What If Church St. Looked Like This?

“Road diets,” roundabouts plugged at regional transit summit held in New Haven.

At a panel discussion on safe road design Monday, traffic planning experts discussed a few of the measures that cities in Connecticut are adopting, or might consider adopting, to make roads safer. On the menu: roundabouts, and trimming the fat from car lanes in what planners call a road diet.

Experts presented those two options for streets at the second Annual Multi-Modal Transit Summit at the Yale Forestry School’s Kroon Hall Monday afternoon in a session on how to make streets safer.

“There’s some 35 to 40,000 traffic fatalities in total in the United States per year. It’s really a big issue,” said Neil Olinski of Milone and MacBroom. ​“We want to rein in speeds as much as we can through design.”

Speed significantly increases the risk of serious injury or death, he said. According to his presentation, when a car is driving 20 miles per hour, the risk of death or serious injury from a collision with a pedestrian is 18 percent. At 30 mph, the risk increases to 50 percent, and at 40 mph to 77 percent.

Speed is dangerous not only because of the increased force of impact. It also increases the likelihood of a crash because it takes longer to stop, and because drivers do not notice as much of their periphery at high speeds.

There are a number of ways to slow cars. Roadside elements and roundabouts are one way. Decreasing lane width and the number of lanes, called a ​“road diet” is another.

Narrower lanes, explained Olinski, prompt cars to drive slower. And when there are fewer lanes, it frees up space for bikes. It also reduces the risk of a multi-threat crash, when a car in one lane stops for a pedestrian, but a car in the adjacent lane does not see the pedestrian until it’s too late (see diagram below).

New Haven Department of Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Director Doug Hausladen said that road diets typically refer to two-way streets where a four-lane road is reduced to three lanes. He said not many roads in New Haven are ready for that type of diet, because there are not many four-lane roads. Large streets like Whalley Avenue, with five lanes, are more complicated.

“It’s ripe for transformation,” he said of Whalley, ​“but it’s not ripe for a typical four-to-three-lane road diet.”

He said the city is planning a road diet on Union Avenue near Union Station to make more space for pedestrians and to make traffic flow more freely.

Olinski used Church Street to show an example of what a one-way road diet might look like. His graphic would reduce it to two lanes, with a bike lane between the sidewalk and a row of parked cars. That road diet, he said, would only be an interim solution before the road becomes a two-way street.

Hausladen said that Church Street is not a good place for such a transformation. ​“Church Street is a transit street” he said. ​“It is our most important transit streets.” Every CT Transit bus in the New Haven area, he said, has to use Church Street. In the next few years the city plans to make it two-way, and in the meantime, it plans to install bus islands in the first half of 2020.

Hamden has seen a number of traffic calming efforts recently. The Traffic Authority approved a speed hump on Haverford Street last month, and anyone driving up Morse Street will notice bright new lane lines and a bike lane on the once un-painted street.

About Time For Roundabouts?

In New Haven, the time for roundabouts has come around. One was recently installed at the corner of Munson and Crescent Streets. The installation was a roundabout process that had been in the works since 2017.

On Monday, Central Connecticut State University Assistant Professor of Geography Tim Garceau (pictured above) gave a presentation on the benefits of roundabouts.

First, he said, it’s important to clear up some misconceptions about roundabouts. A roundabout is not a rotary, he said. Rotaries are much larger, and usually have speed limits as high as 40 mph. Massachusetts has a lot, and they rightfully have a bad reputation, he said because they are, in fact, messy and dangerous.

Watch a short video from the University of Amherst on the differences between roundabouts and rotaries below.

Roundabouts, unlike rotaries, tend to be much smaller, and have much lower speed limits. According to Garceau’s presentation, they result in 35 percent fewer crashes because there are many fewer ​“points of conflict” where cars are likely to collide (diagram below), and those crash points that do exist are not as dangerous as the T‑bone or head-on collisions typical at traffic lights. They can also decrease the amount of time that drivers have to sit and wait, preventing the erratic decisions of impatient drivers and cutting down on pollution from idling. They can cut wait times by 50 – 75 percent, he said.

There are, of course, downsides to roundabouts. Though in some cases they improve intersections, they can also make intersections more difficult for bikes and less accessible for pedestrians with disabilities, said Hausladen. They’re also expensive.

“While I would like to have a lot of roundabouts in the City of New Haven, we don’t have the money,” said Hausladen. Roundabouts cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. Traffic lights are also expensive, though. Hausladen said a traffic-light intersection can cost $550,000, and it has to be updated every 20 years, whereas roundabouts require less maintenance.

Hamden Acting Chief of Police John Cappiello said that the town did a study for a roundabout at the corner of the Hartford Turnpike and Ridge Road, but that it abandoned the idea because of the cost. He said there are currently no roundabouts in Hamden.