Complaints about the reconfigured traffic island at Canoe Hill and Laurel Roads have stopped since the town put in new signage and striping, officials said Wednesday.
Town officials had grappled for years with ways to improve the intersection, where motorists sometimes ignored instructions to keep right around an existing traffic island. Last fall, the Police Commission green-lighted a plan to push the island itself deeper into Laurel Road, no longer requiring westbound Canoe Hill traffic to drive wide around it.
According to Public Works Director Tiger Mann, residents used to lodge complaints with the town about “people going the wrong way around it.”
“Specifically box trucks, FedEx trucks, landscaping vehicles, things like that,” Mann said during a meeting of the Selectmen’s Advisory Committee on Buildings and Infrastructure, held at Town Hall. “If you’re going the wrong way and somebody doesn’t notice you’re going the wrong way, that’s a bad accident waiting to occur.”
Construction of the newly configured traffic island “lagged a little bit,” Mann said, and “while it was being installed, people were unhappy with it, because they didn’t understand how they were supposed to travel.”
“I’m still uncertain as to why that was true, because it’s pretty self-explanatory to me, but we put the signage in, we striped it, and I have gotten nothing but compliments since that time,” he said. “I haven’t gotten any complaints since.”
The only piece of the project that remains is landscaping on the island, he said. Volunteers from the local nonprofit organization the New Canaan Beautification League, which takes care of landscaping for traffic islands and similar areas throughout town, are planning something at Laurel and Canoe Hill similar to what’s in place at Ponus Ridge and Greenly Road, he said.
“I think it functions better now as a ’T’ intersection versus a sort of rotary,” Mann said.
As someone who has driven through this intersection several times a day for over 40 years, all I can say is: What a waste of money and resources! All you needed was better signage and clearer traffic lines painted. Add to that a concentrated effort to slap the offenders with a traffic violation.
Well done.
This is a big safety improvement.
We live up here. I’ll never understand why this was a priority or why money was spent. (How much was it anyway?) The logic was: people ignore the signs, so we’ll change the intersection. Wow. What happened to enforcement? Now we have people bombing down Canoe Hill road from the southeast and we have to make a left turn on to Laurel across that traffic—traffic we can’t see until the last second as it is obscured by foliage. Not so bad at night or in winter but I’ll lay odds there is an accident there when the leaves come back. How about some focus on wrapping up the never ending work on our in-town so we can get around without multiple detours.
Well … now they’re crossing the double yellow lines to take a quick left on to Canoe Hill Road from Laurel and avoid the STOP sign. No joke. We were nearly hit head on two days ago.