Thomas MacMillan Photo
As activists celebrated the release of a manual for making city streets safer, its authors remembered the New Haveners who have been injured or killed by cars speeding through town.
A name on the minds and lips of several in City Hall was Gabrielle Lee, the 11-year-old who was mowed down in a hit-and-run on Whalley Avenue in 2008.
Two years after that tragedy, City Hall was the site of a celebration of the completion of the “City of New Haven Complete Streets Design Manual,” a document that lays out development guidelines for creating safe, bikeable, and walkable city streets. The manual is the result of an ordinance amendment put forward in the fall of 2008 by Fair Haven’s then-Alderwoman Erin Sturgis-Pascale (at center in photo) and current East Rock Alderman Roland Lemar (at right in photo).
Read the manual here.
Lemar and Sturgis-Pascale, along with other members of the committee that drafted the manual, were on hand on Thursday evening for a reception in the City Hall atrium celebrating the completion of the manual and its presentation to the Board of Aldermen. After the celebration, the Board of Aldermen’s City Services and Environmental Policy Committee voted to approve the manual and referred it to the full board, which is expected to vote on it in September.
Cit traffic czar Mike Piscitelli (at left in photo) said the new manual will be a reference for all new development in the city, both public and private. It will be used by the City Plan Department and the engineering department to evaluate and sign off on all city building projects.
Piscitelli called it a “toolbox” of design elements — from speed humps to roundabouts — to calm traffic and make streets safer.
The manual also includes a new process — on pages 75 and 76 — by which neighbors can request street improvement projects and a new system to track those projects, Piscitelli said.
Piscitelli began his comments to the City Services Committee with an apology that the manual was late in delivery. It was intended to be ready after a year or year and a half; it ended up taking two years. “It took time and thoughtful research to identify the best way forward,” Piscitelli said. The result is more than “a loose set of good ideas,” he said. It’s a “template we can work from.”
“This for me is a really big deal,” said Sturgis-Pascale. “This will outlive us.”
She shared the story of how she came to be a champion of safe streets and an elected official, through a “laundry list of things that have happened to me in New Haven.”
In the first week after Sturgis-Pascale moved into her house in Fair Haven, her cat was killed by a car. Then her father in law, who has multiple sclerosis, was nearly hit by “some jerk driver.” A friend was struck by a car while biking, lay in the road for 20 minutes before someone stopped to help, and now has metal plates in his face. Another friend broke a collarbone in a car accident. Another friend, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was in an accident in which her car was hit by two cars. (She and the baby were OK). A man died in a car accident across from her house. Sturgis-Pascale said she came home to find him impaled on his steering column. Finally, a friend of hers was killed in 2006 when a driver ran a red light.
“Something’s wrong here,” Sturgis-Pascale recalled thinking. She decided to do something about it, ran for the Board of Aldermen, and began working for safer streets. “This is the fruit of that labor,” she said on Thursday. “I am enormously proud of that document.”
Providing safe streets for its citizens is a “moral imperative” of the city, she said.
Aldermen Lemar (pictured) recalled when Gabrielle Lee was killed on Whalley Avenue. Michelle Sepulveda, the local alderwoman at the time, said she had known something would happen at the dangerous intersection Gabrielle was trying to cross, Lemar recalled.
There are dangerous intersections throughout the city where people would be shocked and saddened — but not surprised — if a fatal accident were to occur, Lemar said. He named some of those intersections in the wards of the aldermen at the table, like Court and Olive Streets in Aldermen Michael Smart’s Wooster Square. Everyone rolls through the stop signs in Aldermen Greg Dildine’s Westville, Lemar said. And cars still drag-race along Foxon Boulevard in Alderman Maureen O’Sullivan-Best’s Quinnipiac Meadows, he said.
Lemar highlighted the efforts of Elm City Cycling (ECC), whose members began lobbying for safer streets in 2002, he said.
ECC’s Tom Harned, who was on the committee that created the manual, said ECC formally endorsed the document on Thursday.
John C. Daniels School parent Sylvie Rivetta was also on the committee.
West Rock Aldermen Darnell Goldson expressed concern that street work is done in some neighborhoods with more regularity than in others. “How does this document guarantee that my streets in my ward become safer?” he asked.
City Engineer Dick Miller, a chair of the committee that drafted the manual, said that the upcoming reconstruction of West Rock housing projects — with its planned roundabouts and bike lanes — is one of the most vivid examples of the manual at work.
Sturgis-Pascale confidently predicted that work recommended by the manual will find federal funding. Even if not, the manual will help the city to spend its money better, she said.
Aldermen Dildine said that the only thing that may make the Complete Streets Manual incomplete, is the fact that New Haven has so many state roads over which the city does not have control.
Miller said that a paradigm shift is needed. Engineers have been taught for years to design streets so that vehicles can move from point A to point B as quickly as possible, he said. The new complete streets manual marks a clear break from that mindset.