Greenport Village will install a trial speed bump on Fifth Street between Clark Street and Johnson Place after receiving consistent complaints from residents who say speeding cars blowing through stop signs near the southern end of the block is a traffic tragedy waiting to happen.
At a Village Board meeting last week, Fifth Street resident Brian Quillin said he’d returned to Greenport more than a decade ago from a noisy New York City apartment.
“Coming back to Fifth Street, I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic, speeding, revving of the engines and blowing through all the stop signs,” he told the Village Board of Trustees. “I didn’t realize how dangerous it actually was on the street.
“I never thought I’d see myself as a person that’s running off the porch to scream at people in the street,” he said. “I’ve become my father.”
Fifth Street resident Maritza Winkler said it’s gotten so bad that she almost pines for the days when the street was full of potholes.
“Sometimes I think you have to be careful what you wish for, because we had a bumpy road, and then we had that road paved, and it just seems like since it was paved, it’s been discovered for speeding.
“This has been going on some time, but everyday moments of kids on bikes and people backing out of driveways and walking your dog are risky in our neighborhood.”
She thanked the Southold Police Department for “stepping up surveillance efforts and enforcement.
“But regrettably, it’s still not enough. We still hear it. We still are anxious about something serious happening, and I’m hopeful that we will find the will to act … to possibly solve the problem.”
Another resident, Roric Tobin, said that “a lot of these cars are low-ride cars that are speeding there, and I think that [a speed bump] will deter them.
“We’ve got all of the kids going to the park, it’s summer. They’re not always on the sidewalk. I’ve seen them personally drop a ball and go [into the street] for it without looking. The speeding is a very serious risk.”
Fifth Street resident John Williams said neighbors have estimated that only one in every 17 cars stops completely at a Fifth Street stop sign.
Calling it “somewhere between raw data and anecdotal information,” he described his porch-dwelling neighbors, who he said keep a rough tally on a column on the their front porch. “They live on the corner, and every summer they do hash marks for how many people make a full stop at their particular stop sign, and how many people go right on through,” Mr. Williams said. “And the last time I checked with them … we estimated that one in about 17 drivers that come down our street actually makes a full legal stop, and a lot of them don’t stop at all.”
Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi said that if the trial speed bump is effective, the community should “potentially consider whether it makes sense to consider any more [trial speed bumps] beyond that.” Recently, the Village Board lowered the speed limit throughout the village from 30 mph to 25.
The mayor said that a new stop sign was recently erected on Fifth Street and that increased police presence in the neighborhood has led to nearly three dozen traffic tickets being issued in the area recently.