There is a meeting set up by the city to address traffic concerns in ‘The Woods’, the area around Robinwood, Collingwood and Maplewood Avenues, scheduled for May 6th at City Hall between 5 and 6 pm (Ward 2 residents, don’t forget to vote in the Primary before or after the meeting!)
Its my understanding they aren’t looking to hear citizens complaints about the situation but rather, what solutions you have to remedy this ongoing problem. Its only an hour so, time will be of the essence. To that end then, I wanted to add my own thoughts/suggestions on the matter before the meeting to expedite and leave more room for others to speak.

Of course, to consider solutions, one must first fully understand what exactly is the problem. My family moved into ‘The Woods’ in 1965. The bridge across Doney at that point was only 2 years old. Traffic was not as thick as it is now. Then you had Super Duper where Goodwill is now on Robinwood, there was a Big Bear and Kroger (FAR smaller than stores are today) and a Martin’s Kosher Grocery over on the north side of The Woods. On the south side it was a Zayre’s, which was a department type store. Nowadays you have a Target and a Kroger on one end and a Walmart on the other. This leads to alot of back and forth and criss-crossing of The Woods by people going to and fro. Add to this: additional population, huge semi trucks delivering to these stores and The Woods street layout ( 1 mile long straightaways) and you have what we have today. As well, there is an uptick in scofflaws who view these straightaways as personal speedways and so, this all brings us here today.

So then, how to remedy these problems to increase the peace and quiet enjoyment of our community once again? There is the rub.
The three problems that exist as described above:
1. The Woods caught in the middle of 3 big stores
2. Scofflaw attitudes among drivers anymore
3 Mile-long straightaways
a) There is nothing that can be done about the stores, they exist and will continue to.
b) Scofflaw attitudes should be addressed by police through enforcement. You, I and everyone else see the running of the stop signs, the passing of cars who are doing the speed limit, the speeding and roaring down the streets and the semi-tractor trailer trucks going down the smaller side streets, ala Elbern, Doney, et al.
c) So then, that leaves the problem that is the mile-long straightaways. (FYI, outside of Hamilton Road, the only other road that goes directly between Broad and Main outside of ‘The Woods’ is Yearling) Just this year council approved legislation to install 4-way stops at Elbern across The Woods, so that is a beginning. That, of course won’t curtail the stop-sign running scofflaws (see: enforcement) but will certainly act as a slowing to some people’s mania in getting from Broad to Main or back as fastest as humanly possible. This then speaks to using methods to either slow people down and/or deter them from treating The Woods as a cut-through.

A year or so ago the city installed two medians on Maplewood, ostensibly to ‘calm’ traffic. As I myself have noted and heard from several residents of Maplewood, they do little to fulfill their original promise. This is due to the fact that they are too slim. All it does is create a slight movement to the right as you motor through. When I was on a trip to NYC last May, I was in Brooklyn and noticed their solution for cut-throughs. Here are the photos I took:

Ultimately, it is the city’s responsibility to its citizenry to ensure their neighborhoods a level of peaceful enjoyment away from nuisances as we see here in The Woods. I feel the biggest key is ‘bafflers’, whatever those things are, in whatever design which keep people from racing down straightaways and up and down and across any way they want to go. This is what is creating this nightmare for the residents. Stopping that is what will return the peacefulness to The Woods, Whitehall’s oldest neighborhood.