Strongly urge everyone to follow the advice of one of our readers, ElCapitan, and show up at the Portsmouth high school auditorium tonight at 7pm to express our concerns to the DOT and get the Town Center project moving. I have a call in to the State Police to see if there's any result from their investigation.

You want to read something that will really piss you off? Here's the response to the letter I sent to DOT Director Jerome Williams. With explanations, in case State Bureacratese is not anyone's first language.

Dear Mr. McDaid:
This is in response to your May 25, 2007 letter regarding pedestrian safety on East Main Road (Route 138) in Portsmouth. We understand you are requesting roundabouts on East Main Road.
Trans: We can read and understand English

We realize this is a difficult roadway for pedestrians to cross.
We feel your pain, really, seriously, we do.

Pedestrians encounter the same situation on other roadways across the state such as Warwick Avenue (Route 117) in Warwick, North Main Street (U.S. Route 1) in Providence, and Hartford Avenue (Route 6) in Johnston.
Get in line.

It is definitely a challenge to cross roadways such as these with four lanes, large traffic volumes, and high speeds.
Did I mention we feel your pain? Okay, we sort of feel your pain. But really, we're very busy fending off the Governor's requests for Federal investigations and dealing with 60% increases in projected costs for the Sakonnet River Bridge right now. Can we get back to you on this?

When faced with challenges such as these, we have focused our efforts on education, enforcement and engineering.
Notice, if you will, that engineering comes last. We like to have other people take a whack at the problem before we resort to actually doing, you know, that engineering thing. On like road thingies.

We agree that crosswalks by themselves are not enough and are only part of the safety equation.
Safety = crosswalks + streets safe enough to walk across. It's that second part of the equation that we just can't seem to address with education and enforcement, dang it.

In fact, crosswalks often present a false sense of security.
Much like guidelines from the Federal Highway Administration that nominally tell states what constitutes a safe road.

Therefore, crosswalks need to be included in conjunction with other engineering safety measures such as additional signing, pedestrian traffic signals where justified, median refuge islands or roundabouts.
We know how to create boilerplate text macros.

We are currently working with the Town of Portsmouth to incorporate some of these safety changes to the Portsmouth Town Center Project.
We really wish you'd go away now.

For the short-term, [sic] we are presently consolidating three closely spaced crosswalks at the bottom of Quaker Hill into one single crosswalk.
Okay, you've prodded us into doing something. I know we just said that crosswalks aren't really all that safe, but what the hell, maybe if we have less of them, that would be better or something. Do you have the sense that we're just winging this? Sorry.

The Town will install a flasher and our Department will add additional sign to help better identify this remaining crosswalk location.
Your odds of making it across in broad daylight will be marginally better, but in the DWI scenario, well, frankly, all bets are off.

In addition, our Office on Highway Safety will work with the local schools on pedestrian safety education, helping to share the proper ways to cross a street.
Let's blame the victim. It's those kids. If they just stayed on their own side of the street we wouldn't have these problems.

As far as speeds are concerned, this is primarily an enforcement issue and one that will continue to be addressed by the law enforcement community.
We explicitly deny any design problems with a "25"(read:40)-MPH 4-lane road with no pedestrian refuge. You want to blame someone? Here's the number for the State Police.

Thanks again for sharing your concerns.
Thank you, come again.

Sincerely,
[signed]
Jerome F. Willams
Director