Road and Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Cassidy says it's 6 o'clock, so let's pick the meeting off and we'll get out of here by 7, if not earlier. So I will call the meeting to order. I'll let you pick the time, Cassidy.

I got it.

We had a request from Bradley that an item be added to the agenda. He would like to discuss debris and litter on the road, presumably it's related to bicycling.

Yeah, there are invisible issues here.

Would you make a motion that we amend the agenda? Sure. Would there be a second? All in favor? Aye. So we will cover that right after we talk about safety issues on local roads. I just wanted to make a quick note. for people that the town is working summer hours now. So that means the days will be eight to four, Monday through Thursday, instead of nine to four and eight to noon on Friday. So basically town employees get Friday afternoon off. So if you have business with a town department Friday afternoon, you're out of luck. The last meeting we had was on May 21st. Cassidy, distribute the agendas. Would someone make a motion to approve the minutes? Mary, second. Any discussion, any corrections or anything? All in favor, accepting the minutes. Aye. Do you want to abstain because you weren't here? I'll give you that opportunity. Okay. And Public comment?

Oh, okay. Hello. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here this evening. My name is Barbara from Niantic, and I have a concern about one of the roads in town. I was outside seeing, and you have a beautiful, beautiful, lovely town, and I was more or less shocked by what I experienced on one of the roads, and the road was a I'm not sure how to pronounce it. B-O-U-G-H, Brockton. It's on Boston Post Road. It's right by the firehouse. That's the emergency firehouse. So one day I was just sightseeing and I went up the road and it was very lovely. And then all of a sudden I get, I'm going higher and higher into the road, and the road became narrower. And I really didn't realize that, that it was only at the top, it was only like, one lane, not even a lane, it's like a small, thin car that could go up that road. And I got pretty far up to the very end. And I didn't realize that there was no side rails or guardrails on the side of the road. And when I got there, I was going to turn around. And thank goodness I didn't turn around because I probably would have went over the road. wall there it's a high cliff that is um there are houses that are built in because of into the rock that's on that road and i can't understand how that could even happen but they have houses there and there just happened to be um a young man working on one of the houses and he was outside and i was driving the road and i stopped and i looked at him he didn't say anything to me at all and I turned into the driveway because I was going to turn around and go back down the road because there was no place else to go and for some reason I backed into his driveway and I only did a couple of turns and I was able to turn the car around so I could safely turn around and go back down that road if I had turned around the normal way I would just Backed out, would have gone over the cliff there that you have on that road. Not a safe road at all. It needs to be, if people can get houses into the rock, then the town should be able to get guardrail on that whole side up there. But better than that, perhaps what might be even best is to have a sign at the beginning of the road, right by the firehouse, gorgeous.

adjacent to the finance that said private road private property do not enter something like that so people don't go up that road i don't know how it's not a private road so that's why they can't advertise this private road uh it's a public road uh is it the public road the whole street

hole. Even where it narrows, it's still a hole.

We've actually gone up there for fire calls. We have to drive our fire trucks up and literally back pretty much all the way out to the intersection. It is a narrow and it drops off, like you said.

It's a high cliff. I went all the way to the end.

I'm not sure if there's a sign that says dead end or no outlet. I don't know if there's any of that.

There was nothing there. And to turn... You're doing a three-point turn in like a

maybe an 18 foot road.

Fair enough. So for safety reasons, the people up there should be doing this. They should be, you know, like, we need something. And thank goodness there's a fire department right at the bottom of it. So that's my concern. So it's not a complaint.

It's a concern that I don't want to see anyone

and i think to kind of go with that i think it's one of those roads that not a lot of people travel on that's why when you said that road i'm like

You went up that room?

You know, it's just not, like, when I'm at a firehouse, there's just not, there's, like, the locals that live up there. Those are the only ones that usually go up that room, because it's literally a quarter of a mile long, maybe, and it just, that ends, like, there's no turnaround. It literally, like, just ends.

Yeah.

Oh, there is a full turnaround, but I didn't go, I didn't get to, I saw the young man, and I, for some reason, I pulled into it, the young man was, and then I just, he must have been I say an angel. That's how I look at it. That he was something great there for me. So I didn't just do a regular turn that I would do, pull in, back out far, and I would have gone over. And he was there. So I'm grateful and very thankful for him. And I'm thankful for everyone that was here tonight. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll look into that and we'll see if we get a sign of something. Okay. Appreciate your coming by.

Thank you very much. You have a beautiful town here.

Thank you.

I'm outside seeing. And I said, oh, there's water there. Let me go take a look. I'm leaving. Okay. Have a wonderful evening.

So the next item I wanted to talk about is just kind of a update on safety issues on local roads. We had amazing recommendations for Brighton Road. We have the speed humps in town. They've been ordered. We have two of them, which I asked for. We have been kind of searching around for monies to install them because we were frankly, woefully short on what we budgeted for the speed humps. The speed humps themselves cost about $2,600. The installation is going to be about $3,000. What? $1,000. So what Martha hopes to do is we're going to probably have the company that installs them for SoundView install these. And she hopes to have someone from Public Works be there, look at the process, see how they're done. And we hope that if the holes are drilled in the ground and basically in months, screwing them in or unscrewing them, depending whether you're installing or taking them out for the season that Public Works can do it. I understand a lot of the cost is the masonry drills. I guess you burn through a lot of drills going into the ground. Yeah, and you have equipment because they have generators, whatever. Anyway, we're fortunate that Benidante has a little bit of an underage. He has underspent his budget slightly. So we're lucky that I think we're going to be able to get those put in fairly soon. We're meeting, Martha and I are meeting the installer on the site Friday morning at 9 o'clock.

How many are going in there? Two. Two at $2,600 each? No, two at $1,300. Last meeting it sounded like she was saying he was already over budget or...

