$1.2M Would Boost Bike Lanes

This will greatly improve safety for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians, including the thousands of bus riders and very young children who use this street every day.

In an era where New Haven be covered with 20+ feet of water within our lifetimes if drastic action is not taken to meet and surpass the recent Paris agreements, this is an urgent project. Worth waiting for it to be done the right way.

Why wasn't the Route 34 connector chosen instead?
The promise to reunite the Hill and West River neighborhoods is another broken promise.

Mr. Hausladen is just the best!!! Having said that I hope they don't use rubber duckies thats just not a great look for people that own homes in the area. I'd rather see them put down a small curb or use some other, more visually appealing, type of barrier.

The plan near Edgewood Park looks beautiful. But how will it work where Edgewood gets narrow between Winthrop and Park St?

Edgewood Avenue seems like the perfect thoroughfare for a two-way cycle track. I am curious to see the plans especially to understand how bus stops are dealt with.

ILiveHere,
The advantage of using rubber tubes as opposed to permanent infrastructure like curbs is that the tubes are easily removed for snow plowing. And, if for whatever reason, it turns out that the cycle track doesn't work on Edgewood or needs to be slightly redesigned, the rubber tubes offer the flexibility to do that as opposed to the rigidity of a curb or concrete bollards. Perhaps if the city continues to design more cycle tracks and they prove successful, permanent physical barriers like curbs and bollards can be added and the city can purchase a smaller cycle track plow.

If anyone is interested, here is a link to some of my ideas for multi-modal transportation infrastructure in Greater New Haven:
https://newhavenurbanism.wordpress.com/new-haven-urbanism/multimodal-transportation-opportunities-in-greater-new-haven/

@Jonathan Hopkins
i get all that but for people with homes that face edgewood its not a great view particularly as they get scattered by cars and kids.

A protected bike lame is fantastic, a protected bike lane that the state offers to pay for is even better.

The "stir" the author mentions wasn't just about the loss of a few parking spaces for a coffee shop. Many neighbors were concerned about how this would impact the loss of parking near Edgewood School; an area that is already incredibly congested and dangerous for the many families who walk to and from school. An effective traffic calming strategy that would reduce the number of motorists who blow through the area was also raised as a priority. Neighbors have routinely reported motorists crashing into parked cars, street signs, light poles, etc bc of speeding. It's not clear how a bike lane will help eliminate this. Consider for example, how motorists routinely ignore the bike lanes on Yale Avenue.

@TheMadcap-- Whether the City,State or Federal Government "pays" for something it is actually all of us that are funding it. Different bucket, but the same source

Contrarian: A bike lane would significantly narrow the travel lane width, which is really the best (and only) way to calm traffic. Ideally, it should be combined with other things like delineators, curb extensions, and some of the other things mentioned in this article.

The problem with Edgewood is that there is almost never anyone parked along long stretches of it.

The fact is, for most of the day, there are no more than three or four cars parked there over a stretch of twenty city blocks.

Narrowing the travel lane width with parking is a great idea, but only if you have cars parked there. If you don't, all of a sudden a street like Edgewood becomes wider than an interstate highway, which is what we have there now.

Whalley Avenue has the same problem, though the reason nobody parks there is because their car is almost certain to be destroyed, not because there is a lack of demand. As a result, speeds of 70 miles per hour on Whalley are common. Edgewood is almost as bad.

The Yale Avenue bike lane involved a little bit of paint, not a major project like what is proposed here. Of course, the Yale Avenue paint didn't solve the issue because it was not nearly aggressive enough at narrowing the travel lane width and relied on parked cars (which like Edgewood, are never there). That said, Yale Avenue is slightly better than it was before there was any lane there, and the lane makes the street much more comfortable to bicycle on than it was before, even if its impact on traffic speed was only slight.

It's clear to me that humans crave the thrill of traveling fast. Since there are so few recreational outlets for such, they incorporate the behavior into more mundane activites (e.g. commuting). Hoping that design ALONE will alter those tendencies may be too optimistic. That said, I personally love to ride my bike.... really fast. Bring on the cycletracks!

"The problem with Edgewood is that there is almost never anyone parked along long stretches of it.
The fact is, for most of the day, there are no more than three or four cars parked there over a stretch of twenty city blocks."

Data are so much easier to report upon when one is making up the points. I sometimes read the comments just to see the conflated claims "anonymous" will make. This comments for this article do not disappoint.

Nathan, you can verify the information for yourself by spending some time on Edgewood between Forest and the Boulevard. That is a one-mile stretch - or between 16 and 20 city blocks, by any standard measure.

I can't even remember the last time that I saw a single car parked on the blocks between Alden and Forest. The block from West Rock to Yale is also often empty, except during school drop off. Other areas near the park only have parked cars during soccer games, which is a few hours per week. People park along the park when the weather is nice, but it is usually completely empty, which results in the serious issues around travel lane width that I mentioned above. There are sometimes a couple parked cars near Central, but even there, during much of the day you'll find one or two cars there at most.

By the way, the point here is about reducing speeding, not about taking away parking. If the city's plan to control speeding involves narrowing lanes by having cars parked on Edgewood, it won't work, because there are typically a few cars parked over a 20-block stretch.

We need other approaches to narrow travel lanes if we want to reduce speeds from the current average of 40 miles per hour to something more reasonable that doesn't ruin the neighborhood.

