At last week’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Commission (PBC) meeting, PBC members were joined by BWH board members and town staff including Town Engineer Greg Sommer, Director of Community Development Duane Martin, and Town Manager Rick Ledwith. Staff members generously gave their time to respond to many questions, with the vast majority of time spent discussing Slow Down for Kids with many parents of young children who attended. This allowed for a truly rich, productive, collaborative discussion that showed the best of West Hartford’s civic engagement.
The BWH board would like to thank our town officials for taking this issue seriously and spending a great deal of time working with the public. We hope that the needs of our most vulnerable road users, especially young children, will be better taken into account with a more streamlined, effective, results-driven neighborhood traffic calming program.
Somerville and the greater Boston area are undertaking a very similar challenge on a larger scale. Please see GBH’s reporting here.
Please see WTNH 8 coverage of the meeting here.
Stay tuned for next steps in this campaign!! In the meantime, please consider writing an email of support to our town leaders, thanking them for their time and asking them to continue their focus on building a better neighborhood traffic calming plan to protect West Hartford citizens. An autogenerated email link can be found here – please feel free to customize! Let’s keep up the great collaboration with town leaders.
Subject: Thank you re: Slow Down for Kids!
Recipients: townmanager@westhartfordct.gov, towncouncil@westhartfordct.gov, greg.sommer@westhartfordct.gov, bikewesthartfordinc@gmail.com
Dear West Hartford Town Leaders,
Thank you for coming to the November 10 Pedestrian and Bicycle Commission meeting and generously giving your time to discuss Slow Down for Kids with Commission members, Bike West Hartford members, and the numerous concerned parents who were present. This kind of civic engagement really shows the best of what we can do in West Hartford together. I am asking that the town please work expeditiously to simplify the current neighborhood traffic calming program, so that we can better address severe speeding and unsafe driving on our neighborhood streets. Additionally, please see the following video from Boston, which is embarking upon a similar program: https://youtu.be/pIqSb3Vcb-8?si=8GKsxjKEnhqFqB1Q
We can do it here! We can improve the lives of our residents by working on neighborhood traffic calming.
West Hartford Resident and Parent