While welcoming a lowered speed limit along Route 198, members of the Scajaquada Corridor Coalition say they're awaiting additional changes to the roadway announced earlier this summer, including pedestrian crossings.
Coalition members hosted a news conference Monday morning at the base of the pedestrian bridge located near Lincoln Parkway and Nottingham Terrace, which crosses over the Scajaquada. They told reporters that the promised raised pedestrian crossings were - according to a July announcement by the New York State Department of Transportation - due for completion by the end of August.
A written statement from the DOT read, "At the direction of Governor Cuomo, NYSDOT moved quickly to lower the speed limit and have implemented other immediate traffic-calming measures, such as narrowing the lanes to slow traffic, to increase pedestrian safety along the Scajaquada. While the Department continues working on other safety measures, such as adding two raised crosswalks, community input will be critical to any lasting decisions regarding the Scajaquada Corridor. We hope the public will join us for an informational meeting on September 16th."
The time and location of that meeting has not yet been announced.
"We would like to see the crossings installed," said Justin Booth, a member of the coalition's steering committee. "And we would love to see the Department of Transportation engage the community in moving forward with the long-term plan for right-sizing the Scajaquada Expressway back into a parkway."
The move to lower the speed limit along Route 198 from 50 to 30 miles per hour came following the accidental death of a 3-year-old boy who was struck by a car which left the roadway and entered Delaware Park. Proposals to convert the Scajaquada from an expressway into a parkway, though, long predate May's tragedy. Calls which began as far back as 2001 were later put down on paper in the DOT's Expanded Project Proposal, which is supported by the Scajaquada Corridor Coalition.
The reduced speed limit, members said, is welcomed by neighbors not only because of slower traffic but also because of the noise reduction resulting from the slowdown. To activists, changes to the Scajaquada are as much about quality of life as they are about safety.
"Some of those short-term ideas are being implemented with the approach that we've heard the Department of Transportation moving forward on. But there's also opportunities for more short-term proposals that came out of that process, a process that engaged the community well and had a lot of community buy-in at the time," said Brian Dold, coalition steering committee member.
