Thomas Breen photo
Joe Santos: Crossing Foxon is "a heart-pounding experience."
Joe Santos, 73, took his life into his hands Wednesday morning as he crossed seven lanes of Foxon Boulevard — from a city-owned homeless shelter to the Walmart parking lot — to catch the bus downtown.
As soon as next spring, he and other Rt. 80 pedestrians and drivers should be able to move across the corridor with a little less fear, thanks to a suite of traffic-calming upgrades now under construction.
Construction underway on Foxon near Middletown.
Top city and state officials — including Mayor Justin Elicker, state Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, and State Reps. Al Paolillo, Jr. and Roland Lemar — hosted a press conference near Walmart at 315 Foxon Blvd. Wednesday to herald those coming street-safety improvements.
Zinn said that, by spring 2026, the state-owned Foxon Boulevard between Middletown Avenue and Quinnipiac Avenue should have four raised speed tables, new medians with light poles, and a new stretch of sidewalk on the north side of the road between the Walmart entrance and the Dunkin’ Donuts.
These improvements will be funded by $1.8 million in state dollars and $70,000 from the city.
The upgrades are en route to a state road that, according to Elicker, sees roughly 27,000 cars travel along it every day. That road — which has a posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour — has also seen two fatalities in recent years, including pedestrian Jaime Melendez-Martinez, who was a resident of the city-owned hotel-turned-homeless shelter at 270 Foxon and who was hit and killed by a car on Aug. 6. The stretch is also a hot spot for speeding and illegal drag racing.
The goal of these improvements is to “save lives, calm traffic,” and make the street safer for all, Elicker said.
“One fatality is too many,” he added. And the city is working towards a “vision zero” goal of no deaths at all on New Haven’s roadways, not just through the Foxon work, but also through a recently completed $2.6 million traffic-safety project on Quinnipiac Avenue and the coming installation of 19 traffic and speed cameras.
Zinn said that the new medians “will help organize a roadway” that is currently “a very wide expanse of asphalt.” The medians should also offer some protections to pedestrians, and the new light poles should better illuminate the corridor at night.
The “modified speed tables” — which will be “a little more gradual” than speed tables installed by the city on lower-volume roads — should slow down car traffic on the corridor. He said the city plans to install one of four first, and then observe how it impacts traffic on the street before installing the other planned three.
And the new sidewalk, while just a couple hundred feet, should make it safer and easier for pedestrians to walk to the intersection that leads to the Walmart parking lot, where the area’s main bus stop is. That new sidewalk will also go right in front of the city’s 55-room non-congregate homeless shelter.
“This is a long time in the making,” Paolillo said, referring to planning for Foxon Boulevard traffic calming that started 15 to 20 years ago. “This is a game changer in our city.”
The project will not include any new traffic signals or pedestrian-crossing signals, though Zinn and Eucalitto pointed out that the state did recently improve the pedestrian crossing by the Walmart parking lot, including by installing an electronic sign indicating when pedestrians have the right to cross.
Santos, who said he has lived at the city’s homeless shelter for the past two weeks, crossed the road from the north to the south side of the street at the traffic light and crosswalk by the Walmart right before the start of Wednesday’s presser. He then took a breath and, cane in hand, crossed east-to-west across the Walmart parking lot entrance to make his way to the bus stop.
“It’s a heart-pounding experience” crossing Foxon, he said. The road is in desperate need of traffic-calming and pedestrian-safety improvements, he said. He would most like to see new traffic lights installed.
“It’s absolutely insane,” he added. Whoever designed Foxon needs to “sober up.”
City Engineer Zinn and DOT Commish Eucalitto.
The press ...
... and the presser.
City of New Haven image
The proposed changes to Foxon, between Middletown and Quinnipiac.