This piece appeared in the Windsor Journal on April 23, 2026.
Over the past few decades, Windsor has actively placed public housing and elderly housing in the Center. We did this with an implicit promise that these residents would be able to reach life’s essentials on foot: the library, CVS, the Post Office, Town Hall, Geissler’s, the train station, bus stops, local shops, and local employers. The proximity of these places is the reason it made sense to site public and elderly housing here in the first place. Walkability was not a bonus feature: it was the whole point.
The snow storms this past winter emphasized this point; when we fail to keep sidewalks clear in February, and when we leave Broad Street configured as a four-lane highway bypass, we are not just creating inconvenience for dog walkers; we are ignoring an obligation to our most vulnerable neighbors.
Crossing Broad Street is not optional for these residents. It is how they reach their prescriptions, social services, employment, and each other. Broad Street today is not a neighborhood street. Seventy percent of the cars on it today are through traffic. Thirty percent of drivers exceed the speed limit. The corridor sees a crash about once a month.
The Broad Street Pedestrian Safety Project is simple. It narrows Broad Street from four travel lanes to two, adds a center turn lane, installs bike lanes, and shortens the crosswalks with curb extensions. Federal Highway Administration research shows reconfigurations like this reduce crashes and cut the risk of serious injury and death to all users of the roadway, but most especially pedestrians. This is especially important as elderly and disable people are disproportionately injured and killed as pedestrians in the U.S. The project is fully funded by federal and state grants pulled into town by elected officials at all level of government. This project uses zero property tax money.
It’s worth repeating: This project uses zero property tax money.
Our elderly and disabled neighbors are customers for Center businesses, patients at local clinics, and employees at local establishments that are hiring. A road they cannot safely cross is a customer lost, a worker a business cannot retain. The residents, the merchants, and the neighborhood associations closest to Broad Street are the ones who most consistently support this project. That is not an coincidence.
There is a broader principle here. When a town invites residents into a specific neighborhood on the promise that they will be able to live there without a car, it takes on an obligation. That obligation does not end at the ribbon cutting. It extends to the systems those residents rely on to live, even systems as banal as sidewalks and crosswalks.
Windsor Center is gradually returning to its roots as a walkable community for people to commune and do business, just like it was for three hundred years before CTDOT decided it would be the perfect place for a highway bypass. That design remains a dangerous obstacle to residents who, for reasons of age, disability, or income, may not be able to drive a car. We made them a promise. The Broad Street Road Diet is, at bottom, the town making good on a promise we’ve already made to these neighbors, at no cost to property tax payers.
Please support the Broad Street Traffic Calming and Pedestrian Safety Project at the Special Town Meeting on Tuesday, April 28 at 7 p.m., and in the likely referendum in May.