Something like that. Well, we're getting down to the end of the fiscal year and some people are over budget. Some people are under budget. So, I mean, for example. So, in addition to putting them, we need to put in some signs and so. I'm not familiar with public work budget. They have some money left over. However, it is 2500 dollars over to science and we need to have warning signs before the speed. However, we're going to be able to use some of that extra money. And getting to your road, he and Martha took a ride on the road. They noticed that one sign is not visible. They're going to replace that sign and put in four new signs on the road. I'm not sure exactly what they are, John, but I presume speed limit signs are slowed down or whatever. Ed is going to order those, and Martha said it's about a two-week delivery period. So that will be taken care of. I was hoping Rosemary might be here. Rosemary might be here tonight. I got an email from someone who lives on Sill Lane. And she said that she believes kind of coincidental to when there's issues on I-95, there's a tremendous... surge of traffic on Sill Lane. And in particular, a lot of commercial trucks, you get tractor trailers coming down the road, which he says really not appropriate for that roadway. They should stay on Route 1. Well, they try to go through Hatch's Hill.

Yeah. They take my road, Sill Lane, and then right onto my road.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is probably where GPS is directing them to go. So I did a little quick search, and one of the things, that a town can do is request companies not route GPS traffic on that road. Some will comply, some will not. The other thing towns can do if they don't comply is put a thing, no commercial true traffic or whatever. So there's avenues we could go. I was hoping if Rosemarie were here, she could kind of get a sense from her neighbors if other people think there's a problem.

I noticed they're homed up for sale.

Yeah, I noticed her home is on sale for sale too, so I don't know if she's moving or... Yeah, they are. They are moving? You know, if they're moving out of Italy. Are they really? Chicken and mule. I knew that he was buying property there. That's too bad. They had a nice business. I will contact her and double check. Thanks for sharing that, John. That's basically all I had for that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the speed feedback science. And I sent you all a document. I don't know if you have had a look at it. I can kind of go through some of the questions. And a lot of this relates to past discussions. Now, you had said that you were missing keys to that.

Sorry, there's something wrong with the internet and it's not staying connected.

So I was trying to fix it. What's that?

The internet keeps going out.

Oh, okay. Do you have all the keys you need, John?

No. Well, we have keys, but they belong to mine. So I expected them to be on that. Do they work on our devices? They will work on our devices. Okay. So my understanding was they loaned them to us to see if we could buy some or find some, and Martha was looking for... But trying to do a deeper dive into where the keys might be. Well, Mark, the contact did Derek McGregor. Derek said he gave you a key. So he gave me everything they have for road signs, speed limits, speed signs, and speed warning signs. And everything he had was the other oddball, the old traffic solution sign, the batteries for that, spare batteries. and a small bag of keys. And what I said the other week is all of the keys in that bag are for that sign. None of them are for the other signs. Okay, for the battery sign. Right. Okay. The traffic logics signs are double-sided, and none of the keys in that bag are.

But you do know the key you got from the town borrower from Lyme to use this? From... John Evans.

So I have a key to borrow from him, yes. Did we make a copy of that? No, I tried. They said that stores and things I brought to, they said they don't do double-sided. So unless there's... And then Martha was going to try to look some, you know, see if... Well, yeah, I talked to her today about that.

All she's done is basically contacted Derek. So... Do you have any sense of what that might cost? It's something I can't imagine.

Those are on the quote that I submitted. So the quote was like $147 at some. This is not for batteries and stuff. No, that's the other sign. That's the sign we have the keys for. So that sign, there's two keys, two batteries rather, that I did test a sign and it works. Then we have the keys, as I said. I don't know if all the mounting hardware or whatever goes with that is there. It probably is. It looks like for the other three installed signs, there's a plate that's a mounting plate or bracket that goes behind the sign. That uses one type of key. And those keys I found the Yukon signs have the same key for that bracket. So the brackets are the same between the Yukon signs and the mounted install signs, right? So those keys we have. The keys that open the actual sign, the type that are installed, we don't have other than the ones we borrowed. Okay. So those would be... I'll pick a little bit. Those will be on the quote showing the sign keys and the bracket keys. So the bracket keys we really don't need unless we want a couple extra. They're not extremely expensive. It's something like a $45 fee for delivery because it's from Canada. Yeah. That's like $145 of what I had on there. One of the key locks is missing from the whole sign.

There's more than one lock, but one of the locks is complete. When would you need to use those keys, John? If you move the sign or read the calibrator?

If the sign fails, if you move the sign. Okay. Yeah. And any kind of problems with if it needs to be reset inside for like a SIM card on one of them wasn't working, so I had to have access to it for that.

So John shared data with us for the first week of June. We'll get into that in a second. I don't know if, again, I have sent you all this information. If you haven't looked at it, please feel free to look at it if you have time. Did they give us a prompt of every month? How are you getting data?

I was going to mention, so you have the quote, but they... They extended just to the end of June. Well, they said, you know, until July 1st, so the end of June, basically. They did that on their own. I don't expect they'll do it again, you know, perhaps because the holiday was before. Okay. So just an FYI. And they asked about the quote today, what the status of it was. What do you mean for the access? Yes. So I needed it.

Mancini, whose office is right over there, the finance director, she's on vacation this week. We do not have monies budgeted for this. I think, as I mentioned, it was not my expectation that this committee would be operating those signs. It was always my expectation that the police department would do so, but it seems that we have a new task. So we will get the monies to do that. It's a matter of what period We want to extend that.

Do you have any... You're speaking for the cloud access, not necessarily the keys. For the cloud, quote, not necessarily the keys. The cloud access. Yes. The cloud access has the quote. Yes, I have the quote. Yeah, I have it right here.

And then the keys we were talking about have their own quote. It's a graduated fee depending on how long up you want to go.

Do you have a sense of... Right, but the keys we can look at. I'm saying those, which is a lot less fee than the cloud, right? We don't have money for the cloud.

