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Plan for 3-lane Whitney.
The city is looking to put Whitney Avenue on a “diet” — to slim down the roadway to make it safer for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Some neighbors at the latest community meeting embraced the waist-trimming regimen; others were not so sure.
That planned “road diet” was at the center of one of two main debates that took place at the Thursday night Zoom meeting for Whitney Avenue residents and roadway users to give feedback to the city’s drafted redesign plan for the corridor.
Thursday’s meeting was a follow up input session to the previous October meeting where the redesign plans were revealed to residents. (Click here to view those plans.)
City of New Haven
More than 120 participants joined the Thursday meeting to discuss the pros and cons of the proposed plans with City Engineer Giovanni Zinn and the project team.
The proposed plan consists of condensing the roadway’s current four travel lanes to three, which Zinn defined as a “road diet.” The diet would create a total of two travel lanes in opposite directions and a center turning lane along the entire portion of New Haven’s stretch of the corridor.
It also includes a two-way cycle track on the west side of the road heading north from Lawrence Street, and two separated bike lanes going south from Sachem Street. And it includes several rectangular rapid flashing beacons (RRFB) and raised crosswalks or raised intersections at each Whitney Avenue intersection.
Read this previous story about Zinn’s initial presentation on the plan proposal.
The project’s budget is $2.7 million and will be funded by the state Local Transportation Capital Improvement Program.
Thursday's Whitney Ave input meeting.
The engineering team will continue to collect community feedback as it goes back to the drawing board to finalize the design plan by this summer. The plan will then go through the final approval processes this coming October. And construction will tentatively begin in 2023.
Once the final approvals are made for the redesign plan, Zinn promised to also work with residents and East Rock’s alders to draft improvement plans for side streets that will likely be affected by an increase in traffic and potential safety concerns during and at the completion of the construction on Whitney.
Despite a significant decrease in traffic volumes on Whitney Avenue during the pandemic, Zinn said the engineering team created the redesign plans based on the averages of pre-pandemic traffic monitoring data collected by the Connecticut Department of Transportation.
This data qualified the roadway for the conversion of a road diet, Zinn said.
To Diet, Or Not To Diet
One of two main concerns raised by community members Thursday was about potential traffic-filled fallout from a slimmer, three-lane Whitney Avenue.
Zinn defined a road diet as the condensing of the roadway’s current travel lanes — which include two in each direction — down to three total lanes, with one dedicated lane in each direction and a center two-way turn lane.
A list of Federal Highway Administration benefits for a road diet were laid out by Zinn, such as a reduction of rear-end and left-end crashes due to dedicated turn lanes and shorter pedestrian crossing distances.
“Their [Federal Highway Administration] research has shown that road diet conversions of four lanes to three lanes provide a 19 to 47 percent reduction in the total crashes that a street sees,” Zinn reported.
Several speakers offered general praise for the plans and optimism that it will redesign Whitney Avenue into a “livable community” for all users.
Siobhan Quinlan raised concerns that the road diet could cause issues for city buses and shuttles which make frequent stops in travel lanes and could cause traffic to “pile up,” and for an increase in driver road rage.
“Coming down to just two lanes of traffic on Whitney Avenue is going to create so many other problems,” she said. “People are going to lose their minds, honestly.”
In response, Zinn said that the Federal Transit Administration is “recommending that buses stop in the travel lane, it’s faster for people to get on and off.”
He added that an additional benefit to the road diet is that it would help emergency vehicles get around traffic, by allowing cars to get out of the center turning lane and pull to the side or into the parking lane.
Susan Metrick at Thursday's meeting.
Susan Metrick also raised concerns about congestion on the roadway due to delivery vehicles having to navigate the road diet.
“One thing that we saw during the pandemic, a change in behavior, was a huge increase in home deliveries,” she said.
She suggested to decrease parking in areas and to replace it with “dedicated truck pull-over areas.”
Zinn agreed to look into the possibility of adding loading zones in some areas during design. And he noted the plan’s proposal to have a 24/7 parking lane on the west side for delivery drivers.
Amalia Landolfi.
Amalia Landolfi, who grew up on Whitney Avenue, recalled seeing and being in several accidents on the roadway. She added that at around 10 years old, she saw a friend hit and killed on Whitney after getting off a bus.
She raised concerns about the diet affecting delivery drivers and parent pick-ups during dismissal times at Hooker Elementary School.
“You’re going to have one lane so all these cars have to wait till the parents get into the driveway of Worthington Hooker,” she said. “I’m patient so I don’t mind but you’re going to have a lot of people who are not patient.”
In response, Zinn said the team will look more closely at traffic during the school’s dismissal times.
“You’ll see that the road actually kind of operates as a three-lane road already through most hours of the day,” Zinn added.
Where To Put Those Bike Lanes
The second main concern raised by residents was a push for the plan to scratch a two-way cycle track on the west side of the road going north from Lawrence Street. Several residents suggested the plan instead have separated bike lanes on the west and east sides of the roadway.
Zinn said that although the team would prefer separated bike lanes on each side of the roadway, that plan would be complicated by a large fiber duct bank running down the east side of Whitney Avenue, making it difficult to put a curb-level bike lane on top of it.
“We’re working very hard to figure that out,” Zinn said.
Resident Gabriela De La Tierra described the two-way cycle track as dangerous.
“As we’re training more and more of our children and the people that live in the city to go with the flow of traffic when you’re on your bike, I think it goes against that,” she said.
Hamden resident Tim Nottoli described parking on Whitney as “unnecessary” in many parts while bike lanes are needed for cyclists like himself.
“I’m not too concerned that eliminating parking is going to cause anyone a big problem,” he said.
Other local cyclists suggested the bike lanes be separated and put at street level rather than at curb height to avoid putting a curb on the east side duct. They suggested along with this idea that the bike lanes be protected with barriers that would still allow snow removal.
Additional resident ideas to improve the redesign plan included: decreasing parking, reconfiguring street light times, and increasing traffic enforcement to slow drivers down.
City Transportation, Traffic & Parking Director Sandeep Aysola said his department plans to look at traffic signal coordination, leading pedestrian intervals, and bicycle signals during the project.
Mayor Justin Elicker agreed that the city needs to do more traffic enforcement. He said enforcement has slowed due to “strained resources” as a result of the uptick in violence in the city during the pandemic’s peaks. He said the city has been working to secure grants to hire overtime officers to do traffic enforcement.
Elicker added that he is working with the mayor of Hamden to connect Hamden to New Haven with safe biking infrastructure to “facilitate less cars in this area.”