WEST HARTFORD – The town is in the third year of implementing its Vision Zero action plan – a 154-page document meant to steer how officials would make roads safer in the wake of several pedestrian deaths.
That work, town officials said, has caught on.
"We're literally getting requests from every neighborhood in town… asking what can be done to make our streets safer," Town Manager Rick Ledwith said at Wednesday's Town Council Community Planning and Economic Development committee meeting. "It's just an extraordinary amount of work."
West Hartford's streets have begun to look markedly different over the last three years – from the ever-evolving mini roundabout at King Phillip Drive and Old Meadow Road, which caused some stir when motorists failed to navigate it correctly, to quick-build installations of plastic bollards becoming permanent fixtures.
Ledwith said those changes have been welcomed by residents.
"You can really feel that our town has embraced this initiative," Ledwith said. "That's incredibly important. The work is changing the way we think about and how we approach safety on our streets. We're not going to stop until we've made our town safer for everyone who uses our streets."
Vision Zero is meant to achieve a goal of eliminating car crashes that cause serious injuries and fatalities within 10 years of the time the program is implemented. West Hartford hasn't seen any fatalities on its roadways in 2026, but serious car crashes rose in 2025 and included the deaths of two pedestrians.
West Hartford's town engineer, Greg Sommer, said the town has completed around 100 Vision Zero projects this year, ranging in size from smaller items like new signage to larger projects like road diets, which means reducing travel lanes on busy roadways.
These have been happening as the town waits for the start of its speed and red light enforcement cameras.
Those projects, Sommer said, include the neighborhood by neighborhood adjustment of speed limits, which started in the Charter Oak International Academy part of town where officials uniformly adjusted speed limits on 13 streets to 25 miles per hour. The town is currently working with the state to do the same in the Smith School neighborhood.
"In a lot of the grid neighborhoods in town… the speed limit on one street might be 25, the next street over might be 30, the next street might not even have a posted speed limit," Sommer said. "We're looking to standardize that. We've been strategic in working through some of the focus areas."
The town has also added bicycle amenities on Farmington Avenue, connecting the town's Trout Brook Trail into West Hartford Center. The town adjusted the vehicle travel lanes on that stretch of roadway to accommodate a two-way cycle track.
Sommer said town officials hope the bike lane will be completed by Sunday's Center Streets event held by Bike West Hartford that closes West Hartford Center streets for a few hours.
The Farmington Avenue two-way cycle track also includes a raised bus stop platform. (Michael Walsh / Hearst Connecticut Media)
West Hartford has also added more permanent features to its mini roundabout, removing temporary bollards for a "raised decorative mountable island" that will deter motorists from improperly driving over the middle of the installation. Other projects that were installed with temporary plastic materials, like bump outs on Quaker Lane, are also being made permanent. Sommer said the town will continue to make successful trial projects permanent.