I understand that.

That's what I was asking you.

We don't have money for either, okay? So we're going to look at one borrowing of money from one pocket from another. So do you have any sense of how the technology – is evolving in us, John. If we go out seven years, are we going to get, we need new machines by then? I'm a little bit delirious with any technology.

I wouldn't expect so other than if we're looking at cameras, if we're looking at them to do camera logging of speed.

It would be my suggestion, and you're all welcome to comment on this, maybe go out two years. And I think by that time, we'll have a sense of whether the town is going to move towards speed cameras, not move towards or actually have them in place. We hope that we make a decision well before two years.

I could ask the question to UConn to see if they have any thoughts on it. I mean, I think they're expecting the program to, well, they're doing, they have the program for seven years in the cloud. So I don't expect they're planning on going obsolete anytime soon.

Can I ask a question here? Sure. Was there any determination that whether or not the sign was correctly or incorrectly calibrated? Was that leading to that?

So when we proceeded to skew data? There was like a one day of exceptionally high. I did another week's report here from June 1st to the 7th. I think Rick shared that. But basically, I also sat up in our area, pardon me, way before the sign, and I counted 71 vehicles that buy it, and it recorded 55. And what's been the time? So one hour. One hour. So it recorded less than, and it'll display. That's what you want. Well, I don't know. No, it's not great. That's right. But we're at 40 feet. Right. Exactly. So it actually recorded less than what vehicles passed it. So those are, you know, there's also bicycles and other things. I mean, I saw that there was one that was like six riders or children or something. But the numbers... I'm not assuming that any of the data is incorrect.

Based upon what I have here, there's more traffic on the road. Did you do any additional research?

I talked to the company about it a little bit, and I think I mentioned that to UConn as well. I'm sorry, the question is, did I do anything?

And you're just like, last time we were talking about the height of the sign, the sign being not high enough.

Basically, the signs, I mean, I already knew this, but didn't want to give you the last time. They can operate up to like 400 feet away. The lower you mount the sign, the less that ranges. They're meant to, you know, function on the closest vehicle, but the lower you mount the sign, And UConn's thought was, well, they should sort of still work, but again, if there's an optimal installation or what they recommend, we do something different. I'm not going to expect it to function better than...

I wanted to bring in two points to this session. Number one is these are, I guess they're research tools for us, and they're also a safety measure by giving people, as they say, feedback that you're going too fast. And if we're slightly off on the data accuracy, I would hope that whatever data we're catching is accurate. If we're off, it may be that we're not catching all the traffic, as you said, or we're not being inclusive, or it could be a pedestrian, whatever. But if there's some discrepancy from the absolute perfect world, I don't think it matters that much for these signs, personally. I wouldn't say so.

I mean, it would be across the board.

And I appreciate you going out and trying to check that, but I'd want to be chasing our tail with that. They are what they are.

I was basically trying to see if the sign was false as well, and if no traffic was passing. But I noticed there was, you know, the flags were all mounted down the street. I wondered if they were moving around and causing some, but those wouldn't be probably high speeds. It's possible.

Yeah, and as you said, there are issues. I noticed going by there, there are issues, obviously, would... branches and leaves above the signs, the height of the signs. And then the other issue I noted, too, we talked about this when we were talking about trailers, whatever. For the sign on Lime Street, for example, I don't think there's a sign associated with that, tell us what the speed there is at that point, is there? It's further down.

Right. And in fact, another sign in front of the sign, if the signs could, you know, moved in the wind or something, that could potentially, you could, with this other sign, you're talking about battery operated one, I mean, I just waved something at it, and it displayed the speed of it, so to test it.

Well, I'm just curious, what time of the day was it when they had the 31 cars?

It was 6 p.m. Saturday, and it had 55 cars, some vehicles, and packed events, right, it It measured 55 something and it also measured 55 the following day, but the other the other day.

So, yeah, they do. We'll get into the data that John has collected and provided us, but they do give us a sense of what the issues are in the three roads that the signs are up. We have two Yukon signs. One of the things we had talked about was possibly putting them on a trailer as the line is doing to move them around to make them a little bit more wide. John has expressed some concern about issues moving them around and so forth. I got a quote from Traffic Logic. It was, I have to say there, was the company that I did not find it easy to deal with. I talked to them three times when they said they were going to send me a quote. I didn't get the quote after each call. I looked at several days and I called them back and they had the completely wrong email for me. Then they finally wrote to First Selectman's offices and they forwarded it to me and they still had the email wrong. But long story short, the trailers were, considerably more expensive than I think that we had anticipated. They were around $3,700 per trailer.

That's just a trailer.

We would have to work out something to put the sign on it. We'd have to get it registered. There's a number of issues with that. It would be my recommendation and perhaps John would agree with, but I'll let him talk that we really kind of not go with the trails and get those Yukon signs up and modern and start moving around.

It has to do with the position of the sign to the roadway as well. You can't just put them anywhere and they'll work. The sign has to be installed facing directly down the road. If you put it in an improper position, whether you need it a long straightaway ahead of it, if you don't have that, So there's a lot that could go wrong with that. And we talked about moving them and positioning and cloud access. And, you know, if you just have them at one location and you move them to another address, just trying to, you know, identify the data from that on another day. And I talked to UConn about that, too, when they said they don't. They don't have anybody, you know, doing that trailers and they would, they said, if we were to do that move from 1 location another day, or even if it was. Nearby the trailer was moved somewhere.

We put it as a new location and their database, but you, you, we should have, they just said it's too good in that regard. Even if they're not as mobile as the trails, we should have the ability to. move those signs to various locations, correct, John?

Yes, and we can.

I mean, if we put a Yukon sign in the ground, I don't want to keep it there for seven years.

