Almost halfway through 2023, the City of Warwick has a troubling trend on the roads.

As of June 11, Warwick had seen 1,302 crashes since the first of the year. That’s up significantly from the number at this time last June 11 when 1,150 crashes were recorded.

Major Andrew Sullivan believes that there isn’t any one issue to point to that was the root cause for the vehicular crashes, but a combination of different factors.

“General traffic behavior, speeding, carelessness, distracted driving- these are all everyday factors,” Sullivan said. “There’s not any particular factor that sticks out amongst the others, but those are all certainly contributing factors that we see every day.”

According to Sullivan, the crashes that Warwick has seen this year have been spread almost evenly throughout the city, with most occurring on the city’s most traveled roads. Sullivan did point out the intersection of Cowesett Road and Quaker Lane, the Apponaug rotaries and Airport Road near the former Hooters as roads and intersections that have seen a high number of crashes this year.

Overall, though, Sullivan said that the WPD has had to respond to accidents on most major city arteries.

“Basically all of our major intersections are accident-prone,” Sullivan said. “Every accident has its own set of circumstances.”

One potential factor to help improve traffic safety would be the acquisition and installation of cameras in school zones and certain intersections to record motorist who run red signals. 

The cameras were one of the biggest focuses of the Warwick City Council’s budget meetings, with Mayor Frank Picozzi projecting $1.3 million in revenue through next June from their installation, which he said would likely occur in December or January. The council, however, acted not to include the revenue projection, saying there were too many unknowns about the cameras for them to feel comfortable projecting revenue from it over the next fiscal year.

At the time, the WPD said the proposal would likely come before the council at some point this month. With one regular City Council meeting left- scheduled for Monday, June 17- the cameras are “tentatively planned” to be on the docket, according to Sullivan.

Sullivan cautioned, though, that it was “far too early” to assume that there will be action next Monday, noting that the item had already been pushed to this meeting after previously appearing on the docket for the City Council’s June 3 meeting.

The specific number of cameras that the WPD will be acquiring, Sullivan said, will be negotiated with Altumint, a Maryland-based company that provides the cameras.

Should the Council approve the lease of the cameras, the next steps for the WPD will be conducting a traffic study as to which intersections and school zones to install the cameras at.

Sullivan hopes that the installation of those cameras will help correct bad habits and make the city’s roads safer- reversing this year’s negative trend.

“Hopefully, it will improve and correct driver behavior and slow people down a little bit,” Sullivan said.