Full stop. Whitefish Bay will convert almost all of its yield signs to stop signs
Yield signs are soon to be an endangered species in the Village of Whitefish Bay. The Department of Public Works started replacing almost all of the village's 37 yield signs with stop signs this week.
The conversion will cost the city less than $5,000 and has already started in the south and southwest portions of the village with 19 change-outs, Public Works Director John Edlebeck said. Temporary flags will be attached to the new stop signs to draw attention to the change.
The remaining signs will be replaced in November and December.
“The priority for this decision is on safety,” Edlebeck said. “What we’re doing doesn’t have much to do with traffic flow and efficiency. It’s a safety matter.”
There have been 17 recorded crashes at yield signs in the past five years, Edlebeck said. The cause of each of these accidents was deemed failure to yield at a yield sign.
“It is evident through monitoring of yield sign compliance that a slow approach, 5 miles an hour, for example, is rarely taken by both motorists and bicyclists,” said Edlebeck.
“Yield signs can be confusing to drivers. We’re hoping that some of those crashes that we would have seen in the past will be minimized or reduced with the stop control,” he said.
Linda Buntin who lives at an intersection with recently converted stop signs ― Hollywood Avenue and Chateau Place ― said she’s glad the village decided to make the change.
“We would always hear loud screeching brakes around here. A lot of people barely slow down and would blow right through it.”
She said she’ll never forget when a car crash at the intersection made a car swerve onto her lawn. “My daughter could have been playing outside. It was a close call. There were lots of close calls at this intersection,” Buntin said.
A handful of crashes just in the last year at yield sign intersections brought this issue to light, Edlebeck said.
The Hollywood and Chateau intersection was one of two intersections the Public Works Committee initially considered for conversion — Woodruff and Courtland was the other. In August, the committee unanimously recommended that the Village Board take the conversion village-wide.
At its meeting on Sept. 18, the Village Board concurred with the committee's recommendation to convert yield signs to stop signs throughout Whitefish Bay.
“The changes are happening very quickly,” Chairperson of the Public Works Committee Tara Serebin said. “We've been spending a lot of time over the past number of months talking about pedestrian and bike safety. This was a low-cost, high-impact opportunity to make our community safer.”
In new construction, yield signs are typically used at entrances to roundabouts and merge lanes, Edlebeck said. But new yield signs are becoming less common.
After December, only two yield signs will remain in Whitefish Bay, both at merge lanes where other signage wouldn’t improve safety or traffic, Edlebeck said.
Contact Claudia Levens at clevens@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @levensc13.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: No more yield signs in Whitefish Bay. Village converting to stop signs
