Leonia road closures: 60 residential streets closed to commuters Monday morning

LEONIA — The borough began closing off about 60 residential side streets to rush-hour traffic toward the George Washington Bridge on Monday, launching a widely publicized public safety initiative to combat a decade of increasing gridlock.

Borough police will give verbal warnings for the next two weeks to nonresident drivers attempting to cut through the small town on their way to the world’s busiest bridge and begin issuing $200 tickets to violators thereafter.

“It’s a very unique situation,” Police Chief Tom Rowe said. “You will not find a town in New Jersey that has three exits from the turnpike and other major highways feeding traffic to the town, so for us, not having the personnel, we had to come up with a very low-tech solution to a high-tech problem.”

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The problem began a decade ago with the rising popularity of navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze and TomTom, which offer commuters alternative routes and shortcuts through the borough whenever traffic backs up on the bridge, Rowe said.

On the worst days, more than 15,000 vehicles flood Fort Lee Road and surrounding streets in a borough of only 9,200 residents and 18 police officers.

“The traffic gets so bad that some people can’t get out of their driveways,” Councilman Bill Ziegler said. “As a fire commissioner, that’s a problem, because we have a volunteer Fire Department. If they can’t get out of their driveways to get to the firehouse, we can’t get the engines out. It’s a public safety issue.”

Rowe said his overwhelmed Police Department has been unable to respond to emergency calls on multiple occasions because officers are busy handling motor vehicle accidents, broken down cars and road rage incidents.

In 2014, during a 90-minute delay on the George Washington Bridge, the borough was horrified when a Fort Lee woman crossing a gridlocked Broad Avenue was struck by a school minibus and dragged 71 feet to her death. Seven more pedestrians were involved in motor vehicle collisions in the next two years.

Police and local officials blamed the frequency of the accidents on the high volume of traffic overflowing from the bridge.

They have since scrambled for solutions, installing an all-red-phase traffic signal in 2016 at the intersection of Broad Avenue and Fort Lee Road to halt vehicle movement in all directions for 26 seconds every few minutes and temporarily closing off residential streets when traffic on the bridge ground to a halt.

On Monday morning, an hour after the streets were blocked off on a permanent basis, the map of Leonia on Apple Maps was peppered with red dots signifying closures. The borough’s main thoroughfares, Fort Lee Road, Broad Avenue and Grand Avenue, are not affected by the new traffic rules.

“So far, so good,” Rowe said, standing at Fort Lee Road and Station Parkway at 7 a.m. “The major roads in town are open, but we’re asking people to stay on the highways. Going up side streets that are 18 feet wide with kids going to school is a recipe for disaster."

Cars attempting to use Station Parkway without a yellow resident tag were told to turn around and get back on Fort Lee Road.

News of the road closures, first reported in The Record and NorthJersey.com, was picked up by national and international media but still came as an unwelcome surprise to drivers on Monday.

“I didn’t know, and I’m not very happy,” said Asim Usman, a Teaneck resident who commutes to Fort Lee for work. “This is a huge inconvenience. Now I’m going to get stuck with two, three more traffic lights and it’s going to back me up an extra 10 minutes.”

Frank DiPaolo of North Bergen shared his frustration. He often drives through Leonia to visit Overpeck County Park or his doctor in Ridgefield Park and cuts through Station Parkway.

“It’s a pain in the neck,” he said.

That pain is something Leonia residents have been experiencing for years, said Dominick Virgillito, a 27-year resident who lives on Crescent Avenue, one of the closed streets.

“As soon as they see signs on the highway saying there’s a 45-minute wait for the bridge, boom! Right here they get off and they cut through town,” he said. “Everyone looks for the quick way, but you’re inconveniencing a lot of people, especially in the morning. You’ve got buses taking kids to school, you’ve got people trying to get out of town to work. It’s not fun.”

Virgillito said he was pleased to see the borough finally taking action.

“It should have happened two years ago; it should have happened five years ago. It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “They finally did it right.”

The closures will be in effect every day, nine hours per day, from 6 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 9 p.m.

Email: shkolnikova@northjersey.com