Paul Bass Photo
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn at WNHH FM.
New Haven’s next set of bike lanes will be separated from car traffic — but not by “delineators.”
That’s the latest example of the city learning from past experience in a decade-plus-long quest to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians: Install new infrastructure based on the best available knowledge, then assess how it works to improve the next round.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn — a City Hall point person on planning new speed bumps and humps and playgrounds and bike lanes and roundabouts/peanut-abouts, bridge upgrades, and flood walls — spoke about that Tuesday during an “infrastructure update” conversation on WNHH FM’s ”Dateline New Haven” program.
“There are a lot of lessons learned” at each step of improving city infrastracture, Zinn said. It’s also a complicated process: “You can’t design a road where it’s physically impossible to speed. That’s a road everyone else will have a hard time getting down.”
“That’s where enforcement comes in,” he added.
The city is in the process of designing and building new bike lanes (aka “cycletracks) as part of broader safety improvement plans on State Street, Whitney Avenue, Sherman Parkway, Water Street and Howard Avenue. These lanes will rise above the curb from the car roadway rather than being on the same level separated only by standalone poles (aka the delineators).
The first half of the Edgewood Avenue cycletrack had both kinds of separations. More than 100 delineators originally separated the bike lanes from car lanes on the block east of Yale Avenue. Drivers eventually knocked all of them down. (The city reinstalled them this past week, with the knockdowns immediately resuming.)
First one down: New delineators up (and down) this week on Edgewood Avenue cycletrack.
The cycletrack rises onto a separate sidewalk-like elevation for the two blocks west of Yale Avenue. That has proven to work better, Zinn observed: Drivers seem to understand better that the raised lanes are separate, and everyone is safer. He called delineators a “transitional” step toward more concrete (literal and figurative) and viable long-term lanes.
Beginning in the DeStefano administration, the city has responded to requests for cyclist-friendly streets by first painting “sharrows,” which were then replaced by safer and more understandable designated bike lanes, which were then replaced by different variations of separated lanes and two-way tracks.
The city has been delayed in completing the Edgewood cycletrack from Winthrop to Park because of supply chain snags, Zinn said. The latest snag involved an electric meter can (“the little box that holds your electric meter”) for the Winthrop intersection: A year-long delay in receiving previous items (a traffic controller) led a supplier to sell the box to a different customer. “We had to scramble two to four months out.” The city found a replacement box from a contractor who had an extra on hand, and installed it. Next comes work with United Illuminating to energize the signal, and in coming weeks pre-marking of faint white lanes where the lanes will eventually be striped.
When will work be finished?
“I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble predicting the end of this project. It’s four weeks worth of work. It’s about how we sequence it all,” he said.
Zinn said the city has progressed with plans for the $6.7 million new-urbanist redesign of State Street from I‑91 to Water Street, with final approval on the first phase (at the north end) projected within a few months, followed by the beginning of construction. Plans for the expansion of Long Wharf Park are also steaming ahead, as are flood-control and “responsible growth” efforts in the district.
Meanwhile, work has begun on $2 to $4 million worth of new sidewalks at 220 locations around town, with new local minority-owned companies added to the contractor and subcontractor list. The new Chapel Street “peanut-about” has cut down on speeding and car crashes. And talks have progressed with state transportation officials to save some of the trees on Dayton Street from destruction in a needed new sidewalk project there.
Zinn responded in fine-grain detail in the “Dateline” conversation to rapid-fire questions about those projects as well as the Farmington Canal final-phase construction, express-bus lanes, “air spading” to save tree roots, neighborhood commercial corridor street improvement projects, and the “grind, patch and pour” varieties of sidewalk work. He also credited his kids with helping out with ideas for park improvements. (Big slides are in.)
Click on the above video to watch the full infrastructure update conversation with City Engineer Giovanni Zinn. Click here to listen to and subscribe to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
Before the bike-lane naysayers start their whinging, I'd like to lead off by saying that Giovanni Zinn is smart, patient, hardworking, and conscientious, and does great things for New Haven.