No, no, and it's that the cloud sees it as a location, and when you move it, they want to put it as another cloud location. So the sign is just the physical part that captures the speed and what have you. The other thing they mentioned is That some towns or they had some groups that were installing the signs on the post, but having the post be movable. So the base of the post, you mentioned breakaways and things, but the base of the post maybe is still there and they'll take the whole device. everything and move it to another location and just leave that there.

And do you have to buy another base then?

You have to buy a series of bases. I didn't get into the details of what that is or the hardware.

Can I ask a quick question about that? Sure. I mean, obviously we would need to figure out pricing. I'm assuming it's cheaper to do bases around town versus the trailers, but when they remove the post and move it to a new spot, how much of the base is sticking out? Because I can imagine that there will be some people in this town who might be a little bit upset if we have to put traffic cones on and leave them there.

That's what I was going to say, too. I don't know what they do with it when they're moved. This base post would still be there, right?

I don't know what it would take to pull them out of the ground.

I can kind of head on that a little bit. Yeah, I was going to ask you. Yeah, the breakaway is probably about 9 or 10 inches out of the ground. I can do some little bit of research because I know a lot of people post in. I think, you know, be a little different if you just leave a permanent poster, you know, and then you just rotate it around every once in a while.

Then it wouldn't be a tripping. Exactly.

So it would just be there, you know. That would be a... Yeah, yeah.

As far as installation goes, I know Poplar Brook has an auger because we had them work with us to put a fence in it at Horsetail Creek Landing.

So, yeah, it's just putting a post in and seeing if you just got to find it. Getting it out. Exactly. So they actually make pullers. Yeah. It, like, grabs it and you push on it and it slowly pulls it up. It's like a hinge system. We have one at work. But we try not to take them out. They get usually ripped out, but...

Do you know what size the lettering is on the two Yunkan signs that are installed, John, or the three distance-listing signs?

The signs that are installed are the, they're called EV12 FM, so they're full messages FM. You can change this. What's the height of the 12 inches? The 12 is the size of it, and then... if the speed limit's over, is it 40 or so, so if it's over a certain miles an hour, you need the 15 inches.

Yes, yeah, 45. 45, right? 45 or higher. So I talked to Martha today, so. And when we did the traffic counter speed monitors with UConn that the police department recommended, they chose a spot on 156, kind of where the state rest area is. I would love to see a monitor kind of where Amtrak has their area going in there. I was driving that stretch of road the other afternoon, going about 42, whatever. I do not speed on that road. And some guy went around me, pulling a trailer, like I was standing still with a big pickup truck. I couldn't believe it. I think that's a place where I would think to have a truck is probably... A lot of people exceed 50 miles an hour net.

So you go along with that. If we were to do something like that, just from a firehouse standpoint of accidents, I would almost say get it from when you're leaving the beach to come north. Because we get a lot of accidents right at the ferry road intersection. Because of motorcycles and all this stuff here, they fly up. So if you get it before they get to the intersection, it might be like, oh, I'm speeding, or let's see how high I can get going. But, you know.

What is the speed limit on that section of 150?

45. 45. And so I've had back and forth with Martha and DOT. The speed limit changes around Mile Creek, the nearly new shop, but it changes at opposite points in either direction, which is bizarre to me. So the speed limit, speed limit, coming, going east towards Rocky Neck, stays at 45 until about St. Anne's Church. Coming the other way, it's 40, going through that intersection. And the direction by which the speed limit is 45 has a worse sight line, and that's the lane that's closest when people are pulling a boat from the state boat launch out of there. So that's an intersection that I know that Tom and DOT have been wrangling about. DOT put the stop signs on both sides of the road. And some people asked Mark that when did the road become one way? So Ed had to take them off.

Yeah, it does get confusing.

So the Yukon signs are the same size. They just don't change the message on them. Or not as much.

Okay, so we have three signs up and we have two signs to mount. And I think this would be perhaps a good time to segue into the data that John was able to determine on the existing signs. Again, I don't know if you had a chance to look at it. I had a couple of questions on that, John, but I'll let you go ahead and try to... Tell us briefly what we're seeing there.

So, this is a weekly report of statistics summary for McCurdy road. So that so McCurdy is. North found and the other 2 signs are self found. Direction, so it's from June 1st to June 7th and. Basically, on the right side of the report here, there's the speeds and the count of the vehicles. This is for the entire week, not per day, right? So, if we go over 25 miles an hour, so 26 to 30 miles an hour, the vehicle count is 907. 31 to 35, 2005. 36 to 40 miles an hour, 1,273, 41 to 45, 289. And then the numbers drop as you get higher. So 46 to 50 miles an hour, 33, 51 to 55, 2. Nothing over that. And the total number of vehicles for the week was 4,773. So there's two McCurdy roads.

Which one are we looking at?

There's two McCurdy.

Right now he's talking about the weekly report, the statistics summary. Yeah, but we have two that say. Yeah, because the other one has dates of the week on it.

Okay, yeah. Yeah, so this is one that I did yesterday that I guess you would have. So the percentage of the violations is on the center column here. It's 95%. It's on the second page of this, but I just highlighted it at the top. So basically, You have the speeds, the counts, the total, the percentage of the violations are here the whole week again. The highest number of violations was 7 to 8 o'clock over the week, 96%. And that's where the H is in the column. And the highest numbers of the vehicle counts were 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. So, of course, 25-hour zone for each of the three rows.

Can I ask you one question? What is the 85% speed limit?

So that's, I didn't have time to double-check what that's for. It's noted on the report. You can select many different things for it. It has a maximum speed there. You see the speed average and then the 85% speed limit. The numbers are, they're all over 25. So I've got 35, 42, 38 right there.

Can I ask you a question about the report itself? Is this a standard report that the company has programmed or you have a menu you can choose from or how do you compile this?