It's also important to remember that some of the alternatives here may result in zero loss of parking spaces anywhere along the entire 3-mile length of Edgewood. Other alternatives that might take away, say, 0.5% of the total number of parking spaces, would have minimal impacts given that there are hundreds of unused parking spaces, even during the Yale-Harvard game once every two years. In fact, the best way to improve the parking situation on Edgewood is by removing a few parking spaces to put in things like curb extensions that would make the street easier and safer to park on. Most people would not park their car on this street as it currently stands, unless they didn't mind seeing their car get destroyed.

During school drop-off there is never a parking issue either. I have taken a number of photos of school drop-off on the walk in to document this.

If driver's want a speed rush on public property, they can grab a board and drop into the half-pipe at Edgewood Park.

Ben, you are obviously unaware of the fact that people have a constitutional right to park no more than 50 feet from their destination :-).

As a father, Westville resident, and parent of three children at Edgewood School, I am so pleased this may come to fruition. I bike east down Edgewood Avenue to downtown nearly every day, and I can say that creating a more bicycle-friendly corridor for all those who live along the Edgewood Avenue corridor — a diverse community that includes many income groups, residents of different kinds of housing, young and old, schoolchildren and adult singles, every kind of New Havener — will be a boon to all of us. I see people biking in Westville, and I see people biking (including lots of children) all the way to downtown. We all need a safer environment, and I am excited by the lane-narrowing and traffic-calming aspects of the cycle track. Also, as to the supposed lost parking spaces, I have some knowledge of the situation, as I live SEVEN HOUSES from Edgewood School. If there were a parking issue, parking would be scarce by my house. But in fact there are always plenty of on-street spots, during all times of the school day, even pickup and dropoff, including in front of my house on West Rock Avenue — about a 70-second walk from the school parking lot. Quite simply, not only is there adequate parking on Edgewood, there is a huge surplus on the side streets. There is just one day every two years when parking is hard: the odd years when the Harvard game is at the Yale Bowl. Anyway, this cycle track will be a huge plus for my neighborhood, and just as much so for all the neighborhoods along it. I hope it will happen, and that it will serve as a model for other neighborhoods throughout the city.

In the summer it will be a dirt bike ATV lane...to all of us live here our problem just got worse. All the people who hang out in their cars by the park to sell drugs during the day just got a state subsidized drive through window. Good luck trying to bike down that lane in the summer when the random motorcycle hangout party invades the bike lane. It's to bad that the city never bothered to ask the people who live in the area what we thought may impede their "vision" of what they think this project will be. In an ideal situation this would be a good idea but it's a waste of money until the NHPD has the resources to make the Edgewood park area a safe place to bike no matter what infrastructure is in place. The city planners have no idea what goes on in that park on a daily basis

Mikewestpark, I live a block away from Orange Street, which has had bike lanes for years. The bike lanes are not divided but are heavily used. Even though dirtbikes and ATVs plague East Rock, as they do other neighborhoods, I have never seen them on the bike lanes.

@Bradley. I seriously doubt that Orange Street has the same issues that we have in Edgewood regarding ATV's and dirt bikes. Take a summer day to sit on a park bench in Edgewood Park and watch what goes on in the area where the proposed bike lane will be. The problems will become profoundly more obvious to you. Unfortunately the city assumes, as you do, that the entire city is like East Rock and that is the biggest problem. How the city can make a $1.5 million investment without talking to the nearby residents just lends evidence to their fiscal irresponsibility. The proposed bike lane will only work if the area is more proactively policed, which is impossible for NHPD given their current resources. However, in a city where the average citizen mindset allows for a person to park their car wherever they want (as long as their hazard lights are on, of course) blocking travel lanes, I doubt that this will work well. I have no doubt that it will be used. I used to ride my bike to the Hospital for work in the summer. I stopped doing so and it wasn't the infrastructure that made the travel dangerous.

Mike: I'm sorry to hear that you felt you needed to stop biking in this area. However, keep in mind that there are hundreds of other people, ages 8 to 100, who continue to do so every day even though there's little infrastructure there. Many of them can not afford to or can not physically drive a car in the same way that you might be able to.

Perhaps because the majority of people don't feel very safe biking on a road that has no biking infrastructure, most studies indicate that adding a protected bicycle lane immediately increases the rate of bicycling by between 100 and 1,000%.

For example, in 2005, Seville decided that the bicycle was the answer to traffic congestion. The city built a huge network of protected lanes -- about 30-40 miles worth -- in less than 2 years (it has since doubled). The percentage of all trips in Seville made by bicycle increased practically overnight, from 0.4%, to 7% of all trips.

Doing something like that brings millions of dollars back to the city economy, creating many new jobs. Though this is a nice project, it would be nice if the city had more of a vision for an interconnected network, other than just one protected bike lane.

At the beginning of her first term, Mayor Harp promised to install two dedicated cycle tracks and now, at the beginning of her second, it's encouraging to see (what's hopefully!) final plans being made to actually put them in. She rightly called equitable transportation infrastructure a civil rights issue and, as Anonymous points out, separated bicycling infrastructure is important not only to middle-class and wealthy people who have the financial flexibility to choose how they get around, but primarily to those who, for one reason or another, don't have the choice to drive around everywhere in a personal automobile.

It would be great to see the kind of time, effort and planning that's gone into this lane be leading to an interconnected city-wide network--even better to see it leading to a regional one. Connecticut towns are too small for these kinds of improvements to stop at their borders.

It would be a tremendous change to see Edgewood go from two lanes to one with the addition of a protected bike lane with on-street parking more closer to the traffic. That will certainly reduce the speed of reduce the speed of drivers in that area. Awesome plan. This is needed.