Whalley Walked In The Dark (& Some Light)

Is Whalley Avenue too dark?

A walk down the west side commercial corridor revealed the answer to be … well, it depends whom you ask.

A dozen safe streets activists, Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills residents, top neighborhood cops, and city officials responsible for public lighting took that walk down Whalley Avenue as the sun set Tuesday with the goal of having government staffers see firsthand what local residents have described as dangerously dark streets.

“It was WASSD’s [the Whalley Avenue Special Services District’s] opinion that there are major issues with the lighting on Whalley Avenue,” city transit chief Doug Hausladen said on the dusk-hour walking tour. The city’s anti-blight and neighborhood development agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), set up the meeting with WASSD and several other neighbors to walk along Whalley and look at lights.

They invited Hausladen and city Traffic Project Engineer Bijan Notghi; their department is responsible for maintaining city-owned lights.

“We wanted to make sure that we’re seeing what the community sees,” Hausladen said, ​“so that we’re able to better process what the community is processing as well.”

The night light walk came at a time when New Haveners citywide have struggled with a rash of cars hitting and—in four instances so far this year, killing — pedestrians.

All four of the pedestrian fatalities so far in 2020, including the death of Kevin Anthony Cunningham on Jan. 22 near the intersection of Whalley and Norton, have occurred after the sun has set. The same is true for most of the nine pedestrians fatalities that took place on city streets last year.

Tuesday’s walk happened to take place at the same time that a 40-year-old Yale professor downtown was struck by a car downtown while walking in a crosswalk outside of a child care center.

The Whalley walk showed that city officials and resident advocates see the issue of illuminating Whalley Avenue quite differently.

From the city transportation department’s perspective, some city-owned lights need to be fixed. But most are working. And the private sector needs to step up in partnership with the community to install lights where the city currently cannot, because of limited public finances and limited public infrastructure.

From the residents’ perspective, the avenue is still too dark for pedestrians. Too many of the city-owned lights are not working. And city government needs to step up in whatever way it can to fill in the gaps.

The walk began at the Whalley Avenue police substation at 332 Whalley Ave. on the south side of the street, near the corner of Winthrop Avenue.

“The biggest challenge here is actually our setbacks,” Hausladen said from the front of the group. ​“The distance between the curb and the building lines creates a lot fewer opportunities” for private sector lighting to illuminate pedestrians, especially those looking to cross the street.

He pointed up to a good example of a light that is working. Well, half-working. And one that is not controlled by the city.

“This is UI’s ​‘Light the Night,’” he said, pointing up to the LED bulb. When private landlords want help with lighting, they can reach out to the regional electric company and pay for the installation of lights on UI-owned street poles.

WASSD President Allen McCollum said that his organization pays for UI ​“Light the Night” lights on three different sections of Whalley, including the half-on, half-off one directly over the group’s head.

“That light doesn’t help pedestrians,” Safe Streets New Haven activist Ryan O’Hara said. That’s because the light shines down directly atop the heads of passerby, casting shadows at pedestrians’ feet and not illuminating their faces or fronts. ​“It’s not actually helping the driver see me.”

“This is private-sector lighting,” Hausladen reminded him. McCollum said he would reach out to UI about fixing the broken light.

After crossing the street and heading towards Norton, the group came across a city-owned street lamp that also wasn’t working.

“You’ll find that throughout” the avenue, McCollum said about pedestrian street lamps being out.

Hausladen said structures like these were installed back in the 1990s as the fruit of a partnership between the Yale Urban Design Workshop and the Greater Dwight Development Corporation. They prepared a concept plan for Whalley that included bus shelters, telephone booths, trash cans, and a few pedestrian lights, he said.

“It looks easy to fix,” Notghi said about the broken light. ​“But you can’t find the wires.”

If the city does not have original build drawings of where the wires are that provide electricity to these lamps, the lamps are virtually impossible to fix without the city just digging up random areas of the sidewalk and street to try to find those connections.

That, Notghi said, is not something the department is eager to do.

Hausladen pointed to a particularly light-less stretch of sidewalk on the southern side of the street near the Norton intersection.

“Over there, there is no opportunity for more lighting from the City of New Haven’s perspective at the moment,” he said. ​“There are no utility poles. There are no opportunities for the public to install lighting.”

This has to be a project for the private sector, he said. The private sector needs to ​“step up and partner” to install new poles and lights, because the city simply cannot afford installing something from scratch.

Downtown top cop Lt. Sean Maher, who was also on the walk along with Dwight/Whalley top cop Lt. John Healy, is currently getting a certificate in crime prevention through environmental design. Hausladen said the police and LCI can also be good points of contact for neighbors interested in coming up with new, privately-funded solutions to dark stretches.

“From the maintenance department’s perspective,” Hausladen continued, ​“the lights are on. Or, almost all of the lights are on.”

WEB Community Management Team Chair Nadine Horton disagreed. She said the walk, which she does on a daily basis, showed her that there are still significant lighting problems on the Avenue.

“It gets way darker than this,” she said. ​“And there are no street level lights.” Or, at least, not enough of them.

Tuesday’s walk reinforced for her a bigger concern than lighting:: the length of time pedestrians have to cross the street at designated, signalized crosswalks.

“The biggest issue is the crosswalk time,” she said. ​“It’s just too short.”

Hausladen promised to bring information about the pedestrian signal plan to a safe streets meeting that will take place Thursday at the Whalley substation. He said the city uses a relatively conservative metric of allowing for three feet per second of signalized crosswalk time. If you add more to that, he said, you end up with angry and impatient drivers waiting for too long at intersections.

“It seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other to me,” McCollum said. Many elderly and mobility-impaired people on Whalley simply don’t have enough time to safely cross the street. Something, he said, needs to change.