Willow Glen Resident

News

Blewett Avenue residents join forces to seek traffic calming

By Mayra Flores De Marcotte

Blewett Avenue resident Bill Cardoza was in his front yard when a semi barreled down his narrow street. A white pickup coming the opposite direction swerved to avoid the truck, collided into a parked van, then shot diagonally and took out another parked car, changing its trajectory across a neighbor's front lawn and through a hedge and taking a chunk off a telephone pole.

"It was like watching a play-by-play of my worst nightmare," Cardoza said.

The accident Cardoza witnessed ended in the arrest of San Jose resident 22-year-old Daniel Kevin Faddis on charges of driving under the influence, hit and run and possession of a loaded firearm, said San Jose police spokesman Enrique Garcia.

Cardoza and his nine-months-pregnant wife Heather have been traffic-calming advocates for their neighborhood since they first moved there two years ago, battling an issue that has plagued the street for 20 years.

Cardoza, shaken by the Sept. 28 incident, almost threw his hands up and called it quits, but after talking to his wife and neighbors has changed his mind.

"We want to use this as a catalyst," he said. "We want to build awareness. We don't want it to be swept under the rug or have it drag out for too long."

According to Cardoza, two police officers came by the neighborhood to conduct unofficial traffic counts of the street after reading about the incident in the newspaper. Beat officer Bill Doyle along with a traffic enforcement officer counted the cars going in and out of the neighborhood street, Cardoza said.

"They told us we had a severe cut-through problem," he added.

The couple hosted an impromptu community meeting at their home on Oct. 4 to discuss the recent chain of events.

Cardoza and his neighbors hit a snag, however when they tried to use this incident and local police officers' opinions of their street as fuel to implement traffic calming measures.

"The incident was unfortunate, but the individual was intoxicated," said Department of Transportation spokeswoman Laura Wells. "We do look at crashes and use them to determine if things need to occur and are currently talking to the police department and Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio to come up with options for Blewett."

She also disagreed about the cut-through issues.

"We, in conjunction with the neighborhood, conducted a cut-through study a year ago in the summer," Wells said. "Yes, people use it as a cut-through to Lincoln, especially during events that close the avenue, but overall we only saw about 50 percent of traffic as cut-through--not enough to qualify for traffic calming."

Wells said work on a signal modification to the traffic lights at the corner of Willow Street and Lincoln Avenue may make it easier for vehicles to make a left-hand turn. The improvement to overall operation of that intersection may be an incentive to use Lincoln instead of Blewett.

"We fully anticipate that it will take more traffic off of Blewett," she said.

Neighbors are not satisfied with this and have come together to form the Blewett Avenue Neighborhood Association.

"We can't be divided on this," Cardoza said at the neighborhood meeting. "We need to stay on point to fast-track this."