A half-century ago, many Woodstockers saw sidewalks as an urban abomination being foisted on an innocent rural arts community as a prelude to uncontrolled development. Now the grandchildren of these same Woodstockers are pushing for improved sidewalk maintenance and engineering, greater pedestrian safety, walking paths and sidewalk extensions.
“The county executive made road safety a top priority after the recent deaths of four students on our local roads, and we want to make certain that we in Woodstock are doing everything we can to make the roads and streets safe for everyone,” Woodstock’s Complete Streets committee chair Grace Murphy told the town board last week
The committee presented the town board the results of several walk audits conducted last year to assess the problems and challenges posed to pedestrians. It made a pitch for better crosswalks and improved pedestrian safety.
“Our challenge with the walk audit was to assess what it’s actually like to walk around Woodstock,” Murphy said. “You can get crash statistics, but that doesn’t tell you what the experience is.”
The committee used a federal grant to gather information. Roughly 75 volunteers walked the streets of the hamlet.
The intersection of Tannery Brook Road and Tinker Street is a big danger spot, the audits found. Cars drive through where a crosswalk might be, and pedestrians can be hidden by cars turning onto Tannery Brook Road, committee member Howard Cohen said.
Where Tinker Street, Mill Hill Road and Rock City Road converge, pedestrians have to compete with cars that should be stopping, Cohen demonstrated with a video.“There are four people waiting to cross and the cars continue to go because if they’re willing to wait the cars will keep going. But then two more people show up then see what happens when six people are crossing,” he said. “They’re fully in the crosswalk.”
The poor condition of the sidewalks was another issue noted in the audits.
“Certainly, Tinker Street is one, and also Tannery Brook Road, we know is in desperate need of repair,” Cohen said. “I was driving west on Tinker and I couldn’t understand why a lady was walking into town in the middle of the road. So I got out of the car and backtracked and traced her steps, and you can see that snow is piled high on the sidewalks. I don’t think homeowners can move that heavy slush. And there’s a three-foot puddle, which means that you’re literally walking in the middle of a state road from the west end of town to get into town, which really is something we need to work hard to fix.”
On Tannery Brook Road, the sidewalk was fixed and then became “unfixed,” Murphy noted.
“Tannery Brook Road actually has a sidewalk that was there years ago, but it became so overgrown, and we noticed that there was paving there,” she said.
Woodstock contacted the county DPW, because it’s a county road, and they cleared it up,” Murphy said.
By the summer, the sides of the roadway were completely overgrown again.
“Their commitment to putting a surface down that would protect it from growing up again was not kept, and we contacted them several times,” said Murphy. “It just didn’t happen. And you can see it’s back in this condition that it was in, and it’s unusable once again.”
Cohen talked about a disabled woman named Carol on Pine Grove Street who has to drive her powered wheelchair in the middle of the road because there was no sidewalk.
There were other places with inconsistent sidewalks and places where crosswalks were not logical, Cohen said. In other places, like Ohayo Mountain Road and Lower Byrdcliffe, the roads lacked shoulders for safe walking.
Speed is also a major concern, Cohen noted as he showed photos of Ohayo Mountain Road. “The car on the left just didn’t make it ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road,” he narrated. “The car on the right went through somebody’s garden and didn’t stop until they hit a tree passing through their entire yard. And this family has two toddlers. So that’s scary.”
Murphy advocated for more community education about the consequences of speeding and better traffic engineering. She said raised crosswalks served the dual purpose of increasing the visibility of pedestrians and of slowing motorists.
Quick fixes from the committee include better signage to direct vehicles to off-street parking. “Town parking lots should be appealing and well-maintained,” Murphy said.
The committee also suggested a more uniform policy for sidewalk snow removal. “When we talk to business owners, there seems to be some conflict as to who is responsible,” Cohen said. The business owner is responsible for some sidewalks, while the town maintains others.
A path to Bearsville
Through the help of assemblymember Sarahana Shresta’s office, an application is pending for a $250,000 state grant to Woodstock which would be used for the matching funds for a $3-million Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) grant to build a walking and biking path between the village green and the Bearsville Flats.
The hope is the work can be completed in tandem with a state DOT improvement project of Tinker Street from the center of town to near Bearsville, including new sidewalks, to be started in 2025.
The walking path would not just be a wide shoulder. It would be separate from the road. The idea is to have a safe space for pedestrians and cyclists.
— Nick Henderson
A $25 fine too low?
A program introduced three years ago to beef up enforcement of illegally parking in handicapped accessible spaces is working, Jacqueline Manganaro told Woodstock’s town board last week, but the fines are too low enough and there is a lack of follow-up. The $25 fine is a drop in the bucket for most people coming in town and parking all day long, she said.
“And then I come to find out in asking the court clerk, what do we do with the tickets if they’re not paid for?” she said. “I think within three months or so, the ticket goes up a little bit. But there’s no pursuance to it. That’s it. If you’re writing a ticket for $25, and it’s not being pursued, what’s the point? Really, the point’s pretty moot.”
Manganaro said unpaid parking tickets in other towns prevent motorists from renewing their registrations, but that is not the case in Woodstock.
“The town board has to be careful not to delegate to the judges or the courts, However, as a resident, you might be able to have more of a conversation with them than we can,” town supervisor Bill McKenna said. “So let me look into that and possibly try and arrange a meeting between you and the two judges to have a conversation about what can be done.”
Councilmember Laura Ricci wondered whether $100 would be a more suitable fine. “If you bring it up from $25 to $100, that’s sort of a little bit of a message,” Manganaro responded.
— Nick Henderson
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