One Intersection. 28 Crashes. Locals Say No More.
This intersection in New Haven, Connecticut has seen 28 crashes in five years. Take note of the width of the street and where a zebra crossing is absent.
On a gray November morning, a split-second mistake at the corner of Willow and Nicoll sent two cars crashing into each other. One passenger was injured. Both vehicles were wrecked.
Discomfort is a daily reality at this East Rock intersection in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s where parents grip their children’s hands a little tighter. Where cyclists brace themselves to ride through. And where, over the past five years, at least 28 crashes have occurred.
Of those 28, more than 20 happened because the driver on Nicoll Street ran the stop sign, according to East Rock resident Rishabh Mittal. He pointed out that several design factors might explain the confusion: Nicoll is the wider street, its stop sign is hard to notice, and only Willow Street has marked crosswalks. As a result, drivers believe they’re still on the main road, rather than a neighborhood street, he surmises. City planner Erik Harris agreed. “Drivers typically follow the design cues around them.”
Mittal and other residents decided they’d seen enough. Rather than wait for another tragedy to make headlines, they took matters into their own hands—and organized a Crash Analysis Studio.
The goal wasn’t to assign blame. It was to get clarity: What’s really going wrong here—and what can we do about it?
A Simple Intersection, a Tangle of Hazards
During the Studio, residents, advocates, and local officials came together to examine the crash data and the site itself. What they saw was a perfect storm of hazards:
Stop signs placed too far from the actual intersection.
Overgrown trees and illegally parked cars blocking sight lines.
A long, wide straightaway encouraging drivers to speed, especially for drivers exiting nearby highway ramps.
“There’s a Willow and Nicoll, if you will, in every single neighborhood.”
Many of the crashes involved drivers turning right through the stop sign—not trying to blow through the intersection, but creeping forward because they couldn’t see oncoming traffic. It was exactly the kind of systemic issue the Studio was designed to surface.
“There can be more imaginative, more demonstrative solutions that really elevate the pedestrian,” said Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith. With sidewalk bump-outs and colorful crosswalk repaintings, she added, “drivers would be more likely to think of the area as a spot to slow down and not speed up.”
To back up what they observed, residents collected speed data at the site. In a weekend study conducted by Mittal and a team of volunteers, 413 cars were tracked on Willow Street. More than half were speeding.
The team of residents who adopted the Crash Analysis Studio model in New Haven. This image was taken during speed data collection.
‘We Shouldn’t Have to Tell People to Avoid a Street’
“There’s a Willow and Nicoll, if you will, in every single neighborhood,” Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith said before a public webinar highlighting the Crash Analysis Studio’s findings.
She hopes this kind of collaboration can become a model—one that pairs city expertise with community momentum to confront long-standing safety challenges. “We shouldn’t have to tell people to avoid a street. We shouldn’t have to say, ‘Take a different route,’” Alder Anna Festa added. “All our streets should be safe. And I think that’s everyone’s responsibility.”
More than 200 residents have signed a petition calling for immediate action. City staff are now in active conversation with the community to determine next steps. But perhaps the most important shift isn’t just in policy—it’s in perspective.
By adopting the Crash Analysis Studio model, the East Rock community is learning to ask better questions—ones that move away from blame and toward understanding why crashes happen in the first place. Instead of focusing on who made a mistake, they’re looking at the conditions that make mistakes deadly.
They’re no longer asking, Who messed up here? They’re asking, What is it about this street that keeps producing the same outcome—and how do we change that?
