Longmeadow installed flashing lights at a Maple Road crosswalk on October 21 after 7-year-old Camille Marquart wrote to town officials about drivers failing to slow down. The town did not add the speed bump Camille also requested. The crossing is near her home, Greenwood Park and the Longmeadow Adult Center.
A Second-Grader Takes On Maple Road Traffic
Camille is a second-grader at Wolf Swamp Elementary School, according to MassLive. She raised concerns about the crosswalk near her home, where she walked her dog with her mother and brother, and said other children used it too. Her letter asked town officials for flashing lights and a speed bump.
The response surprised her. Longmeadow Police Chief Robert Stocks personally wrote back, promising that officers would keep a close eye on the crosswalk area. Stocks also said he planned to bring Camille's suggestion to the town's Traffic and Road Advisory Group, the panel that reviews requests like light and stop-sign complaints or specific speeding concerns, per the Town of Longmeadow. Camille was so pleased by the personal reply from the chief that she told her first-grade teacher about it.
How Longmeadow Reviews Traffic Requests
The town says its Traffic and Roads Advisory Group meets at least quarterly and reviews submitted applications at its next scheduled meeting, according to the Town of Longmeadow.
Lights Installed, Speed Bump Shelved
Town officials moved on the flashing lights fairly quickly, installing them on the crosswalk sign on October 21. They decided not to install a speed bump, though the reasoning behind that call wasn't detailed. Camille later went back to tell her former first-grade teacher that her letter had actually led to change on the street outside her front door.
Select Board members Vineeth Hemavathi and Shelly M. Maynard-DeWolf thanked Camille for advocating for pedestrian safety. In social-media posts, they referred to the crossing as Camille’s Crossing. Her mother, Jacqui Marquart, said she was proud that Camille had worked to improve her community.
Enforcement Efforts Already Underway Nearby
The letter campaign isn't the only crosswalk safety push happening in Longmeadow. The Longmeadow Police Department has also run a crosswalk enforcement operation using a plainclothes officer as a decoy, according to WWLP, which resulted in several drivers being stopped for failing to yield to pedestrians. A similar sting in neighboring Chicopee last January caught close to 40 drivers violating pedestrian-safety rules at Broadway and Lincoln streets, with 19 of them cited for nearly $4,000 in total fines, MassLive reported in earlier coverage. That same report noted Longmeadow had received more than $16,500 from a federal traffic safety program, though it remained unclear whether that grant funded the town's own sting operation.
Why Small Fixes Like This Matter
The research behind traffic-calming tools backs up what Camille was asking for. A Federal Highway Administration literature review describes studies in which flashing beacons increased driver yielding to pedestrians, according to pedbikeinfo.org. A separate evaluation out of San Francisco found an automated flashing beacon reduced vehicle-pedestrian conflicts and increased driver yielding from 81 percent to 94 percent. Speed humps have shown even sharper results elsewhere — a review of five Bellevue, Washington neighborhoods found 85th-percentile vehicle speeds drop from the mid-30s down to the mid-20s after installation.
The stakes behind these kinds of fixes are serious statewide. At least 76 pedestrians were killed and 268 seriously injured in Massachusetts traffic crashes in 2025, and the annual death toll has barely budged over the past 25 years, according to an opinion piece in The Boston Globe. A University of Massachusetts Amherst Transportation Center director cited in that piece said a pedestrian hit by a vehicle going 40 miles per hour faces roughly an 80 percent chance of serious injury or death, compared to an 80 percent chance of escaping relatively unscathed at 20 miles per hour. Somerville, which has leaned heavily on raised crosswalks, speed humps and curb extensions, has gone four years without a reported pedestrian fatality, the same piece noted.
A Lesson in Speaking Up
Camille said she learned that children can speak up about problems in their community and that she would do so again. Her effort brought attention to a crosswalk used by neighborhood children and helped prompt the installation of flashing lights.
