Winter 1, Crosswalks 0

This was to be the week that a second raised crosswalk was to have been installed in the borough, but as it turns out, there are now no raised crosswalks on the busy dogleg of Queen Street and Glover Avenue. Snowplows sealed the fate of this experiment in “traffic calming” — at least for the winter — by mangling the program’s inaugural rubber crosswalk in the season’s first plowable snow Sunday morning.

So much for the $8,000 in materials and labor the town spent to install the crosswalk — not to mention the $5,000 spent on the other raised crosswalk, which never made it out of storage. Yes, the plowed-up “speed table” can probably be salvaged and reinstalled on some fine spring day, but we doubt the apparatus will ever see service in another December. This fair-weather three-season program of calming seems a little wimpy for a town that has vowed to crack down on traffic violations.

Earlier this year, when the Legislative Council enacted the Traffic Calming Ordinance that enabled the Newtown Police Department and Police Commission to order the raised crosswalks onto the streets, the authorization stipulated that the traffic calming program would be subject to recognized design standards and practices. The assumption on the part of the council was that those standards and practices would be applicable to New England, not Florida. Someone should have taken the time to find out that the raised crosswalks Newtown purchased were not designed for towns with snowplows.

Newtown’s public works director said this week that the Police Department and Police Commission will now have to decide whether they want more durable and permanent concrete and asphalt structures installed when the weather warms up again.

The Police Commission should use this winter interim to review the usefulness of raised crosswalks. Nothing is suppressing traffic volume in the center of town — not even high gas prices, anymore — so are such devices simply shifting the traffic around to other areas that are equally or more hazardous? What were the real benefits or drawbacks of the town’s brief experience with the ill-fated Glover Avenue speed table? Are there other better alternatives to safeguard motorists and pedestrians, especially schoolchildren, in the center of town?

These are the questions the Police Commission needs to ask itself while it is waiting for the snowplows to retreat. If the answers still lead them to conclude raised crosswalks are still a good idea, let’s at least spend our money on something that will survive the first blast of a New England winter.