In recent years, the Township of Livingston and its Council have made a concerted effort to improve the walkability of the community in order to improve both the municipality’s “downtowns” and overall safety. There is much work left to do, but officials have continued to push for “complete streets” planning in town.
“Complete streets” is an approach to planning, designing, building, operating, and maintaining roadways, which enables safe access for all people who need to use them, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities. More than anything, it is designed to improve the walkability of communities. This involves, for example, ensuring there are sidewalks and other walkways throughout town, so a person could theoretically get anywhere in the municipality without having to hop in a vehicle. From adding bike lanes on side streets to ensuring scheduled developments connect to existing sidewalks, “complete streets” is embedded into Livingston’s planning.
In the spirit of this practice, we suggest increasing the number of crosswalks on our busiest roadways in town. Of course, there are currently crosswalks along Livingston’s major intersections, anywhere that has a traffic light. But there are long stretches of busy roads in town between some of these lights, forcing some pedestrians to have to choose between making a dangerous trek across the street, or a lengthy walk in search of a proper place to cross. On a beautiful day, this is a tough ask of people, to say nothing of a day where it is freezing cold, swelteringly hot, or there is snow, ice, or pouring rain. In those instances, people tend to take the quickest route to their destination, and with the closest crosswalk so far away, it’s hard to blame them.
To give one such example (that happens to be located right outside the Tribune office), there is no proper way to cross South Livingston Avenue between Northfield Road and Town Hall. That is nearly a mile of roadway without a safe place to cross the street!
It is a real problem directly outside of our own window, where there is a heavily-utilized bus stop. All throughout the day, people take the bus to work at ShopRite and are dropped off on the other side of the street from their workplace. They then make the dangerous walk directly across bustling South Livingston Avenue, because the alternative is a half mile round-trip trek to Northfield Road and back to the bus stop on the other side of the road. We certainly do not blame these employees, who just traveled via bus to their work, for not wanting to tack on an extra ten minutes of walking to their commute. But that does not make it any less dangerous; some in our office have referred to crossing South Livingston Avenue by our building to a real-life version of the game “Frogger.”
Something needs to be done to help these pedestrians. Anyone who has driven around Livingston (or northern New Jersey in general, to be fair), knows that it is only a matter of time before a terrible accident occurs. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear the familiar screeching of tires and honking of horns as a potential crash is barely averted. Over the years we’ve witnessed countless motor vehicle accidents on “our” little stretch of South Livingston Avenue; a few years back, a young man was hit by a car, fortunately suffering only minor injuries. We do not want to see any more of these situations occur.
Adding more crosswalks along Livingston’s busy roads to help alleviate this problem is a no-brainer. It supports Livingston’s “complete streets” efforts, and fills an immediate need in the community. And the cost of doing so would, seemingly, only be a few hours of work and a couple of cans of paint.
South Livingston Avenue appears to be the street in most dire need of this, but others that come to mind include Northfield Road and Mt. Pleasant Avenue (the latter of which is not a municipal road). We know that many projects take time to complete; look no further than the town’s planned new Department of Public Works building and community pool as examples of this. But adding crosswalks could conceivably be done this week if those with the power to make it happen chose to do so. So, let’s start off 2025 with an easy win, and add more crosswalks in town.
