In the near future, visitors to New Haven may discover news signs to help them find their destination in town and maybe even a spiffy new streetcar system to convey them there — as long as they’re not headed to Whalley Avenue or Westville.
That’s the result of a Wednesday night meeting of the City Plan Commission, which voted unanimously to authorize the city to apply for two grants. Both now go to an aldermanic committee for further approval.
One is an application to the Federal Transit Administration for a competitive $800,000 grant to pay for the next phase of a “starter alignment” or the downtown starter route of a proposed streetcar system. It would help pay for a $1 million study to plan streetcar deployment.
Wednesday night’s discussion of the streetcar plan raised a lingering concern: Will the new trolleys do enough to connect Whalley Avenue and Westville to the rest of town?
The commission also voted to authorize an application for $670,00 to the U.S. Department of Transportation for a “multi-modal wayfinding sign system.”
Both grants require matches from the city. The grant to defray the next phase of the downtown streetcar project is called an “Alternative Analysis Study.” If approved, the 12-month study is slated to cost a total of $1 million, with $800,000 from the feds and $200,000 of city capital money or state funds, if those can be secured.
The rising Gateway Community College would be one of a dozen stops along the mile-and-a-half fixed rail streetcar system that, moving with traffic, will travel from Union Station up Church/Whitney as far as Science Hill and descend down Whitney/Temple to the medical center district.
Click here for a story on the proposed route and a taste of the controversy from the September 2010 public meeting where the route was unveiled. Among points of argument was why even in its initial stages the route doesn’t aspire to go out Whalley Avenue to Westville, among other locations where a trolley stop might inspire much needed economic development.
“We had tremendous support [for a proposed streetcar system]” at the public meeting, declared Deputy Economic Development Director Mike Piscitelli, who Wednesday evening presented the grant submission on behalf of the city.
In discussion before voting, the aldermanic representative on the commission, East Rock’s Justin Elicker, asked, “Are we locked into this route?”
“The route’s [still] in play in the alternative analysis [phase]” Piscitelli replied
Elicker said that he recalled from the public meeting concern that the route should, for example, go out Whalley. Piscitelli said that scoping other routes is very much part of the ongoing process and he agreed their absence is a weakness of the plan.
However, he said, the Metropolitan Transit Authority advised the city to establish a core route first; other branches or spurs could happen later. Piscitelli said the “starter alignment” accomplishes that, with its focus in areas of density, major employment, and a route that enables people to move around the center city.
Elicker pressed Piscitelli on whether city is “moving through hoops” provided by the federal government, that is, giving them what they want.
Piscitelli replied that the grant is very competitive. Part of the reason the route goes where it does is because “they want to see if the route will generate ridership.”
“How much of a role does economic development” have in making the city’s submission appealing? Elicker pressed.
Allan Appel Photo
“Bigger and bigger,” Piscitelli replied.
Elicker said that while he loves the route’s potentially offering East Rockers another means of getting downtown and to the medical district, there is a weakness to the plan at the north end, because there’s not room for much economic development in the East Rock area.
Piscitelli concurred.
The material the city prepares during the “alternative analysis” phase gives the feds a way to screen if indeed a streetcar system is what’s called for. “They’re going to see, do we need more buses? Or light rail? Next, they check the alignment with other of our systems,” he said.
Piscitelli also assured the commissioners that there would be plenty more public discussion both on the signage, as preliminary designs moved ahead, and on the street cars.
If the city is successful in its “alternatives analysis” phase, they next to have overcome these hurdles: environmental process or impact statement; that could take 18 months and costs $1.5 million. Then comes preliminary engineering. That’s a year and a half and $3 million. Final design takes another year and costs $2.5 million.
And, if that weren’t enough time and money, construction is forecast to take two years and cost $25 to $35 million per mile, or between $75 million and $105 million for the route..
Signs
If the city receives the $670,000 federal grant for new signs, it will have to match it with 20 percent or $180,000 in capital funds.
The new signage will be designed for cars as well as for pedestrians and bicyclists and will encourage walking, public transit, and visiting sites of historical and other interest, according to a City Plan staff report.
Current signage is more than 20 years old and in some instances signs are being struck by trucks or just falling apart, said Piscitelli.
Monday night’s recommendations to approve now go to the the Board of Aldermen’s City Services and Environmental Policy committee, which meets next on Sept. 20.
This is not really a route to East Rock. I thought the idea behind a route that terminates at the northern end of downtown, near Sachem and Whitney, is that it can eventually connect over Sachem Street into to Newhallville and then up Dixwell Avenue into Hamden - all areas that need economic development just as badly as the Dwight, Edgewood and Westville areas along Whalley Avenue do.
Although a route through Dwight/Edgewood to Westville would probably create more jobs and serve more commuters in the short term, both routes are equally needed and I think one could argue that Dixwell/Newhallville is in more dire need of job creation.