1st Peanut-about Opens; Speeders Slowed

This is terrific!

Congratulations to all involved in making this happen!

A safer section of the world! Hip! Hip! Hooray!!!!

And, a big thanks to the reporter (Paul Bass) who spent his time and skills to get this uplifting story to all of us!!!

There is good evidence that traffic calming measures work. But it help the city make its case if collected before and after data on accident rates, vehicle speeds, etc.

Looking good, Westville!

• Looking forward to seeing more safe streets and cool traffic calming solutions take shape in more areas of the city. Love it.

$600,000 for some concrete, asphalt, paint and dirt??!! Are you kidding me?!

Looking at the scope, $100,000 sounds high, but about right, considering how much our dear city of New Haven overpays for everything it purchases.

The bidding process by which New Haven procures work is obviously broken. Are the unions, and collusion, to blame? I believe 100% in paying people properly for a job well done, and the workmanship in this project looks very good, but the price gouging due to .......unions?.......poor bidding practices?....is untenable for our society. When the city pays 6 times more than a reasonable top shelf price, for everything the city buys, there is no way we - city, state and federal governments - will be able, in the future, to pay our bills. We are leaving future generations with a tax burden they will not be able to afford. Unacceptable. We all need to demand and fight for fiscal accountability.

Also, this seems unnecessarily complicated. Why not a simple roundabout as was installed on the opposite side of the West River at the intersection of W Park Ave and Elm Street? Roundabouts are a good and common solution to a common problem. Why does a simple roundabout not work here and how much less would it cost?

ok - i'm not a fan of the 'traffic-calming' and roundabouts, but - having grown up close by, and both walked and driven through the intersection hundreds of times, if not thousands - this works for me. Chapel St and Yale Ave are both wider than normal streets, and the diagonal intersection was abnormally large, and those factors, along with unpopulated approaches from the South and East made it very dangerous. Good job.

AAP, unlike Giovanni Zinn, I am not an engineer. But having staffed the legislature’s Transportation Committee for ten years, I know that federal transportation funding comes with strings attached. In this case, these include Federal Highway Administration geometric standards, which among other things govern the angles at which roadways can meet.

I live a few blocks from the intersection. That particular intersection was extremely dangerous due to sightlines, parked cars and speeding vehicles coming down Chapel Street. I imagine the reconstruction took a lot more than just some concrete, paint and dirt. Surveying costs, demolition costs, engineering cost, etc.
While the cost seems high, I believe it will save a number of lives as well as injuries. You certainly can’t speed through that intersection now without severely damaging your car. Overall, I am happy with it.

The roundabout works very well. Heads up to users though - a significant number of drivers take a left turn, instead of a right, on this so they can “cheat” and not have to drive all the way around. This is especially true for drivers coming down Yale and taking a left onto Chapel heading towards downtown. Perhaps the median should be extended out farther to prevent that from happening.

This is unnecessarily complicated and expensive. Having gone through this twice - once at night, once during the day - it needs more or better lighting at night. Overall, it's better as a traffic control measure than the flashing yellow light. But Zinn et all took a peanut design with a much larger footprint and squeezed it into this location. There is going to be a continuing problem from Yale Ave on the bowl side of the peanut. Cars coming from that direction already blow the yield. The cost is absurd but cost never seems to be a consideration at our City Hall.

The peanut shape is uncommon, but not unique (or the first).

People using the road make mistakes (like speeding, running stop signs and red lights, turning left in front of oncoming traffic), always have and always will. Crashes will always be with us, but they need not result in fatalities or serious injury.

Modern roundabouts are the safest form of intersection in the world - the intersection type with the lowest risk of fatal or serious injury crashes - (much more so than comparable signals). Modern roundabouts require a change in speed and alter the geometry of one of the most dangerous parts of the system - intersections. The reduction in speed to about 20 mph and sideswipe geometry mean that, when a crash does happen at a modern roundabout, you might need a tow truck, but rarely an ambulance. Visit the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety or FHWA for modern roundabout FAQs and safety facts.

The FHWA has been saying for over 20 years that signal intersections have TEN TIMES the fatality risk of modern roundabouts.

And I am an actual traffic engineer.

ScottRAB - that's all correct, but if drivers are cheating and turning left into the roundabout to save 10 seconds of drive time, that could still place vulnerable road users at risk, and potentially even drivers (a head-on collision, even at 15 miles per hour, is not pleasant). Overall though, yes it's going to be at least 10 times safer than what was here before.

The shape and angles of this intersection could not accommodate a traditional circle, which is why the peanut shape was more sensible. Having grown up in the neighborhood and having walked, biked and driven through that intersection, this is a huge improvement in safety. But it wouldn’t hurt to put up no left turn signage or extend the curbs to prevent people from trying to cheat by not going around the correct way. Anyone who whines about a traffic roundabout/peanut, was probably going too fast anyway.

This is great! Great work by the city to get this done. That intersection was a mess and extremely dangerous for drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and a complicated to work with given the width of the streets and the angle at which they meet. If one consequence is that fewer people cut through a residential neighborhood (to avoid this roundabout), that's a GOOD thing.

We need speed humps and curb bump outs at Orange and Lawrence, Its the elevational trough of the neighborhood nd many people have suffered accidents there. Probably Canner and Bishop also because speeds seem to peak there for some reason.

Is it possible to have an article explaining the traffic rules for round abouts and peanuts? It would be good to get a refresher and education on these new installations is never part of the initial plans.

Elicker's PR machine broke out the drone (it's officially election season after all) and hoodwinked quite a few. 

The reality is as follows:

I'd like to see the city bus or a fire truck go through it.