Princeton officials have asked the state Department of Transportation (DOT) to investigate ways to make Nassau Street safer, with the request coming less than a year after a pedestrian was killed downtown while crossing an intersection on the state road.
Specifically, the municipality wants the DOT to focus on the Bayard Lane to Harrison Street corridor of Nassau Street (state Route 27), an area busy with pedestrians, municipal engineer Deanna Stockton said on June 27. A written request from the town was made to the DOT in May, she said.
“Because they may only be looking at it as if we want to move vehicles through this corridor in the fastest way possible,” Stockton said. “We want to look at is as this is our main street. We want to look at it for quality of life, for parking opportunities, loading opportunities (and) transit, bike and pedestrian facilities that don’t exist now.”
Stockton referenced serious-injury crashes as well as the pedestrian fatality, in October, in which a 62-year-old woman was killed by a cement truck turning from Nassau Street onto Washington Road.
“There’s just a lot of activity down there and a lot of use of the same space,” Stockton said. “We’ve had the crashes, and so we want to reduce the number of crashes that are occurring out there.”
A crash total was not immediately available.
In addition, the town is looking to the DOT to make pedestrian crossings safer at three streets that intersect with Nassau Street: University Place, Washington Road and Witherspoon Street.
Stockton said the town wants the state to consider, either through installing new equipment or retiming existing traffic signals, stopping motor vehicle traffic in all directions to give pedestrians more time to get from one side to the other.
On June 25, Mayor Liz Lempert called Nassau Street “the hub” for car, bike and pedestrian traffic. She said she would support studying the possibility of reducing the number of traffic lanes from two in each direction to one.
“We are going to have an opportunity to, hopefully, rethink and make improvements to the street because it doesn’t operate 100 percent in every dimension for sure,” Lempert said. “If you shrink the two lanes down to one lane it gives you more space for bikes. It would give you better visibility for pedestrians that are crossing, so it has some potential advantages.”
Along the same lines, she touched on discussions officials have had internally about having a “vision zero” policy, to design roads and lower speeds with the goal of having zero motor vehicle fatalities.
“You can’t always prevent crashes,” said Lempert, an advocate for having bike lanes in town. “But you can design your roads and control your speeds so that when there are crashes, people don’t die as a result.”
“We want to design the roads so people are more likely to go at the speed limit,” Council President Jenny Crumiller said on June 25. “Right now, a lot of people just routinely drive above the speed limit everywhere, except when there’s enforcement in place.”
DOT spokesman Matthew D. Saidel said DOT Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti “is aware of the Princeton officials’ request to employ additional road modifications to Route 27 (Nassau Street) and the department has begun the process of looking into the matter.”
“As you know,” Saidel said, “DOT has a responsibility for providing safe pedestrian accommodations on state roads while not increasing traffic congestion and gridlock on a critical road through any town. Balancing these concerns is paramount for any road improvements DOT considers.”
