Drivers who frequent Uptown Kingston were surprised this week when the the City announced on Facebook it would permanently remove the stop sign at the southbound corner of Clinton Avenue and Main Street.
As was evident by several first-hand drives through the intersection, many drivers didn’t get the memo. A significant number of vehicles continued to halt in front of the stop sign’s ghost. The sign was uprooted Monday, Nov, 25, never to return.
The original function of this stop sign was to allow northbound Clinton Avenue traffic to freely turn left onto Main Street, avoiding traffic backups. In practice, this was easier said than done, as southbound drivers were known to cut off the left-turners with some frequency. Some didn’t see the stop sign and drove right through it, others assumed left-turners would have to yield to oncoming traffic.
The sudden disappearance of the aforementioned stop sign wasn’t the only traffic talk in Uptown Kingston. A pair of stop signs appeared at the corner of Main Street and Wall Street on the same day the other stop sign was taken away. This intersection by the churches and post office is quite infamous for local drivers. This writer personally witnessed three accidents and countless near-misses at the location. Drivers on Wall Street would sometimes not see the stop sign, but a more common mistake was not paying attention to the traffic coming down Main Street and pulling into that oncoming traffic, often by drivers assuming Main Street traffic had a stop or yield sign. Now this intersection of two one-way streets will have the Main Street stop sign many Wall Street drivers wrongfully assumed was already in place.
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