The Woodstock group tasked with street safety has made several significant recommendations to improve pedestrians, motor vehicles and bicyclists’ ability to coexist. The Complete Streets Committee has updated the town board on its progress.
How extensive is Woodstock’s problem?
“We’ve had 39 cars going off the road. These cars have hit trees, utility poles. They’ve ended up in ditches, they’ve rolled over,” Complete Streets Committee member Howard Cohen said. “Most of the reports don’t speak to speeding, but I’ve never lived in a town where so many cars are going off the road. And if you obey the speed limits, you’re not going off the road. So this is one problem we feel that we have is speeding outside of town. We’ve had 30 cars connecting with deer, which again, we all have to drive carefully. This is just part of living in the country.”
The committee has been working with the police on accident data.
The police department logged 77 crashes in 2024. The town is on trend to match that number this year. “July and August last year represented 25 percent of the incidents, so we’re in peak season,” Cohen said.
Unless there’s a high-speed collision with another car, it’s safer in a dense environment like the central hamlet of Woodstock to be in a car than not. “Vehicle occupants have reinforced safety cages, seat belts, airbags, head restraints, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control,” Cohen said. “You’re going to be fine if you hit a pedestrian or a cyclist, but for those pedestrians and cyclists, they have nothing.”
A grant from the AARP will pay for a walk audit through the town corridor. According to Murphy, the results of those work audits were not particularly reassuring. “People did not feel comfortable and they did not feel safe.” It was particularly difficult for those with disabilities to navigate the town.
“And you don’t have to look too hard to see cars racing through crosswalks with people in those crosswalks and those kind of instances. It happens constantly,” said Cohen.
Sidewalk upgrades are mandatory.
“We also think we can do a better job highlighting our crosswalks,” Cohen said. “Anything we can do to make that cross safer and more visible.”
The problem is serious, its incidence frequent.
Design features like raised crosswalks force drivers to slow down and to help make pedestrians more visible.
Complete Streets is also working on traffic-flow investigations, looking for a better way to flow traffic around the center of town.
And then there are the parking lots, also in the center of the town. “One of the first projects that Complete Streets completed was a parking map that focuses on accessibility, parking, and traffic flow,” said Murphy. “People don’t know how to get to the parking lots, don’t know how to use them. That’s one of the reasons that we want signs to direct people to the lot.”
“We’d like to make the parking lots more visible and more accessible for everyone,” added Howard Cohen.
The support of the town board was needed in order to help obtain that signage, “so that’s one of the things we’re requesting today,” said Murphy.
Complete Streets has been working in coordination with the state Department of Transportation in improving the town’s main corridor from Tinker Street to Bearsville. The committee is working with a traffic engineer to design a bike path off the vehicle lanes of the Route 212 corridor.
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