South Orange Village has placed medians on Lenox Avenue in the last week in an attempt to slow “a very aggressive level of speeding,” and will study the traffic there again to see if they do the trick.
Eric Chabeach, who lives on Lenox between Walton and Ridgewood, said it is too soon to tell the effects of the medians but he is hopeful. Chabeach, along with other neighbors on the block, had previously asked the Village to install speed bumps after seeing a Village study backed up what they saw, showing a high level of speeding over the 25 mph limit, with many traveling up to 39 mph.
“I’m open to any accepted best practices for traffic calming,” said Chabeach. “… I still consider our block a prime candidate for speed bumps and likely to be the best long-term solution. But [the Village] asked us to let the engineer’s designs go into effect first and then evaluate the effectiveness — and I feel OK about that. I do think the medians will have at least some impact, so for me, I’m happy to have them here.”
But other residents in the neighborhood are concerned. At the South Orange Village Council meeting on Monday, Ridgewood Road resident Samuel Fredman complained during public comment about the medians, expressing concern about their placement at the intersection and about stonework in particular. “The lanes seem narrow. They seem to be placed in a way that make turns onto Lennox Avenue from South Ridgewood Road difficult…. [The stonework] is placed in such a way that it could interfere with turning and could result in flat tires or banged up front end.”
Beyond the construction, Fredman also complained that a lack of notification “is one thing that has irked me.” He said none of the neighbors that he spoke to knew about the work before it began. “So I’m asking you to make an effort to inform the public of what was done and why it was done and why there wasn’t notification to the local community in that area with regard to the construction work.”
Village Administrator Julie Doran told Freman that residents on Lenox had asked for traffic calming measures and that notification was given through the neighborhood group from Lenox Avenue that was involved with the evolution through the years of these traffic-calming plans that went through the meetings with Health and Public Safety and the Department of Public Works. Notices were also sent through email and hand delivered to homes, she said.
“What I don’t know off the top of my head is to what radius, which exact homes received the notices of the construction before it [started],” she said. “The design of that roadway was done in conjunction with Public Safety, with Engineering, and with homeowners on that street. Some of the concerns that you’re citing, I would say are probably by design. There’s a concerted effort to reduce the traffic on Lenox Avenue and slow traffic down, particularly in their turning and speeding downhill.”
Doran said the Village has heard concern about a school bus being unable to make the turn, since Lenox is used as a bus route to South Mountain School.
“We checked with the Transportation Department today and they did not know of any problems, but we did ask our Engineering Department to have inspectors go out, maybe not this week because of the holiday, but when things are busier again, to observe that during school pickup hours to make sure that the school bus can make that turn,” she said. “Basically the plan is to reduce traffic, reduce the speed on the street, which was a growing problem.”
South Orange Mayor Sheena Collum added that the data was analyzed by the traffic bureau on numerous counts, and it showed “a very aggressive level of speeding continuously on that particular block. So our engineer, who looks at traffic calming on every single street, worked a design to address the problems that we were seeing over the past two years with people flying down that block. So, as Ms. Doran noted, it is that we had some concerns come in from residents, and our engineer is following up on those.”
Doran said the Village will observe it and “if modifications need to made, they will be made.”
At a Village Council meeting on June 9, Chabeach and other neighbors on the block of Lenox between Ridgewood Road and Walton Road expressed frustration that they were not involved in the planning discussions for the upcoming road work, despite years of advocating for changes to slow speeders.
At that time, the residents who spoke asked the Council to also include the lower portion of Lenox in whatever calming efforts were going to be used on the upper portion of Lenox, and advocated for speed bumps or the wider speed tables.
The medians were placed on both blocks last week.
“I’m not sure that I have seen enough traffic yet to really say for sure whether the medians are reducing speeding or not,” Chabeach said on Wednesday. “But the town had told us that their plan was to run another traffic study after all of the work is completed to see if there’s an impact… and I think, for myself, I’m interested to wait and see something with more concrete data like that.”
