“Ulster Avenue is like a racetrack,” Kayla Nadal said at the regular Saugerties Village Board meeting on July 6. “From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. people, especially the younger generation, attempt to beat the red light. Sitting on my front porch with my husband, who is a volunteer firefighter, we are both afraid that somebody is going to get seriously hurt or killed. And the amount of people walking on Ulster Avenue — what can be done before somebody really does get hurt?”
Mayor William Murphy said the best thing would be to get a sign similar to the one on Washington Avenue, which tells drivers how fast they are going as they approach it. “We had a temporary one up last year, and it did seem to slow things down.” Murphy has been in contact with Ulster County to try to get a similar sign to be permanently installed on Ulster Avenue as well.
Murphy said the other alternative is strict enforcement. While he does not have the authority to reduce the speed limit on a state road to 25, “I don’t think five miles an hour on a state road makes a difference as opposed to residential streets.”
Saugerties Police Chief Joseph Sinagra said the department does enforce traffic laws on Ulster Avenue. The sign that was installed temporarily records the speed of traffic in both directions, “and that data shows that the last time we had the sign up on Ulster Avenue people were compliant,” Sinagra said. “The times we found the anomalies at high speeds, we were able to correlate that with emergency vehicles, such as EMT and ambulance, fire vehicles, police vehicles responding to emergencies.”
Police did not find a lot of non-emergency traffic that was going faster than the speed limit, Sinagra said. “We’ll see what the results are on Elm Street and Market Street; that’s where the sign will be moved to next, and we’ll make a determination as to how we can handle it.”
Sinagra said an enforcement detail including state troopers, deputy sheriffs and Saugerties police officers would “saturate the village” for the remainder of the week [week of July 5].”
Sinagra said he observed traffic one evening in the previous week and he wrote out six tickets, for people running a stop sign; all but one to Saugerties residents.
Murphy said he has spoken to the county, and they have two of the signs that tell drivers how fast they are going. “I hope I can grab one. They were supposed to give two to each town and we only got one at the time.”
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