Yeah, there's both. So in this case, this is a weekly report. If you go in and run the weekly report, it will... try to run it for the month for each week. If there is, if all that data. In terms of the data that's included on there. Right. So if you run the weekly report, it'll ask you, do you want to go by the count or the percentage of speeders or what have you? And I went by the count for this and then it still shows you the other information on there. So there's this sheet, there's some other graphs that go along with it. I didn't include all of that, but yeah, You know, basically broke out from this information. There's other custom reports you can do as well. So there's a little bit of control with weekly one you can change. And then the custom, you can, as far as I'm aware, you can set all the things on it. You can say, you can, you can toggle on and off, like maybe there's 12 different, different options to see the data. But that's, That's the McCurdy was 4,707 degree vehicles. I pass that around if you wanted to see what I was talking about.

If you have the ability, John, it would be useful if we could somehow get the information for the violations that are going 10 miles an hour above the speed limit.

I calculated them. Okay, great. So if you want, Assuming that you were going to start ticketing at 36 on each of the locations, 33% of the people traveling Mercury would get a ticket. That's almost 1,600 people that would be ticketed in one week on that road.

And that's greater than or equal to 36? Pardon? Greater than or equal to 36?

Equal to and greater. 36 and greater. Awesome. On Lyme Street, This 598 tickets would be issued much lower percentage of speeders, only 7% that would be ticketed. And then I'm still laying 433 or by 20% of the people. So, if you're looking at that clearly. from a potential speed camera enforcement level, McCurdy is the worst, then Sill, and then Lyman.

Like I said, it's 95% violations based on this and on McCurdy, and it showed 82% of the other two.

I think Sophie brought up a great point. I think it's us in determining also It helps us in determining the gross number of people who are speeding, but I think it would also be helpful to know if the town were to go to a speed camera enforcement program, and like most towns, we give people a 10-mile-per-hour grace period, what are we talking about in terms of violations and offenders?

Right, if 96% are going five over, we're fine, kind of.

Yeah, yeah. You would have the ability to give people even more of a grace period, but I don't know of any towns that are doing that.

I mean, that's... That's some sound price versus costing. You're probably going to give out, let's just say, 20 tickets versus the price of having a program there. It's not really just money.

And this is just with the three locations that have been tested here. So the Lime Street 8257 is the count for the numbers for the traffic, and 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. is the highest volume of traffic and violations, and that's out of the field. And the sibling was, you know, 2,083 for the count, and 7 to 6 p.m. for the most count of violations and such. Yeah.

I think at least when I joined the committee, the problem rose or what was that?

Those are the two signs that they still haven't calibrated and put up.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. This is just based on the ones we know of, but with the speeding only going so much over.

Do you have any news on when the two new signs might be operational? What's that? Do you have any news on the two new Yukon signs will be operational?

We're going to talk about that right now. Okay. So we have three signs that are up right now. We had two signs ready to be installed when this committee talked about that last two locations were kind of considered. One was Tom Woods Road. One was Grassy Hill Road.

I

would be somewhat in favor of moving one of the signs off the current location, that would be Lyme Street, because we're not seeing, I don't think that the amount of violations we're doing. And I would like to see if we can capture the two state roads, which were, well, actually, when UConn had their monitor, they found what they call high enforcement rating on both Shore Road and Howell Woods Road. And so I think those would be perhaps two possible roads for the Yukon signs. We'd have to put Shore Road in location where the speed limit would be 40 miles an hour. If we were to move one of the signs off Lyme Street, John has suggested possibly on his road or Grassy Hill Road, kind of on what similar roads would you say, John?

Sure. Mine's Saunders Hollow is more of a road. They cut through, like we said so late.

What is your vote, sorry?

Saunders Hollow.

We did in the survey, a lot of people wanted Grassy Hill to be looked at. They did.

And as far as Saunders Hollow Road, I would like, if you could be patient with us, I would like to see what impact, if any, having those signs on your roads too. And Martha and I can talk to Derek McGregor and have an officer out on that road periodically, what you think is a period of time when people speed the most. I have not seen any new data from Derek, but Martha told me that he's been really encouraging his officers to write tickets when they see violations. And she thinks there's been a pretty good jump in ticketing. I would like to also, ask the police department again for their advice on where to put some signs.

There's any other UConn monitors that don't display this? Yes. Those could also be, if the signer saw that signs to mount them on. But you mentioned the Solane, I'm sorry, Lyme Street sign, perhaps. Pulling it, moving it, and then the two Yukon signs, so that's three.

That would be one sign. The other possibility, even though there's a lot of, it's picking up a lot of violations, I know people have talked about the particular spot where the McCurdy Street sign is, where people are kind of coming in around the corner, and it does seem to me to be fairly shaded, and it also is not in the most visible location. It is fairly shaded. You want to record traffic, but you also want people to know, hey, I'm a little faster than I should. Maybe I should slow it down. It would be nice if it were a little bit more prominent.

So those would be the, there'd be three signs, the two Yukon and this one, if it was. Well, let's get the two Yukon signs at first.

Okay, yeah, and so which ones, yeah. I'm just trying to clarify what. So let me throw this out and see what you all think. We can go with the two spots that Yukon identified as high enforcement spots. would be on Shore Road, kind of where that monitor was, where you have a stretch of road kind of between, kind of between where Old Shore Road does a loop, somewhere in between there. And I'm agnostic about whether it should be facing east or west on that road.

Do you know which way they did their study?

I don't, and that's a great question. This was for which road? Shore Road. Okay, on Shore Road. If you don't mind, I'll give Sean a call about that, John. And the other would be Townwoods Road. And I'm going to ask them exactly where he had those signs. And if we, if when I contact Derek McGregor, if he's amenable to those two locations, are those good sites for this committee to go ahead with, with the two consigns?

Yeah, I just wanted to say really quickly, I would like to argue against moving that line street sign, considering the number of pedestrians and also school children that are there. Like if the live sign does act as a deterrent in a way, like showing people their speed, I think that as far as safety is concerned, it would be, it would make sense to keep that sign where it is. Okay. And then perhaps moving the Sill Lane sign. I mean, Saunders continues in the Sill. Absolutely. If we have that capability in the future.

