I appreciate the spirit of your post, having seen several entire families narrowly avoid being run over and wiped out by speeding red light runners in recent weeks within this area. Speeding at your corner seriously erodes your quality of life and sense of safety.

Unfortunately a traffic signal might actually create more crashes, by encouraging people to run red lights. A more effective solution would be traffic calming, similar to what the city recently installed at Edwards and Livingston, or at any number of other intersections in the area. Traffic calming is also significantly less expensive than installing a new overhead signal.

The entire neighborhood needs a traffic calming master plan, similar to what other cities throughout the U.S. have done. New Haven is unfortunately far behind the times and as a result is missing a key opportunity to make its neighborhoods more walkable, livable, and attractive for families. A neighborhood plan would involve a strategic program of upgrades across a number of blocks which would result in a more attractive neighborhood as a whole, not just a few scattered improvements on a few blocks. In Fair Haven, the neighborhood passed around a hat and raised enough money to do a study in 2008, which proposed a detailed neighborhood traffic calming master plan for the eastern half of Fair Haven.

A similar problem, located a few blocks from your report, has seen some discussion on this as well: http://seeclickfix.com/issues/119210

Please visit http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/Engineering/completestreets.asp and consider filling out a request form so that your intersection will be prioritized for improvements. Your Alderman can also help with this.

Also, some people say that traffic calming is expensive. The city has tended to pursue more expensive types of traffic calming (such as new curbs), but there are solutions like temporary curb extensions that are basically free if the city is willing to think outside the box and move forward more quickly. At the current rate, it will take approximately 600 years to improve the street grid - that is an unacceptable failure on the part of our local government.