three or four years. If everybody on Church Street decides that they want gas or do not want gas, and they can sign up or not sign up in one shot, then I know exactly what I am doing and I can pave it quicker and be done with it and put it to bed.”

Ultimately, DiFederico said that police would start collecting data from sentries on Church Street that do not alert passing motorists to their speed. 

It’s very difficult to measure cut-through traffic on Church Street right now because there’s so much construction on South Avenue and Main Street, he said.

Past data that police have on file shows that the 85th percentile of drivers on Church Street travel 24 mph eastbound (toward Main Street) and 28 mph westbound. On a given day, he said, eastbound traffic is far heavier than westbound, with 1,700 cars per day versus 900.

During the meeting, residents including Newman and Carlene Towers also asked whether speed data had been gathered prior to the new centerline going in on Church Street (no), whether there’s ever been a yellow centerline on Church Street (it doesn’t appear so) and whether a police officer could be assigned to ticket speeding motorists on the street (no, the data doesn’t justify dedicating an officer there). 

They also asked whether the town would consider installing speed bumps on Church Street as a traffic calming measure.

The traffic officials responded that it’s possible, though such a move may prove unnecessary and also presents some new problems. 

Mann made the point by imagining a scenario where gates are installed at either end of Church Street so that nobody except residents of the road could enter it.

“Let’s just say we make it a private drive,” he said, strictly by way of making a point. “So we take everybody who is there and pushes it to Oak [Street]. Oak does the same thing, pushes it to Harrison, and eventually somebody has to say, ‘Stop.’ So you cannot have a law of unintended consequences where it just pushes the problem from one to another because it will never go away.”

Carlene Towers asked why the South-Main cut-through traffic could not be pushed toward a “nonresidential” street such as Maple. The officials responded that such a move would further back up cars from the light at Main and Cherry Streets, which already is a problem.

For Mann, double-yellow centerlines are the least costly and least intrusive means to achieving safety for both motorists and pedestrians.

Mann said that he himself lives on a cul-de-sac that has no centerlines and that overall he prefers “a village feel” himself. 

“But the problem is that we don’t live in that anymore,” he said. “People don’t drive that way anymore. They are driving fast, their cars are smoother, they don’t notice their speeds. So we have to do things in order to make it safer so that the kids can walk to school, so we don’t have problems like that. That is our biggest problem.”