Zoe Berg, Photo Editor

Westville residents and officials are bracing for parking problems and traffic clogging around the Yale Bowl at the Yale-Harvard football game next month. 

At the monthly online Westville and West Hills Community Management Team meeting Wednesday evening, residents aired their concerns regarding increased speeding incidents in the city and worries about overcrowded streets during the upcoming game. This year’s game is scheduled for Nov. 20 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. Officials from Yale, the New Haven Police Department and Westville present at the meeting assured residents that officers at the event will strictly enforce parking and public safety throughout the neighborhood. 

“This has been an ongoing problem ever since I’ve been here,” Kate Bradley, a Westville resident since 1988, said at the meeting. “The Yale police do not police our streets, and so I want to know that there’s going to be people out there enforcing the parking zones and also making sure that people are not sitting all over people’s properties and blocking their driveways.”

Bradley said she would like the NHPD to be “active” in ticketing and towing parking zone violators on gameday.

Westville Alder Adam Marchand responded, saying he had met with Upper Westville Alder Daryl Brackeen, Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs Representative Karen King, representatives from the YPD and Yale Athletics officials to devise a parking and traffic plan for the event.  

While officers from the YPD, NHPD and West Haven will be involved, Marchand said parking enforcement will be handled by the Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department. Marchand said he has been in touch with Karla Lindquist, the Interim Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department Director, in preparation for the heightened parking violations they expect to see. 

“We will have a robust parking enforcement presence there,” Marchand announced at the meeting. “The time when [these issues] come up the most is the Yale-Harvard game because that’s by far the largest event Yale holds and so there’s a lot more traffic and cars. … Then there’s a fair amount of tailgating so there’s a lot of people getting drunk — just to be blunt.”

Marchand added that in general, parking and traffic issues related to Yale sporting events besides the Yale-Harvard game and some summer lacrosse tournaments are fairly low. 

So far this fall, Marchand said there has not been much neighborhood disruption from Yale home games. “But when Harvard comes to town it’s a different ball game.” 

King said the YPD has been working on enforcement plans for the Yale-Harvard game and beyond. 

“YPD is well aware, not only during the Yale-Harvard time, but throughout the year that there are concerns about parking issues in the neighborhood, and so we always bring that up when we are talking about planning events,” she said. 

Westville district top cop Lt. Elliot Rosa added that the involvement of public safety officers from NHPD and West Haven will entail responding to traffic and issues off Yale’s property, while parking zone enforcement will largely fall on the Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department. 

Rosa also addressed mounting concerns about speeding, particularly along Yale and Whalley avenues, in Westville. Traffic calming measures including a two-way cycle track, a midblock raised pedestrian crosswalk and speed humps on Yale Avenue were approved for Westville this summer. 

Rosa shared that so far this year in Westville, officers have stopped 386 motor vehicle operators, while this time last year they had stopped 282. 

He noted that the number of incidents of drivers running through red lights and speeding have shot up throughout the city. According to Rosa, city-wide officers have made 7,000 stops this year in contrast to 6,266 stops by the same time last year. 

In August, the NHPD received $50,000 from the Connecticut Department of Transportation Speed and Aggressive Driving Enforcement to fund extra shifts and catch more speeders across the city.  

SOPHIE SONNENFELD
Sophie Sonnenfeld is Managing Editor of the Yale Daily News. She previously served as City Editor and covered cops and courts as a beat reporter. She is a junior in Branford College double majoring in political science and anthropology.