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.