Tina Li, Contributing Photographer

On a partly cloudy November morning, two cars collided as they drove through the intersection of Willow and Nicoll streets. A passenger was left bruised and both cars were damaged. Ultimately, the driver on Nicoll Street was faulted for having run their stop sign.

On a public webinar this Wednesday, Strong Towns — a national nonprofit advocating for safe, livable cities — and several community members took a microscope to this crash to analyze and try to address the intersection’s dangers.

East Rock residents have expressed safety concerns about the Willow-Nicoll intersection for over a decade. Due to speeding cars, faded zebra crossings and low visibility, the crossing has become infamous in the area for its hazards.

In the “Crash Analysis Studio” webinar, Strong Towns’ Community Engagement Coordinator Tony Harris facilitated a discussion among several panelists: Alders Caroline Tanbee Smith and Anna Festa of Wards 9 and 10, respectively, and East Rock residents Rishabh Mittal and Peter Clarke.

Mittal and Clarke had successfully applied for this intersection to be analyzed by Strong Towns. This is the 22nd crash analysis the organization has conducted nationwide, with the aim of promoting grassroots action and providing local leaders with an analysis and recommendations report.

According to Tanbee Smith, over 70 people attended the webinar, including New Haven’s City Engineer Giovanni Zinn.

The webinar followed several months of activism and community engagement by Smith and Festa, whose wards this intersection straddles. Since last fall, they have been door-knocking in East Rock and discussing potential solutions with the city. Their petition for traffic safety improvements on the Willow and Nicoll Street intersection has garnered about 200 signatures.

“The North American response to crashes focuses primarily on assigning blame, often assigning blame to drivers and sometimes to pedestrians too,” Harris said. “Our objective really is to learn as much as possible about what happened, what took place, identify contributing factors and make some suggestions for improving safety at this crash location.”

Harris began the webinar with a detailed crash analysis. Clicking through slides of diagrams and images, he described how the intersection would have looked from both drivers’ perspectives. He then opened up the floor to the alders and neighbors to discuss the possible crash factors.

Tanbee Smith and Festa both emphasized the intersection’s poor sightlines for drivers and pedestrians.

“You have to inch, inch, inch to try to see around the tree [or] ironically, the pedestrian yield signs. You always feel like you’re taking a little bit of a leap of faith when you take the turn,” Tanbee Smith said.

Due to overgrown trees, the pedestrian yield sign and cars illegally parked on the intersection corner, it’s difficult for cars to see people waiting to cross. When Festa drives through the stop sign, she even honks to warn pedestrians, she said.

Tanbee Smith also pointed out how the intersection’s proximity to highways means that people are likely to be speeding on and off the ramp. Indeed, in a small study conducted by Mittal and volunteers, they found that even on a weekend day, 57.3 percent of 413 cars tracked were going over the speed limit of 25 miles per hour. 

“It’s treacherous. I avoid it at all costs,” Festa said.

Mittal, who brought his transportation planning and consulting experience to the webinar, suggested two main design features that would ameliorate the intersection’s conditions: narrowing the street and bringing the stop sign closer to the road. 

Of the 28 crashes the intersection has seen in the past five years, over 20 happened because the driver on Nicoll Street ran the stop sign, Mittal said. He believes that drivers mistakenly think they are on the main road for several reasons: Nicoll is the wider street, the stop sign is hard to notice and only Willow Street has crosswalks.

Harris echoed Mittal’s concerns, saying that drivers typically follow “the design cues around them.”

Tanbee Smith also expressed hopes that there can be “more imaginative, more demonstrative solutions that really elevate the pedestrian” at the intersection. With sidewalk bump outs and colorful crosswalk repaintings, she said, drivers would be more likely to think of the area as a spot to slow down and not speed up.

Other solutions floated around during the panel discussion included adding traffic safety measures such as four-way stops and a large speed table, pruning the trees, rethinking pedestrian signs and redirecting traffic in the neighborhood. 

“There’s a Willow and Nicoll, if you will, in every single neighborhood,” Tanbee Smith told the News before the webinar. She hopes this event will serve as a model for uniting city and community expertise together to brainstorm solutions for traffic safety problems. 

“We shouldn’t have to tell people to avoid a street. We shouldn’t have to tell them, take a different route,” Festa said. “All our streets should be safe, and I think it’s everyone’s responsibility.”

Strong Towns will hold two more crash analysis sessions in New Haven, one on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and another on a Whalley Avenue intersection.