The other option is, well, I mean, whether there's some other trailers at some point or any other thing. The odd sign we have, that's not one of these three or the Yukon.

I'm a little bit hesitant about putting up a sign that somebody needs to deal with data, John.

Well, I was going to say, I mentioned the other week, there's also... There's also an external battery connection option where you can have a different power source.

Let's get five working and see where we're at.

I was going to say, since that's right here, they might be able to just have that sign powered all the time.

If we are set on locations, let's leave the line. One of the things I wanted to mention, pardon me for jumping all around here. I'm trying to keep track of my mind where the conversation is going. One of the things I talked about Martha with, and she was very much in favor of our, what I would call active signs. She very much likes stop signs. I noticed a couple in New London when I was there the other day, stop signs that have a little band of lights around the octagon edge of the sign. And also, while they're solar run, we look for a grant for all that stuff, Kent, And like the drive slow sign that would have that kind of thing in the school session here, which maybe would mitigate having to have the speed things camera sign.

The other sign you mentioned, that also can work on solar, but I know you talked about there's no money in.

Yeah. The last time we were mentioning like speed tables and our affinity for those that have experience in Hartford or wherever, and like we have a crosswalk right out front here with the center school that would be a perfect candidate for installation or something like that.

Martha, I didn't get quite exact things she was talking about, but she was talking about kind of a soft table she went over in some town that she really liked. Yes, like a wider one she was talking about. I would be really cognizant of what you guys, how you got, in addition to the school, that we want, we do not want to do anything that's going to slow your response to stock. Just a point of the

Well, all these signs is that they do log and we do have the data collection for now until the end of June, right? So we don't need to be able to collect that unless we have- Yeah, we're aware of that, John. So if we don't move it, we lose access to the data and it just flashes. And if we do move it, we still lose the access to the data wherever it would go. So you know what I'm saying? If you wanted to put that on town woods- Okay.

We're going to, I would shoot from the new signs on Townwood Central Road that New York Times said, and you are confident working with Public Works that you can advise them on installation, John? Yes. Okay, great. So let's move on. I want to talk about, before we, and I want to throw the floor open to Bradley and have him talk about his talk.

Yeah, so to sort of change the topic, conversation that I want to talk about littering out of debris, trash, out of this broken glass is really the biggest risk for myself. I occupy the shoulder area where litter seems to accumulate with rain and whatever sweeping it over in that way. So this is a big problem for me, especially when I have to avoid a broken beer bottle and veer out into the motorist land. You know, I'm, of course, not the only cyclist in town, so this is not an issue unique to me. And in an effort to, like, sort of, we've always been talking about finding money to do things, establish, you know, accomplish goals that we have in this community. I looked into the Connecticut, it's the Nickel and Nip program, which was on law passed to charge a $0.05 surcharge on sales at the NIPs. This was in October 1, 2021. And in old line, we average 161,355 NIP sales in a year, one year, which generates an average of $8,068. And this past year in 2025, it generated $7,845. This sort of falls under the purview of the Waste and Recycling Committee. I read online, I found this person's page on our website, that Rachel Peterson is the, she's the director, the coordinator is her title. So I'd love to, you know, potentially collaborate with this person about utilizing that money. And as part of the law, how they're supposed to use the money that, you know, is generated from NIP sales for environmental purposes or cleanup purposes. So utilizing that money in order to clean up those sections of roadways where there is a high amount of debris. Just out of curiosity, my ride here goes from Binney Road to Saunders Hollow. I counted 97 pieces of trash in between Binney and Saunders Hollow. How far distance would you say that is? It's like a half of a mile, quarter of a mile. Two-thirds of those were probably beer cans, beer bottles, or nips. It's frustrating to me when I, for six months, avoid the same ass of broken glass. It's not cleaned up. I know that maybe like once per season, the street super will... will come up. I think they did their spring round already.

Yeah, usually in springtime.

Yeah, right, right, right. You know, this is sort of a symptom of a larger problem, which I think is the driving laws of American driving, which is a hard thing to enforce, but, you know, we talked about speed traps and things like that. I think that's, of course, a thing of purview of the local police department. So, I suppose signage is one potential remedy, and Yeah, just the enforcement of littering.

So I am chair of the Open Space Commission. And one of the members on that commission is also on the Wasteland Recycling Committee. And I actually work with him in helping them decide how to hire Rachel. And I would be happy to reach out to him and figure out a way that you and Rachel can reach out. A quick question, Bradley. So after this last storm, I live on a street that has a lot of poplars lying along it, and they're phenomenally messy trees. Whenever we get a storm, this neighborhood is just deluge with branches on the road. And they can be this long, and they can have a caliber up to my wrist. Do those branches cause you an issue too?

Yeah, I mean, there was a place on Saline that I rode by where debris from trees, I things like pollen or, you know, blossoms or whatever that are falling off the road, like extended at least a foot out into, you know, what is the space that I would buy when I get home.

I've seen people move some walking and riding a bike through on something.

Does the nickel and nip money that's currently not being used for anything?

I don't know if it's being used or not. I have the number of what was generated last year. I didn't have time to look into the waste and recycling committee minutes to, you know, figure out if there was anything like that.

I think if you met with Rachel or would be.

Yeah.

We'll start a conversation anyway.

The limelight article did indicate that the proceeds from that were used to hire that individual and fill that position. So I don't know if it's a stipend position or like a part-time position or how it works.

It's part-time for sure.

So. What I gather, at least from my non-exhausted research, is that the money from that program is compensation for that individual's role.

