The Bumpy Road To Calming Traffic

First fix the speeding by drivers on Anarchy Road. Then we can talk about bike lanes.

Fifty Westville neighbors sent that message to city officials Thursday night as they blasted an early draft of a city proposal to reconfigure the layout of Yale Avenue’s bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and parking spots. Many of the neighbors criticized the plan for paying insufficient attention to what they saw as the most important problem on the block: high-speed traffic.

The criticism — along with appreciative praise — emerged at a community meeting organized by Westville Alder Adam Marchand, Transportation, Traffic and Parking (TTP) Director Doug Hausladen, and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn. They called the meeting at Edgewood School to discuss a city proposal to reconfigure portions of Yale Avenue, a wide cut-through that winds for just under a mile along the west side of Edgewood Park from West Rock Avenue to Route 34. The dangerous speeding on the avenue has bedeviled the neighborhood for years. (Click here to read about the police department’s efforts to catch speeders.)

The city’s new proposal is an offshoot of a much larger new-urbanist plan that Zinn and Hausladen crafted with the neighborhood: two-way bike lanes (aka a ​“cycletrack”) on Edgewood Avenue from Forest Road all the way to Park Street downtown. The city’s about to start building that project.

Now Hausladen and Zinn have turned to a stretch of road intersecting that cycletrack, on Yale Avenue. As Thursday night’s meeting showed, traffic-calming matters a lot to people in New Haven. And finding solutions is rarely simple, as officials juggle the needs of parkers, businesses, pedestrians, and cyclists in an era when roads are now seen as serving more than just drivers seeking the quickest routes.

As Thursday’s meeting also reflected, city officials have made a priority of devising solutions — then taking flack from angry neighbors and working with them on tweaks to win consensus (as they did in this case to win consensus for the Edgewood cycletrack). 

Room For All?

Hausladen and Zinn said they are seeking address two major concerns with Yale Avenue that they have heard from Westville residents and alders alike: that cars travel way too quickly along the north-south road, and that parking spots are scarce, particularly outside of Edgewood School.

Their proposed solution involved setting up a protected two-way bike-and-pedestrian path on the park side of the road. They also proposed restriping the road to allow for 150 newly legalized parking spots.

Yale Avenue currently has bike lines on both the north and south sides of the road. It has a sidewalk on the same side as Edgewood School, but it lacks any pedestrian path on the side closer to the park. Hausladen said parking is currently illegal on the park side of the road, though plenty of cars park there anyway.

“We’re looking for a way to organize the road better,” Zinn said. He stressed that the Yale Avenue project is less about bike lanes than about creating a roadway that caters to a diversity of uses.

He and Hausladen presented mock ups that showed two adjacent four-and-a-half-foot-wide bike and pedestrian lanes abutting the park side of the road. That shared use path would be protected by delineators.

Next to the protected path would be newly striped, seven-foot-wide parking spaces, followed by two 10-and-a-half-foot-wide driving lanes, followed by another row of eight-foot-wide parking spaces abutting the sidewalk.

Hausladen and Zinn said the restriping work would be relatively inexpensive as far as road improvements go. They estimated the plan would cost somewhere in the low tens of thousands of dollars to implement.

They said the money would come out of their departments’ capital budgets. After they get sign off from the community and from the city’s Traffic Authority, the work would take only a few days to complete.

Many of the neighbors who showed up at Edgewood School on Thursday night found much to criticize about the proposal. Of the nearly 20 who spoke up, nearly everyone said the proposal did not go far enough in reining in traffic speeds on a road that some said resembled a parkway instead of a residential city street.

Harold Houston, a retiree who has lived on Yale Avenue for 30 years, said the block is bedeviled every summer by groups of dirt bikers and quads traveling as quickly as 40 or 50 miles per hour.

“The wild, wild West exists on Yale Avenue,” he said. ​“It’s complete anarchy.” He said no road improvements or traffic calming measures will make any difference on the block unless if New Haven police step up their enforcement of the existing 25 mile-per-hour speed limit.

A number of residents brought up their concerns with the intersection at Yale Avenue and Chapel Street. Paul Stabach said the intersection deserves a traffic light. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, who lives nearby said she, her husband, and her young son Cliff are inundated day and night with the sights and sounds of car crashes.

“I can’t emphasize enough how many car crashes we hear,” she said.

Steven Judd, who lives three doors away from Edgewood School on Yale Avenue, criticized the plan for not including heavy duty traffic calming measures like speed tables and bump outs.

“We all desperately want traffic calming,” he said. ​“This is really a bike plan. … Moving lines around on the road just won’t do it.”

He said he was also wary of the proposal because it did not address the problem he and his neighbors face in getting blocked into their driveways by school buses that park on Yale Avenue while waiting to pick up students at Edgewood School. He said he would only support a city proposal to change up the roadway if it addressed the problem of school bus parking as well as the problem of cars speeding up and down the block.

Amidst the hypercritical voices of the plan were a few neighbors who greeted the proposal with some enthusiasm, even while recognizing that Yale Avenue has a speeding problem.

Tim Holahan said he welcomes any kind of bike infrastructure improvements to the neighborhood, considering that he, his wife, and his child bike downtown every day for work and school. He said this proposal, while not perfect, may be the best the city can do right now with limited funds to improve on the status quo. He stressed that any apparent narrowing of the roadway, which this plan would accomplish through the striping of the protected bike-and-pedestrian path and parking spots, is a proven way to reduce car speeds.

“I think this is going to be brilliant,” said Ida Nelson, who lives at the corner of West Rock Avenue and Yale Avenue. She said she sees cars flying through the stop signs at her intersection nearly every day, and that she thought the proposal as presented would help reduce some of that speeding.

Hausladen, Zinn and Marchand promised to set up another community meeting before the end of June to discuss an updated version of the Yale Avenue reconfiguration proposal.

Hausladen and Zinn pointed out that traffic-calming measures fall into different pricing tiers: restriping and speed humps cost in the low tens of thousands of dollars; raised intersections and speed tables cost in the mid-to-high tens of thousands of dollars; and roundabouts and traffic lights cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They said the Chapel and Yale intersection will require its own intensive planning and community discussion process, but that they will incorporate neighbors’ calls for speed humps, clear parking regulations, and improved signage into their Yale Avenue proposal before the next community meeting.

“This is the right way to do government,” Zinn said at the end of the meeting. He said the technical expertise that he and Hausladen brought to the proposal was only as good as the specific and informed direction offered by people who actually live in the neighborhood in achieving some kind of higher quality of life and roadway use on Yale Avenue.

Edgewood Cycletrack Nears Construction

Hausladen and Zinn also said during the meeting that city is just about ready to go out to bid for the construction of the Edgewood Avenue two-way protected cycletrack.

The $1.2 million largely state-funded dedicated cycletrack will stretch along Edgewood Avenue from Forest Road to Park Street. After a contentious public deliberation process two years ago, the cycletrack ultimately received the thumbs up from the Traffic Authority.

Zinn said he is waiting on only a few more state approvals, including from the State Historic Preservation Office, before the city can officially put out a bid for a contractor to build the cycletrack. He did not want to put a specific date on just when the state would deliver the last of those approvals, but said that the project should be completed well before the end of the calendar year.