Tiring of Those Who Short Cut, Neighborhood Considers Gate

By MANDY LOCKE

In about eight minutes, a driver taking a shortcut from the West Tisbury Road to the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road can get from the entrance at Metcalf Drive to the exit at Dodgers Hole. It takes only six minutes if he ignores the 15 mile per hour speed limits painted on the asphalt between speed bumps on the narrow residential streets of the cut-through.

If the driver instead follows the main roads - going east on the West Tisbury Road and then back west on Edgartown-Vineyard Haven, even on a quiet December morning - the trip takes 11 minutes. In summer, when bumper-to-bumper traffic plagues the Triangle area, it is easy to understand why hundreds of drivers opt for the Dodgers Hole passage to get from one side of Edgartown to the other.

"Why would you want to mess with the Triangle? Taxis cut through here. Workers cut through here. It's a constant flow," said Ken Ivory, a resident of Dodgers Hole for 17 years and a member of the association board. It does not help, Mr. Ivory said, that local writer Philip Craig even recommended the shortcut in one of his mystery novels.

But after a decade of seeing their private streets used as a thoroughfare for trespassers, Dodgers Hole residents are saying enough is enough. A gate could soon convey the message to shortcut users.

"We're not trying to be uppity up, we are just trying to make it safe for the kids," Mr. Ivory said this week after neighbors from a cluster of four subdivisions in the Dodgers Hole area met to discuss the possible installation of an electric gate. In these subdivisions, some 300 houses lie within a 150-acre corridor between the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven and the West Tisbury roads. The proposal: Install a single electronic gate on the road that cuts through the subdivisions. Residents would have the code; outsiders would be turned back.

The speed bumps have not managed to slow down drivers. Neither have the bright yellow "children at play" signs. Other signs announcing "no through traffic, private road" have failed as well, as have the posted speed limits.

"We've had many discussions about not putting up too much signage. But it's a tradeoff. We'd much rather not have all that stuff up there. But people speed by at 50 miles per hour," said Kate Lingren, president of the Edgartown Forest Estates Association, the legal name for the Dodgers Hole homeowners group.

Speeders have not taken kindly to the impediments.

They are known to race into each of the nine bumps punctuating the 0.7-mile stretch of Dodgers Hole Road. Through the years, Ms. Lingren said, Dodgers Hole speed bumps have been burned; a few have even been dug up. When the association installed boulders a few years ago to prevent drivers from swerving around the speed bumps onto residents' lawns, the boulders disappeared in the dark of night.

These battles are the fallout of the kind of development that hit Edgartown in the 1970s and 1980s. Residents say they are still puzzled by how four dead-end subdivisions - which called for all of these homes to share a mile-long private access road - ever earned approval from the town planning board.

"It's the curse of the 1980s. Every place that a house could go up, it did. And it all happened so fast," said Kevin Ryan, a resident of the Saddle Club development, one of the subdivisions linked to Dodgers Hole.

Residents, who say they have been paying the price of such careless planning for many years, said they had no choice but to introduce warning signs, speed bumps and painted asphalt.

"All of this gives you the sense that you should turn back. It's not very welcoming," said Mr. Ryan.

And, perhaps, foreign to the Vineyard.

"This kind of development was fortunate for us because we were able to afford a little part of the Vineyard. But it altered Island dynamics, I imagine. It brought a more diverse group of people, and some of them are trying to make it more of a suburb," said Sue Reynolds, a seasonal resident of Dodgers Hole. Ms. Reynolds, who said her family came to the Vineyard to get away from the mainland's stop signs and traffic lights, is uneasy about the proposed electronic gate, just as she was about a street light the association installed years ago on her street. The light eliminated star-gazing, she said.

"Everyone comes for different things; we came for the solitude," she said.

The Dodgers Hole development was approved in the late 1970s. The plan called for 174 half-acre house lots to fill a mile-long road and circular loops. Next came the Betty Wells Scott development, initially planned as 43 half-acre parcels just south of Dodgers Hole along the Tar Kiln ancient way. Ms. Scott linked the two developments by purchasing a residential lot at the rear of the Dodgers Hole subdivision and putting a connecting road across it.

"I bought a lot in Dodgers Hole because it was a closed development. I thought it would be safe. The next thing you know, there's a dirt road going through the back, then a car road," Mr. Ivory recalled.

Not only did the Dodgers Hole cut-through suffice as access for Ms. Scott's subdivision, but soon there were two more subdivisions relying on that route. Ms. Scott sold her Dodgers Hole road easement to the developers of Saddle Club and Shurtleff Woods subdivisions, and the Edgartown planning board extended legal access to those developments.

"The town made a big mistake," said Mr. Ryan.

For some years, residents in the new subdivisions cut through two adjacent Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road neighborhoods, Westminster and Sandy Valley; but those residents grew weary of the extra traffic and finally blocked their streets.

A fire in the Saddle Club neighborhood eventually brought things to a head. Emergency personnel struggled to reach a house fire deep within the subdivision. In the aftermath, town officials created Metcalf Drive, a public road connecting the back of Saddle Club to West Tisbury Road.

But the Dodgers Hole association then installed a locked gate to block the road between them and the neighborhoods in the rear. Saddle Club residents protested the move in court, and a judge ordered the gate taken down. Years of land court hearings and at least one round of appeals followed, battles that burdened homeowners with more than $200,000 in legal bills. In the end, the court ruled that residents of Saddle Club, Shurtleff Woods and Island Oaks had legal rights to use Dodgers Hole Road as an access.

Some lingering wounds from these access battles are still evident, but residents at the Monday night meeting tried to steer the conversation away from the subdivisions' contentious history. The history of these access wars was completely lost on many of the residents, newcomers who have bought homes in the neighborhood within the last two years.

But to the old-timers who remember, Dodgers Hole association leaders called for a new era of collaboration among the subdivisions as they work to address their shared traffic concerns. About three-quarters of the 50 or so people at the meeting Monday supported the new gate concept. Residents in each of the four subdivisions formed a committee to explore the idea further. If nothing else, the land court ruling binds the neighborhoods to work together on any changes to Dodgers Hole Road. It is unclear whether the groups face any legal obstacles if they install a gate.

"We really want to feel more connected to our neighbors in the back now that all those [lawsuits] are behind us," said Ms. Lingren.