Town officials last week approved a proposal to install two pedestrian-activated flashing beacons at regularly used crosswalks that motorists tend to approach at speed, as well as flashing signs warning drivers of school bus stops at two locations in New Canaan.
A pedestrian crosswalk that spans Old Norwalk Road at Old Kings Highway, hooking up with a trail that skirts the edge of Kiwanis Park and, ultimately, sidewalks that connect to Main Street and Farm Road. Credit: Michael Dinan
The “rapid reflective flashing beacons”—similar to the one already in place at Weed and Elm Streets—are to be installed at Kimberly Place and Elm Street and at the intersection of Old Kings Highway and Old Norwalk Road, where a crosswalk went in three years ago.
Police Capt. John DiFederico told members of the Police Commission at their regular meeting that the department has received “numerous complaints from people coming out of the Kimberly [Place]-Seminary [Street] area that they they do not feel safe to cross there.”
And the relatively new crosswalk that connects Old Kings Highway to a trail that skirts Kiwanis Park and hooks up to a sidewalk that runs to Main Street downtown as well as Farm Road up to the schools “is getting a lot of use,” DiFederico said at the Sept. 18 meeting, held at New Canaan Police headquarters.
Ultimately, Commission Chairman Sperry DeCew, Paul Foley and Jim McLaughlin voted 3-0 to recommend the installations.
The school bus stop is in the area of 77 Frogtown Road (foreground), at the bottom of a hill coming off of Weed Street, after a blind curve. Streetview photo
The solar-powered flashing beacons warning motorists of a ‘bus stop ahead’ will be installed on Wahackme Road, replacing one that had worked effectively in the past, as well as at a particularly dangerous area on Frogtown Road.
DeFederico said the Frogtown Road school bus stop, located at the bottom of a curve and hill coming off of Weed Street, near a cemetery, appears to serve a private school in New Canaan.
“It is a tricky stretch of Frogtown and there is a busy pickup,” DiFederico said, adding that “the kids have to cross the road” there in order to get to the bus stop.
“Typically New Canaan Public Schools do not allow any pickups to cross the road like that, but we have had other traffic complaints from that area, so these are going to help,” DiFederico said.
DeCew called it “an awful curve” in the road.
The matter now moves to the Board of Selectmen, to award contracts for the equipment and possibly its installation, too.