To the Brookline Board of Transportation: Please make the Eliot Street "Kid Zone" safer for our children

Speeding and traffic congestion imperil the safety of children on Eliot Street, particularly in the area where they are most concentrated, the “Kid Zone” between Dean Road and Eliot Crescent. This area attracts a heavy number of daily visitors because it is home to Hayes Elementary School, the Brookline Recreation Center, and Eliot Playground / Warren Field. On any given weekday, the Kid Zone hosts hundreds of children, youth, and adults who come to attend school, play sports, walk their dogs, and frolic in the playgrounds. 

A 2024 DPW study found that almost half of all vehicles traveling along Eliot Street in the Kid Zone exceed the posted speed limit. Street parking in the Kid Zone especially during school drop-off and pick-up times and during sporting events results in bottlenecking and a disproportionate amount of accidents – according to police statistics, over 75 percent of reported crashes along the whole length of Eliot Street occur in the two-block Kid Zone. There is no place for children and other pedestrians to cross the street safely to go to Eliot playground. We anticipate that planned construction on Chestnut Hill Avenue will exacerbate the problem by redirecting traffic between Route 9 / Boylston Street and Beacon Street to Eliot Street.  (A full report and supporting materials are online at https://tinyurl.com/EliotStreetKidZone.)

To ensure that children have safe routes to park and school, and to protect pedestrians and bikers in the neighborhood, we the undersigned members of the community respectfully request that the Brookline Department of Public Works undertake the following measures to calm traffic in the Kid Zone and neighboring streets:

1. Install speed bumps at regular intervals on Eliot Street to calm traffic, especially in areas where children are concentrated.
2. Install a mid-block crosswalk across Eliot Street to Eliot Playground with appropriate daylighting to ensure children have a safe route to the park.
3. Restrict parking on Eliot Street between Dean Road and Doran Road to one side of the street only to reduce the congestion that makes it unsafe for children to cross.

In addition, and particularly in view of the prospective traffic impact of construction on Chestnut Hill Avenue, we encourage the Board of Transportation to evaluate signage and crosswalks on the streets surrounding the Kid Zone at its earliest possible convenience. These streets include Eliot Crescent (where residents request a speed bump and improved one-way signage), Ackers Avenue, Reservoir Road, and Dean Road (where residents have requested a crosswalk at Penniman Road).