Sea Cliff crafting a plan for safer streets

The Village of Sea Cliff is working on a plan to improve safety, mobility and the quality of life for everyone who travels around the village.

Sea Cliff’s Safe Streets for All Comprehensive Safety Action Plan is being funded by a $120,000 grant from the federal Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program, part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed into law by President Joseph Biden in 2021.

Local municipalities can submit applications for grant funding for safe-streets initiatives. The funding is intended to support planning work, not construction.

Village Administrator Bruce Kennedy acknowledged that while vehicle crashes are not frequent in Sea Cliff, it’s still important to proactively address changing conditions. “We’re dealing with issues that we never dealt with before,” he said, “whether it be population or more vehicles on the street or more people working from home, the village has never considered a lot of these issues, because they weren’t issues.”

The village hired NV5, an engineering and consulting firm based in Florida with offices across the country, to help devise its plan. NV5 specializes in infrastructure resilience, asset management, and road safety analysis. This spring, the village and NV5 began collecting crash data in the village from 2019 to 2023, and analyzing roadway safety.

“We definitely have a couple of outlier locations that we’ve identified,” Bill Nicolle, the project’s senior transportation engineer, said, highlighting county-owned roads such as Glen Cove Avenue and Sea Cliff Avenue as a “high-injury network.” Nicolle added that several village-owned streets also stand out. “That list is still being refined, but we had a couple that floated to the surface right away,” he said.

Nicolle declined to identify specific streets before a planned public meeting at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church on Nov. 5, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. A preliminary plan was drafted last month, and this month and in November the village is looking to engage the public in the project planning.

“I urge all residents to attend the Safe Streets for All information session at St Luke’s,” Mayor Elena Villafane said at the village's Oct. 14 board meeting, arguing that it was crucial for the aim “of trying to improve the walkways and roads for safe passage for all residents.”

Before the November meeting, residents can share their comments on the virtual interactive map at PerkinsEastman.MySocialPinPoint.com.

“The village is such a quaint, small town, and there’s no way in the world we would ever tell them or tell ourselves that we know their roadways,” Stephen Normandin, managing director at NV5, said. “They live it and breathe it every day.”

After the public-engagement session, the goal is to have the first draft of the plan done by February 2026, and a finalized action plan completed by March.

“We’re trying to create a safer environment,” Kennedy said. “If that means slower, that’s great. When we're done, we're going to have a set of plans which will enable us to apply for additional grants and to actually do some infrastructure changes.”

Sea Cliff’s plan follows a framework known as the Safe System Approach, a model focused on eliminating fatalities and serious injuries among road users. This national strategy builds layers of protection into streetscapes, aiming not just to reduce crashes but also to lessen the severity of those that do occur.

The Safe System Approach is grounded in five principles: death and serious injury are unacceptable; humans make mistakes; humans are vulnerable; responsibility is shared; and safety is proactive. It treats street safety as a community-wide responsibility shared by drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, transportation planners, and policymakers.

By identifying gaps in the current system — from street design to policy updates — the hope is to build safer, more connected roadways that reflect how people live and move today. For that vision to become reality, village officials say, they need help from the people who know the roads best: the residents who drive, bike, and walk on them every day.

“We all know what we know, we all live in our own bubbles, we all have our own routes,” Kennedy said. “I’m looking to get information that I don’t already have.”

Additional information about the project is available at SeaCliffSafeStreets.com.