"We won't let the kids play out in the front yard:" Neighbors in Pleasant Prairie say detour is ruining their summer

PLEASANT PRAIRIE (WITI) -- Those who live in a Pleasant Prairie subdivision say a detour has brought danger to their neighborhood. The neighbors worry speeders, and even semis, are going to ruin their summer.

The plan is to ease congestion at the intersection of County Highway C and County Highway H in Kenosha County.

In the meantime, traffic has been detoured away from the area, but many drivers are ignoring the signs -- knowing it will be quicker to cut across 94th Avenue, and through Pleasant Prairie's Ashberry Creek subdivision.

"As of Monday, we started to see that it was such an endless amount of speeders going through that we wouldn`t even let the kids play out in the front yard," Ted Krueger said.

Krueger says a surveillance camera at his house has captured some of the unfamiliar sights: Semis motoring through, one car speeding around another, and even Krueger's experiment of tossing a soccer ball into the street to see if a speeding van would stop.

It didn't.

"It`s a community, it`s not an outlying track, or road they`ve been told to use as a detour," Jeffrey Spaeth said.

Spaeth says he placed a "children at play" sign in the street, but that didn't work either.

"Somebody came by and clipped it, basically," Spaeth said.

Neighbors wanted to close 94th Avenue off to through traffic, but the Kenosha County Highway Commissioner says he can't order people off a public road. He also can't force people to use the detour route, but the commissioner says he's open to placing additional detour signs near the subdivision.

"People are gonna use the shortcut. We understand that, but if they would just go the speed limit, or under the speed limit like a normal subdivision would be, it would really help us make our kids safer," the commissioner said.