Improving safety on Prospect Avenue

Twins Anthony and Angie Sissons, 9, played behind a 7,000-pound hunk of granite that their parents added to their property, at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Second Street, after a car drove into their home Memorial Day weekend.

David Weingrad/Herald

After a two-car collision at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Fifth Street on Sunday, two women were transported to a hospital.

David Weingrad/Herald

The Ispers, who live at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Fifth Avenue, added metal beams behind their picket fence, which was damaged in an accident on Oct. 25.

David Weingrad/Herald

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A number of car accidents on Prospect Avenue in recent years, including one on Sunday that sent two women to a hospital, has intensified discussion among residents who say that pedestrians are not adequately protected from reckless drivers on the busy road.

The conversation goes back years. One Prospect Avenue resident says he has been complaining to local officials about safety issues on the road for a decade.

The two-mile thoroughfare, which connects Hempstead Turnpike with Merrick Avenue and crosses East Meadow and Bellmore avenues, has six traffic lights and one stop sign. Its speed limit is 30 miles per hour, but residents say drivers rarely obey it.

“It’s a speedway, it really is,” said John Nikiel, a former Nassau County police officer who lives on Roosevelt Avenue, two blocks from Prospect. “People drive recklessly pretty much on every road, [and Prospect Avenue] just happens to be a fairly convenient north-south corridor between Hempstead Turnpike and East Meadow Avenue.”

Now the Town of Hempstead is taking action. According to Town Councilman Gary Hudes, a resolution to add a four-way stop sign to one of the road’s most dangerous intersections, at Second Street, will be put before the town board within a month. That location, Hudes said, was chosen after a town traffic study determined that it had the highest accident rate of any intersection on the road from 2012 to 2014. “This is an issue that is absolutely on the fast track,” said Hudes, who expressed confidence that the resolution would pass easily.

The study was conducted this month by the town’s Traffic Department at the behest of several residents. According to Hudes, there were 11 accidents at the corner of Prospect and Second in those three years.

Elizabeth Sissons, who has lived at the intersection since 2011, said she could recall at least 10 accidents there since last summer, including one on Memorial Day weekend this year in which a car drove onto her property and struck her house while her three young children were home. “People speed through,” she said. “A stop sign needs to happen ASAP.”