Yeah. I want to end the meeting a little bit talking about where we've been and where we're going. So I had a long conversation with Andrea Fenton a couple weeks ago. She resigned from the committee. Andrea's a really busy person, and she didn't feel... that this committee was moving along enough to kind of keep her involved. And we have been on a long journey and this committee has evolved from what was initially the charge was that each of us would represent a neighborhood, basically reach out to the people in the areas that we live and bring each neighborhood's concern to the board of selectors. then we kind of allow from that into a committee that would come up with its own recommendations for what we're going to do from what we learned and what we've studied. And now we're kind of sliding into kind of an operational mode, which I told Mark that I'm a little bit uncomfortable with because I don't want to view this as kind of a lifetime gig. We're going to work on this. We have I think we've done a number of good things around here, but I think the one issue that kind of is, in my mind, kind of the mountain in the distance that we're looking at is the issue of speed camera enforcement. All the towns around here are doing it, and I think there's some expectation that this committee is going to make a recommendation or not. I view that there's two ways we could do that. We could say, yeah, the data seems to indicate that this is something Natana would do, or we lay something out and say, these are the pros for that, these are the cons for that, and you decide. And I'm curious, I'd like to go around the table quickly, how you all view that issue and how we can move towards it. Just as a quick, I did a quick study again. So to, just as a background, so this committee met with three different vendors, I think they were all pretty good vendors. Two of them were chosen as kind of suggested vendors by the Hartford Area Council of Governments. We also talked, I think, with about 10 towns that had different programs. Mary, Andrew, and some other people, and Sophie talked to them. DOT requires speed studies, and I think that we have that. and we'll get more of that data as we go along. They also need, and this is an area that I'm gonna see if we can find some more information on, is data on how many crashes in the town were caused by speeding drivers. They also want enforcement history. I think we get that from the police department. Traffic volume, we can get from the DOT. And then roadway geometry, which a vendor can do for us. We're not expected to be engineers, but still around the table quickly. This is, they want this for? This is for, so before a town can begin a speed camera forest program, they have to apply to DOT. And it's a pretty rigorous application. I don't know of any town with exception in New Haven that has done that application on its own. New Haven has a traffic department, it's probably bigger than this whole town government. Everybody else is used on vendors. So I think we have some of the data. I think we could turn to a vendor to get a lot of the other data. I think we can justify that by the level of speeding that we see in town that we're picking up with data and also by the community sentiment from our study a while ago. The one point I think we're missing is accident experience, people being hurt by speeding drivers in town. And I would guess there's some issues, but I don't know.

The thing that doesn't capture is that less people bike, less people walk because they feel like it's not safe. Absolutely. Nobody's biking. Great point.

Great point.

What you're saying going around, I agree with Andrea. I feel that we've been spinning our wheels here. And to me, it's almost simple. All the data that you just showed, it's just there. I mean, okay, Boris Leitman, here's the data. People are speeding a huge percentage of it. We want to put in cameras. Why aren't we moving forward? I mean, it just seems week after week, month after month, we don't go anywhere. And everyone's afraid of it, and it becomes a little annoying.

My thoughts. Well, I mean, I don't know. Like, to the outside, I was feeling pretty disillusioned, like, at our last meeting with this committee. You know, that being the reason for bringing up what I did. Just sort of veering the conversation away from concerns of, you know, speeding related to motorists. I do understand it poses a threat to myself as a cyclist and pedestrians. But, you know, I think when I joined this committee, road and safety, like, there are other issues at hand, too. Like there are other folks who use the roads than motorists and speeding cars are just one part of the equation. I will say like, I think more work needs to be done on accident data. I think more research needs to be done on privacy concerns, surveillance concerns that Sophie brought up. I myself am really ambivalent about implementing speed cameras in town for that reason. So I don't know. I think that... Funding has been a persistent issue here, and I think that maybe until we have the idea as to what we can do with the budget that we're allocated, perhaps maybe we should shift the conversation more to researching things like what implications installing speed cameras would have concerning the privacy and the surveillance of folks that live here. Like, I'm not necessarily convinced that the risk is zero at this point.

Would you be willing to kind of, not to do the research, but just kind of take in your own mind what research you would like to see before making a decision before the next meeting? That would be really helpful.

Sophie's already brought up, I mean, this was a couple months ago now, but I think that your concerns are absolutely valid and I agree with you. Um, I think that more work needs to be done. You know, research in that regard, but I think that we need to be thinking, you know, carefully about, I guess, how much surveillance and what privacy concerns there are with putting speed cameras in town.

Yeah, speed cameras and just privacy in general with the license plate monitors is really kind of a, I find it a little bit troubling.

Okay um so I mean I have a lot I collect a lot of this information I have a lot of you know um obviously we're talking about this part so I don't know if the speed cameras are gonna because again it comes with fees we got to pay for all this stuff right and I think now we realize if you can stream cameras now we realize it's all on us you know in this committee like we don't have that budget you know so reality-wise it'll be a couple years by the time we can actually justify if you want to call it that, you know, and get it into the budget.

I felt we were really throwing a curve with this committee with our budget. I never anticipated we were going to be doing this stuff we're doing. Exactly. And that's where I'm thinking. I always got a sudden impression like we're buying speed humps. Why would we be buying speed humps? That's just something all that works that we don't. We should say you need speed humps.

We recommend by talking to our neighbors and talking to them. You know, that's kind of how I'm looking at things. I'm like, it's just kind of weird. Like, how do we, like you said, how do we end up becoming the operations side of it? You know, I think it does go back to, because again, like, we're not people going out to put them up because now, you know, public works people need to put it up. Or if we put them up or you're taking jobs away from us, you know, it's a union thing and it becomes a whole mess. So, I mean, I know they just hired another cop. what if they actually get on the cops? And I'm a fire, and I love my fire, our police officers in town, I have great relationships with them. But like, if they actually go out and do radar, you know? I mean, are there radar guns working? You know? I've heard there's one that has been working for a while. But, you know, I know Ethan, he usually works evenings. He's pretty busy. You know, he'll ping people all the time. And I'm like, if we actually use our, you know, cops, like, So with my pager, I can monitor our town. It's actually state police who I monitor. I can listen to them. And, like, they're not crazy busy here in town. I hate to say that.

