At a Town Hall meeting with residents of the Academy Heights neighborhood on Wednesday, June 18, the South Orange Village Council decided to move forward with striping Academy Street in an effort to reduce speeding and increase pedestrian safety.
The speed was captured as a car (not shown) on Academy approached a speed sign going 36 in a 25 mph zone. Neighbors say traffic calming measures aren’t working. (Photo by Laura Griffin)
The Town Hall came about after a Village Council meeting in May in which residents expressed their concerns about Academy being used as a cut-through for drivers trying to avoid Valley Street or Prospect Avenue and driving too fast.
About 10 residents from Academy Heights attended the meeting in the Founders Park Community Room. The group hopes that painting lines on the road will make it easier to guide traffic, and for drivers to see the crosswalk at the end of the street despite its incline.
“This is a huge visibility issue,” neighbor Jessica Miller said, whose child’s bike was hit by a car as he was walking it across a crosswalk on Academy.
Children like Miller’s use Academy Street or have to cross it to get home from school, as it runs from Columbia High School to downtown South Orange past Our Lady of Sorrows, and neighbors say they feel that there is not enough being done to prevent people from speeding down the street.
Both the Academy Heights Neighborhood Association and the South Orange Police Department conducted their own traffic studies to monitor how often and frequently people were speeding. While the police department’s study showed that 71% of northbound drivers and 67.5% of southbound drivers go over the 25 mph speed limit, Dan Dietrich, treasurer of the Academy Heights Neighborhood Association, said he did not want the data to distract the group from the issue at hand.
“We’ve been working on this for years“ with different groups and people, Dietrich said, but, until now, he had not heard “anybody yet acknowledge that there is an actual problem.”
Dietrich, who proposed the idea of striping the road during the Village Council meeting in May, said that it would be ideal for the striping to be completed before kids go back to school.
Village Engineer David Battaglia told the group that he aims to add the striping of Academy to a village-wide project he is currently working on. Battaglia has a list of crosswalks that need to be re-striped and is planning to put out a bid for striping. However, he said, the project would be done through the Morris County Cooperative Pricing Council, so he has less control of when it will take place.
Finishing the striping on Academy by the fall “is possible,” Battaglia said, but he “cannot guarantee it.”
