Construction Draws Near For Whitney Redo

The city’s Engineering Department plans to wrap up final designs for the northern section of a long-delayed, traffic-calming reconfiguration of Whitney Avenue this month — with construction expected to start later this year.

When complete, the East Rock/Prospect Hill corridor redo will see a protected bike lane, a narrowed roadway, raised crosswalks and intersections, and other changes designed to slow car speeds and protect pedestrians and bicyclists between Trumbull Street and the Hamden border.

The avenue will also see all new traffic lights — a technology and infrastructure improvement that the city’s top engineer said has driven the latest stretch of delays.

The planned Whitney redo dates to at least 2019, when the city first found out about a tranche of state funds it would be receiving to support this traffic-calming project. City Engineer Giovanni Zinn hosted a public meeting in February 2021 to solicit ideas from Whitney residents and roadway users. He and his team revealed one iteration of the redesign plan in October 2021 — and an updated version in January 2022, with construction then estimated to start in 2022 or 2023.

As the years passed, and the city built out other major traffic-calming projects, including on Valley Street, the timeline for the Whitney Avenue redo kept getting pushed back and back as the project got more complicated and expensive.

On Monday, Zinn explained that the the city wound up putting together ​“three fully redesigned concepts” for this Whitney Avenue redo. 

“The big change” between when this project was first broached and now, he said, is the city’s decision to replace all nine outdated traffic signals on the corridor (excluding the one at Huntington Street). ​“Designing all new signals, that takes time.” 

He elaborated by email that the Whitney project ​“has been delayed because it has been expanded to include the redesign and reconstruction of all the traffic signals, which was not originally deemed necessary. This is a highly time and capital intensive effort which has significantly expanded the scope of the project.”

Zinn said that the city should have final, completed designs in place by this month, April, for the reconfigured section of Whitney Avenue running north from Canner Street ​“with the rest to follow thereafter. We expect to bid the northern section for construction as soon as CT DOT has finished reviewing the final plans.” 

The new traffic signals, he said, will allow for ​“better coordination” and traffic flow, as well as leading pedestrian intervals for walkers.

“As discussed, the project went through a number of design iterations in response to voluminous public feedback,” Zinn added when explaining the delays. ​“In addition, there was a significant amount of utility coordination to avoid the numerous underground utilities under Whitney Avenue.”

Zinn said that construction on this project should begin in 2025 — in line with what he told the Independent for this January 2024 article. He said construction should take roughly a year and a half to complete.

East Rock Alder Anna Festa, whose ward includes a portion of the northern section of Whitney, pointed out that residents have been pressing for the city to make it safer to cross the avenue — especially at the intersection near Edgerton Park — since at least 2016, as evidenced by this still-open SeeClickFix thread.

“It’s kind of unfortunate that we do have to wait this long” for the project to happen, she said. But, she continued, ​“the community wants to be involved. Meetings have to take place. Design has to take place. All of this takes a lot longer than we’d like. And once you start the design process, you have to make changes according to whatever challenges appear all of a sudden,” like the need to replace and coordinate all of the traffic signals.

As someone who grew up on Whitney, Festa said, she has seen traffic and speeding increase on the avenue. She said that one of her concerns with the coming start to this construction project is what will happen to the Whitney Avenue side roads, which drivers will turn to when the main corridor is partially inaccessible.

“This has been a long time coming,” she said about the Whitney Avenue redo as a whole. And now it’s almost here.

Darko Jelaca, an engineer who lives on Whitney Avenue, has been advocating for pedestrian safety improvements on the corridor for a decade. Click here and here to read about his pressing the city over the years to, for example, build out a pedestrian safety island at the intersection of Whitney and Cliff Street with a striped sidewalk and a rapid flashing beacon. He’s also called for the installation of radar feedback signs up and down the avenue. With his baseball speed gun, he has clocked cars traveling as fast as 58 miles per hour in the 25 miles-per-hour speed limit zone.

Jelaca was skeptical when informed by this reporter that, per Zinn’s update, construction should finally begin this year.

“What I do not understand still is why this could not have been done in phases? Why it has to be all at once? At least radar feedback signs could have been installed?”

The city could have put in that pedestrian safety island by Edgerton Park, or done something to slow car speeds by Worthington Hooker School. ​“I don’t understand how at least something could not have been done in 10 years. That part is mind-boggling to me.”

“Maybe there is a good explanation,” he added. ​“I am disappointed in the way this process was handled.”

In a follow-up comment provided to the Independent, Zinn thanked Jelaca for his advocacy, especially around that Whitney intersection near Edgerton Park. 

“I think there are a few challenges to an interim or pieced-together approach on Whitney Ave,” Zinn wrote. 

First: ​“We did not want to spend significant amounts of local funds on interim measures that then would need to be significantly altered or ripped out during a final construction. Many advocated for improvements along different areas of Whitney Avenue, and it would be hard not to stretch improvements at one location [such as near Edgerton Park] to include others [such as around Hooker School]. At that point, we are more into corridor treatments that require more design and funding, rather than a small spot project.”

Second, Zinn continued, this Whitney Avenue project presents ​“a generational opportunity to create a first class active transportation connection. Together, these considerations push the project towards a unified corridor approach as opposed to a series of unrelated interventions.”

Zinn concluded by noting the ​“extensive interventions in the side streets” that have already taken place, such as speed bumps throughout Prospect Hill. ​“Those interventions appear to have been successful in reducing speeds.”