But that's a pushback at the beginning. They aren't too busy. They cannot be ticketing everywhere, right?

We're busy too, right? And that's what I'm saying. It's like they can, I hate to say it, they can be action.

Wasn't it because in terms of billable hours, though, like that would, they would accrue too much overtime if they were to? Do it on their regular shift.

They have their hours.

They have their hours at their work. I know there are grants that they can go out for, for like DWI or I think distracted driving. I know Waterford, like I said, I work for Waterford, so I hear a lot there. I know they get a lot of those grants.

I'm not sure how it works with a resident trooper. I did work for the state police department for several years, and they get grants that used to pay for overtime for road troopers. I don't know how that

usually it's usually it's holiday periods yeah yeah but like even just a day-to-day operation yeah like call me crazy like you couldn't go sit on the gurney roof or you know even by the data that we have currently you could run that data for probably a long almost a year now let's just say And just sit there for 45 minutes. 45 minutes. You can't take 45 minutes out of your, I don't know what they do, eight or 10 hour days. I'm not sure what the hours that they do.

And just pay great. John? What you were talking about for the cameras and for what they need and that, right? Will they fund some of the cameras if they were used? Will the state? The state police? No, such as UConn and the state, right? Yeah. The signs, is there some funding or are cameras available for trailers with cameras?

There's a lot of money available for traffic safety. And I've always felt that this town should have at least a part-time grant person. Right. And yeah, you know, Jim Lampost does a lot. I'm looking at three different grants right now for the town for another agency. It's just whether you have the time to pump that stuff down or not. Right.

So that would be interesting to know one way or another. And I mean, I'm kind of in agreement with you on, you know, police getting involved with the data. We have the data. I mentioned you know, someone else could access. I could use another email address and have a, you know, report user log in. I don't know if anyone, if you wanted to log in and see the data and run different reports. Could be useful if people use it, right? So then the original purpose from what one of the police mentioned to me was, you know, the sign goes up, the sign could go up blank. picks up whatever the speeds are, then you can change it to have it display the speed when you are speeding at whatever level. And then after that, and you have the data, then the police can go out and act on it, right?

Yeah, well, I don't want to take up too much of anyone's time. I would say that for the next meeting, I would like the position of this committee to be clarified. If we are purely an advisory board, that's fine. It's good to know if we are expected to. Not only come up with certain solutions, but fund those solutions. Then I think that, I mean, some people might not want to be involved in that, but if we are going to be involved in that, then our budget should rival the biggest budgets and we should be looking at infrastructure stuff. I've obviously talked about my issues with speed cameras. but I believe in sidewalks. I believe in bike lanes. You know, like there's a lot of stuff that costs money, that there's lots of data that suggests that it's really, it works for cyclist safety and pedestrian safety. And, you know, I don't know, setting up walking school buses so that children can walk to school and feel safe. Like there's a huge amount of stuff that if, even if we're just an advisory board, I would like to talk about that. But I would like for us to know what our role is so that we can go forth understanding that rather than our current situation of not really being clear on that.

Great suggestion. So before the next, we will make a point of seeing who we could have join us for that discussion. I would also say that I thank Bradley for giving me an idea to put on the agenda. And before the next meeting, if any of you want to, talk about a particular topic, whatever, or talk about what you think we should be doing, please communicate that. I'm happy to put that on the agenda and make that a discussion item for the future. Again, I appreciate all the time you guys are putting in. Thank you for your participation and go ahead.

I just wanted to, I was just thinking, not the campus, but the, sorry, forget it. We were talking about the cameras and then you were talking about the sidewalks, but I was going to mention one other thing. Oh, the budgets. About the signs. So like speed limit signs, this committee doesn't fund those right out of the budget from this committee for speed limit signs.

I talked to Martha about that today and she said, you know, if you guys need to figure out What you would want to spend on science and Ed will put that in his budget. How do we know what we're going to want to spend on science? I mean, we did a survey around once before. I mean, I'm not going to drive around and say we need science. But there's a lot of things that are in the budget, right?

So, I mean. why would, if there were cameras or anything else, whatever.

Everything seems to be done on an ad hoc basis, John. You're doing this, so you budget that. They're doing this and they budget that. That should probably be clarified. We did some clarification. That should probably be clarified as well. Thank you. And I will touch base with the police department. I'll get back to you about the UConn science town.

So for the reports for the email, they want me to set that up to the road and safety committee, just use that address and

make a user and then if anyone wants to access that, they can. I also want to send that to Derek and ask Derek, what do you want to see in this report? How can this report help you with the course?

What I'm saying is I can log in and I can modify and do things, but there can be a report user whomever can log in.

and run reports and see other things where you and i and derek could meet and we can we can ask derek what do you want to see from these subjects sure yeah okay thank you what were you what were you looking into ken what am i looking into i don't know i wouldn't recommend the signs or the breakaway signs or pulling them

Oh, no, I was just talking about how we had a conversation about that. The solar signs, we actually have a solar stop sign at work. They're buying two more because Spinhead Road and Dano's are putting them up there. And honestly, I wouldn't recommend them. They don't last. We've already had two warranty works on those things. It's been up for three years now, and it doesn't work half the time. As much as they're great, and I mean, they're not cheap. I think the new ones we're putting up now that we have... They say we have to, but I was like 20, 2100 bucks a piece. And they're all solar and all this stuff here, but it's like.

Yeah, you know, I can't, I don't want to talk about that. My wife bought two little solar lamps at the job lot and stuck them in the ground and they've been working for three years. Yeah. Okay, motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor? Aye.

Meeting adjourned.

Yeah, I got it.