Newtown’s Traffic Problems

Newtown’s struggle with traffic problems in the center of town sometimes seems like a journey of a thousand miles undertaken entirely during the morning and afternoon rush on Queen Street. It is always a slow-moving, frustrating experience, low in satisfaction and high in blood pressure. That may account for why some people use the southern end of Queen Street as if it were their own personal escape valve, pushing both the pedal to the metal and the limits of responsibility as they career through what is perhaps Newtown’s most hazardous residential neighborhood.

The Newtown Police Commission last week took another baby step in that journey — a step it resolved to take five years ago in response to a 2006 “Queen Street Area Traffic Improvement Plan,” but never quite managed. It once again authorized the construction of broad speed bumps, known as speed tables, at unspecified locations on Queen Street in an effort to slow traffic in its headlong rush into and out of town. The speed bumps are to be temporary, installed for a limited period of time that will give the commission time to assess their efficacy. Presumably that time period will expire before the snow flies next winter, since the town has already learned in an unfortunate experiment on Glover Avenue that snowplows make temporary speed bumps far more temporary than desired.

Meanwhile, on another front, Newtown’s Capital Improvement Plan allocates $400,000 to be spent in 2012-2013 for three projects: a realignment of the Glover Avenue/Queen Street intersection; a new sidewalk and crosswalk at Glover and Queen; and more than a half-mile of sidewalk along Queen Street from Newtown Middle School to Mile Hill Road. Dozens of other recommended projects lie in the pages and charts of the 2006 traffic improvement plan — a recognition by the experts and engineers who prepared it that managing traffic and addressing public safety at the confluence of three state highways (6, 25, and 302) smack in the middle of a growing town’s cultural and commercial center is a complicated thing.

While we sympathize with and support the efforts of Queen Street residents to get the town to do something — anything — to protect pedestrians, especially children, from speeding and often distracted motorists on their street, we also understand the whack-a-mole nature of the overall problem of traffic congestion in the center of town. Installing traffic impediments in one congested area, like Queen Street, increases the traffic and hazards in other congested areas, like South Main Street. A temporary speed bump is not the solution, or even the beginning of a solution, to the problem. Sidewalks and intersection realignment are just part of the puzzle.

Until Newtown, in conjunction with regional and state planners, addresses overall traffic flow in the center of town, we will have to face a growing accumulation of negative inducements to use one route or another. This spread-the-pain strategy, however, can be mitigated by positive inducements like better traffic control at key intersections, like the flagpole intersection or Queen and Mile Hill Road. Better yet, serious consideration of a connector road from Church Hill Road to Wasserman Way should be revived after several years of hibernation under a neglected pile bureaucratic qualms and diversions. Newtown needs to take a serious look at the big picture of its worst traffic problems and not get hung up on a temporary speed bumps.