Thomas Breen file photo
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn (right): Goal is to keep everyone safe.
Upper Orange Street’s parking spots will all stay put. The city will build no new dedicated bike lanes.
But! The city will “slow” the street and make room for cars and cyclists alike by narrowing the road, trimming the speed limit, improving signage and sightlines, coloring the street, and putting in a median.
Such are the details the Elicker administration has put together after years of debate over a new design for a nine-block run of Orange Street between Humphrey and Cold Spring Streets.
Mayor Justin Elicker announced the new design via email and a city website posting.
“The proposal is called a ‘slow street’ or ‘neighborhood greenway’ — an innovative concept tried in some other municipalities, particularly in Europe, but not yet tried in New Haven,” Elicker wrote Friday in the email message.
The plan includes a 20 mile-per-hour speed limit, down from 25; a road surface that will bear a color and texture distinct from other city streets; a “slow driving lane shared between bicycles and cars”; and various traffic-calming features, such as sidewalk bump-outs and plant-bedecked medians.
“In the end, we believe the proposal will make the street safer and more accessible for pedestrians and cyclists, expand opportunities for outdoor dining, and also maintain the number of parking spaces for residents and local businesses,” Elicker wrote.
Friday’s decision has been two years in the making.
The city’s transportation department held its first public meeting on the topic of Orange Street safety back in March 2022. It held a follow-up meeting in December 2023.
At both virtual gatherings, dozens of East Rockers turned out to debate whether or not any of the 199 on-street parking spaces on either side of that stretch of Orange should be removed and replaced with protected bike lanes. Cyclists warned about unsafe commuting conditions and the dangers of getting“doored”; some neighbors and business owners worried that the removal of parking spaces could hurt commerce, and urged the city to focus on redoing Whitney Avenue instead.
City of New Haven design
Proposed design for a "slow" Orange St.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, whose office will be working with the city’s transportation department to make this Orange “slow street” a reality, stressed that city officials returned to a central question over and over again when figuring out what design to go with. Namely: “How do we get all of the users of the road through the road as safely as we can?”
Yes, the city’s proposal retains all on-street parking. Yes, it does not implement a dedicated bike lane, let alone a protected one.
But, he argued, it does do quite a bit to solve that key problem of safety for pedestrians and cyclists and drivers alike.
The travel lane in each direction will be reduced from 10 feet to 9, and the color and texture of the pavement plus the new median and signage should “give everyone a clear message that this is a shared road space.”
One key way to achieve that, he said, is “cutting down on illegal parking at the corners.” The roadway improvements included in this design — especially the sidewalk bump-outs and median — should help accomplish just that.
He also recognized that, under this proposal, the four-foot-wide striped bike lanes that used to be on both sides of this part of Orange — but which have been gone since the road was repaved in the fall of 2021 — won’t be coming back.
Elicker told the Independent that the “parking vs. cyclists” framing of previous public debates around how best to reconfigure this stretch of Orange is “not a healthy dynamic.” Plus, he said, “I don’t think anyone involved is anti-parking or anti-cycling, so we worked very hard to create a solution that we think helps support all users.”
Zinn and Elicker emphasized that this proposal is not simply adding “sharrows,” or slap-on road markings indicating that cars should, please, share the road with bikes.
This project is not just about bike lanes, the mayor said. It’s about safety.
“The color and texture of the street will also change” under this proposal, Elicker said. The goal is “a road feel that is entirely different than any other road in the city of New Haven,” where drivers will “inherently” slow down because of the roadway’s setup.
The mayor described this Humphrey-to-Cold Spring stretch as “Phase 1” of redoing Orange Street. If it works well, then Humphrey to Trumbull heading downtown would be Orange Street “Phase 2.”
“Orange Street is the first street that ever had a bike lane in the city,” he said. There’s a history of “trying new things” on this corridor.
Next up now that the design has been put together? Zinn said, “We have to refine it,” figure out what materials to use, pull together cost estimates, and then “obviously working with our partners at the state to fund” the project. He doesn’t have a cost estimate yet, but said it won’t be cheap.
What about the area of Bradley Street/Orange Street & NH Academy? Drivers use it as a wrong way cut through after getting off the highway. Even, when school is in session. Hopefully, that area is included in plans to update it.