Watsonville introduces new Neighborhood Safety Plan
A new plan in one Central Coast city hopes to make neighborhoods safer. The city of Watsonville brought its updated neighborhood safety plan to the city council Tuesday and residents are happy with it.
Watsonville Public Works came up with the plan because of speeding and other traffic and safety concerns from residents. Now the city hopes to use that plan to address those concerns.
Speeding cars isn’t unusual in one Watsonville neighborhood.
“I see a lot of cars that come through pretty fast, they don’t really read the speed signs so it’ll be good to have somebody slow down,” said Watsonville resident Crystal Fernandez.
Slowing drivers down is exactly what Maria Esther Rodriguez with Watsonville Public Works hopes this neighborhood traffic plan will do.
“[We will} address their concerns as a group and come up with solutions that will work,” Rodriguez said.
Part of the neighborhood traffic plan are traffic calming techniques such as speed humps. They are a little different than speed bumps, drivers have to go over them at 10 miles per hour. It’s a calming technique the City of Watsonville says has already been effective.
“With this program we were able to actually get a grant too to install those speed humps and it’s really addressed some of those concerns on that straight stretch of road,” Rodriguez said.
For Watsonville residents like David Van Lennep, the safety plan is more than welcome. His family was the victim of a speeding drunk driver.
“My wife’s parents were here visiting over Mothers Day and as a Mothers day gift they got their car totaled, it was parked out on the street,” Van Lennep said.
He says he wishes traffic calming techniques weren’t need and that drivers would just be better aware of their surroundings.
“If they were conscious of that and paying attention,” Van Lennep said, “We wouldn’t really need things like safety measures in the neighborhood.”
With this new safety plan, Public Works say they still hope people like David Speak up about the issues they see.
“Who knows their neighborhood best than the people that live there?” Rodriguez said.
Funding for a lot of the traffic calming techniques will come from Measure D which Public Works say will also help them get grants for additional funding.
