Political Snarl Over Police Pay Leaves Tisbury in Traffic Jams

By MAX HART

It is a few minutes before 11:30 on a recent morning in Vineyard Haven, and Five Corners is a dead zone.

Cars cruise past the post office on Beach Road heading toward Oak Bluffs. Trucks coming out of Lagoon Pond Road pull into an empty intersection, along with a lone bicyclist coming out of Beach street extension. A few tourists sit on benches outside the Black Dog Bakery reading newspapers.

It is a rare moment of quiet at this notorious intersection, known for its huge traffic jams and the motor vehicle dance familiar to Island motorists and required for navigation in any direction.

In a matter of minutes everything changes. The 11:30 a.m. Islander, bound from Woods Hole, pulls into port. Soon pandemonium reigns.

A line of cars waiting to enter the Steamship Authority parking lot and staging area begins to snake up Water street, backing up into the intersection. Cars pour off the ferry, lining up two wide as they wait to ease their way into Five Corners. Traffic entering the intersection from Beach Road to the east and State Road from the west is halted by the cars waiting to get into the parking lot. A sea of people and bikes flood the sidewalks.

A fuel truck waiting to proceed down Water street breaks the line and passes on the left. An ambulance coming the opposite way does the same thing moments later. For all involved, it is a frustrating and potentially dangerous situation.

A female police officer appears and directs traffic for approximately five minutes. Then she is gone.

And then the 11:45 a.m. freight boat pulls in, carrying more cars and people.

\"Sure, it\'s chaos,\" said Nick Ducharm, whose job at AAA Auto Rentals at the Five Corners intersection allows him a front row seat to the congestion. \"It\'s nuts. You got bikes that are sliding on the sand in the road, mopeds, people trying to walk across the street. And that\'s not even mentioning the cars.\"

With the sole year-round port for the SSA a stone\'s throw away, Five Corners has consistently been a hot spot for congestion, especially in the summer months.

There has been much debate over how to best police the troubled intersection. A long-running dispute between the SSA and the town of Tisbury over who should pay for traffic control at the Vineyard Haven terminal ended in a standoff this year. The town used to hire summer traffic officers, with reimbursement from the Steamship Authority for the cost.

But with the advent of the 50-cent embarkation fee last year, most port towns are using money collected through the fee to pay for police detail around their ferry terminals.

But not Tisbury, and the result this summer is little or no traffic control at the busiest intersection on the Vineyard.

\"It\'s a difficult situation down there, for sure,\" said Marc Hanover, the Vineyard Steamship Authority governor. \"The town is providing traffic officers to help pedestrians cross the street but not help car traffic, and I think that is unfortunate.\"

Tisbury selectman Tristan Israel sees things differently. \"We really have an infrastructure problem,\" he said. \"It is a case of too many automobiles going through an intersection, that\'s really the issue. We\'re going to have the same amount of cars whether we direct traffic or not.\"

The congestion at Five Corners has led to infamous traffic lines that stretch past the Lagoon Pond drawbridge to the Martha\'s Vineyard Hospital and beyond. Traffic statistics from 2004 provided by the Martha\'s Vineyard Commission for the Five Corners area reveal that on average, over 22,000 cars per day traveled along Beach Road near the intersection. Likewise, more than 17,500 vehicles were recorded along State Road in front of the fire station, and almost 5,500 traveled along Lagoon Pond Road near the post office.

Much of that traffic can be attributed to the ferry. Last year, more than 2.6 million passengers and 588,718 vehicles traveled on the SSA, and the majority of them came through Vineyard Haven. The New England Fast Ferry also docks in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs four times a day during the summer season.

\"You are talking about three per cent of all ferry traffic in the United States emptying onto the Vineyard each year,\" said Tisbury police chief Theodore (Ted) A. Saulnier. \"That\'s hundreds of thousands of cars and millions of people. With the volume we get, we\'re going to have a traffic problem no matter what.

\"We are keying in on preventing pedestrian accidents,\" the chief added. \"We do the best we can do with the resources we have, and we just don\'t have the resources we had two years ago.\"

Two years ago, the town had three traffic officers designated to direct ferry traffic in and out of the terminal. Back then, Chief Saulnier said the town employed 10 to 12 seasonal police officers.

Today Chief Saulnier said his budget only allows for six to eight traffic officers for the entire town. Occasionally one will direct traffic at Five Corners.

\"I am limited in what my staff can do. If you are a big corporation and have a large-scale operation, you usually pay for your own security officers,\" he said.

Mr. Hanover disagreed, noting that hundreds of thousands of dollars is now coming into the town from the embarkation fee.

\"That\'s what the embarkation fee is all about,\" he said. \"Oak Bluffs benefits from it as it should, and the police do a great job getting people off the boats and out of there. I realize Five Corners is a different animal. That said, if you want to see how it is done well, you need to watch how they do it in Oak Bluffs. They handle it masterfully.\"

Last year, Oak Bluffs chose to use a portion of its embarkation fee revenue to pay for the salaries of seasonal traffic officers. Tisbury decided to spend the majority of its embarkation money on a new ladder truck for the fire department.

\"I think Oak Bluffs uses the embarkation money in the way it was designed, which is to address the impact of the Steamship Authority on the community,\" Oak Bluffs police chief Erik Blake said. \"It helps us get the cars coming off the boat through town as quick as possible with as little disruption to traffic as possible.\"

Mr. Israel pointed out that the Steamship Authority is not the only contributor to congestion at Five Corners.

\"The post office is really as big a contributor to traffic as the Steamship Authority.\" he said. \"And you also have the Stop & Shop, so it\'s not just the boat.\"

He said the town has been looking at several possible solutions, including converting Water street to pedestrian traffic only and reversing the one-way direction on Union street.

Mr. Hanover said the boat line intends to address scheduling issues to eliminate the situation when two ferries arrive in Vineyard Haven within 15 minutes of each other. Currently this happens three times a day.

\"We\'re going to correct that,\" he said.

Back in front of the Black Dog it is just after 12:30 p.m. Traffic has lightened up a bit. But the 1 p.m. boat is on its way. And still, no traffic cops in sight.