Published: June 12, 2008 10:01 pm            

VIDEO REPORT: Campbell Blvd. residents say speeding drivers causing dangers

CAMBRIA — Within a quarter-mile south of the intersection of Campbell Boulevard and Route 31 in Cambria, there is a cluster of about nine households, with almost 20 children between them.







Last Wednesday, a few minutes before the school bus was due to arrive, the quiet afternoon was disrupted when a woman driving a small Chevrolet suddenly went off the road, careening through a yard on the west side of the road.

The woman’s car knocked down two mailboxes and a utility box, clipped a telephone pole and kept going, eventually stopping when she hit a boat that was parked in front of the home of Jennifer and Gary Londo. The impact knocked the boat off its trailer, sending it flying 30 feet into the buses.

“If those people were out in their yard, getting their mail, or cutting the lawn or fixing the boat, they would have been dead,” Meal said. “She would have run them right over.”

As the Niagara County Sheriff’s Department and area fire crews arrived to clean up the accident scene, a school bus carrying several neighborhood children pulled up and stopped to drop them off — within three minutes of the accident.

“If it would have happened five minutes later, she would have hit the kids,” Meal said. “She was going so fast.”

The crash is just one of many that Meal and her neighbors have witnessed on their front lawns in the past decade.

The speed limit through the residential area is 55 mph, which Meal and other residents say translates into 60 or even 70 mph for the cars going past.

Meal, who has lived on Campbell Boulevard for 11 years, said the traffic gets bad during the peak hours — the morning and afternoon commutes. At times, the rumbling from trucks is so loud it shakes her home.

Several times every school year, the school bus will be passed by people who are going too fast to stop.

In the winter, the snow drifts over the road, carried by the wind through the fields on either side of the clump of houses. Every year, the residents witness several cars sliding off the roads and into ditches or telephone poles.

“We’ve had them in our trees in the front,” Meal said. “Across the street, there was an accident where the lady spun around and actually wrapped her car around the tree. It took the Jaws of Life to get her out of her car.”

Meal said she often sees commercial trucks go so fast through the neighborhood that they cannot stop for the red light at the intersection at Route 31.

“If I had a nickel for every time I hear someone lay on their horn and go through that intersection,” said resident Beth Pyskaty.

Even for the residents without kids, the problems are evident. Resident Tammy Reynolds said she has to put her blinker on almost a quarter-mile before she actually turns into her driveway, in order to avoid being rear-ended.

“And there’s still cars that will slam on their brakes, cars that have actually flung sideways,” she said. “We have to fly into our driveways. We can’t even proceed with caution into our own driveways.”

Reynolds and her next-door neighbor Gail Beutel connected their driveways, to make a U-shape that they can both use and to avoid having to back out onto the road.

In 2003, several of the residents petitioned state Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane, to have a traffic study conducted. The results concluded that most drivers were traveling 58.4 mph — slightly over the 55 mph speed limit, but not enough to warrant changing the speed limit, Meal said.

She called Maziarz again last week to request a new traffic study. The road was repaved since 2003, making it easier for cars to travel faster on the road, she said.

The goal is to get the speed limit changed to 45 or lower to match the rest of Campbell Boulevard, between Lockport Road and the Millersport Highway.

“There’s absolutely no reason why this has to be 55,” Meal said. “It’s almost like the people up in this area are not as important, so you can go faster through here.”

With the speed limit at 55, the residents say they keep their kids far away from the road.

“My son wants to ride his bike on the side of the road,” resident Kathy Walker said. “He thinks he’s big enough. I’m like, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

Walker said she grew up on Route 31, so she is used to a lot of traffic — it’s the speed that bothers her.

“They’re in such a hurry to get to where they’re going, they just don’t care,” she said.

Contact reporter April Amadon at 439-9222, ext. 6251.

        

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