Paul Bass Photo
Central between Fountain & Whalley: Future pedestrian-only plaza?
Neighbors explored the merits of woonerfs and bumpouts, as consultants proposed changes for a crash-wracked stretch of Fountain Street.
The vocabulary lesson and subsequent debate took place Monday night over Zoom, as ten Westvilleans gathered with city transit officials and CDM Smith consultants for a workshop to discuss how to create a more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly Fountain Street around Westville Village.
Parklets? Sharrows? Refuge Islands?
Those solutions and more were on the table.
CDM Smith
The workshop centered around a street study that CDM Smith had conducted on Fountain Street, as well as small portions of Central and Whalley Avenues.
According to a presentation by CDM Smith consultants Sharat Kalluri and Becca Hall outlining the traffic study, 371 crashes occurred at key intersections along the stretch of Fountain, Central, and Whalley in the three-year period between 2016 and 2018.
Some of the most problematic intersections include where the street meets Forest Road, Dayton Street, and Vista Terrace (an area that saw 91 crashes) as well as the intersection between Whalley and Fountain (which saw 73 crashes.)
Much of Fountain in the Westville Flats (bounded roughly by Forest Road, Chapel Street, Yale Avenue, and Willard Street) has a speed limit of 25 miles per hour. Still, the 85th percentile of speeds studied often reached over 10 miles per hour higher than the limit.
In response to this data, consultant David Sousa unveiled a series of traffic-calming interventions that could be implemented along Fountain Street. The consultants Monday night sought community members’ input on where the most problematic parts of the street are, and on what kinds of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure they’d like to see in their neighborhood.
A Traffic-Calming Glossary
A 2013 plan for the Audubon-Whitney intersection’s speed tables.
In the process, they unveiled a blizzard of terms of art for traffic-watchers to absorb.
Among the terms that came up over the course of the Monday evening workshop:
Speed humps: These literal bumps in the road are a direct, physical intervention to encourage drivers to slow down. They are one of the most common measures that traffic safety advocates call for, although they’re occasionally controversial.
Raised intersections (“Speed tables”): An alternative to speed humps, speed tables are extended areas of the road — usually intersections — that have been raised so that cars will slow down. They’re “not inexpensive,” Sousa said. This 2011 project on Edwards Street cost $310,000.
Dynamic speed display signs: These fixtures measure the pace of oncoming traffic and inform drivers of the speeds at which they are moving.
Woonerfs: This term comes from the Netherlands. It translates from Dutch to “living yard.” This kind of (typically residential) street envisions pedestrians and cars sharing space with one another. Drivers are supposed to move at the pace of walkers, and the road is often landscaped and curved so as to promote slowing down, like parts of Audubon between Whitney and Orange. Woonerfs often don’t have a clear delineation between pedestrian, bike, and car lanes.
Pedestrian-only streets: A level up from woonerfs, pedestrian-only streets are closed off to cars entirely.
CDM Smith
Movable parklets: This strategy involves taking over parking spaces for pedestrian use — like benches or outdoor dining — or for public art. These “bring the life of the sidewalk into the parking lane,” Sousa explained. They are considered a kind of traffic calming measure, he added, because drivers tend to slow down as they pass by to see what’s going on.
Courtney Luciana File Photo
Bumpouts on Quinnipiac Avenue and Hemingway Street.
Bump outs: This intervention widens pedestrian space while narrowing the road, often at crosswalks, where they have an added benefit of shortening the distance that pedestrians need to walk in order to cross the street. Bump outs can take the form of curb extensions, which build out the sidewalk into the street, or painted boundaries around sidewalk edges.
High-visibility crosswalks: These are crosswalks that have been enhanced, often with brightly-colored paint, to attract more attention.
Mid-block crosswalks: Crosswalks that create a pedestrian pathway in the middle of a block, rather than at an intersection, create additional designated spaces for pedestrians. But, Sousa said, they aren’t always the safest intervention. “It’s important to design these carefully because motorists aren’t expecting these.”
Pedestrian refuge islands: Some streets, like parts of Edgewood Avenue, have “islands” of greenery in the center of the street. Usually, much of these islands aren’t walkable, but pedestrian refuge islands extend to the middle of crosswalks, offering a place for pedestrians to pause in the middle of crossing the street. These can help lessen the burden on pedestrians to cross wide streets within one traffic light cycle.
Pedestrian crossing signals: These traffic lights flash before changing to red with a countdown from 10 or 15 to zero, letting pedestrians know how long they have to cross the street.
Forced walk signals: Most pedestrian traffic lights in New Haven change to green after being prompted by buttons. Forced walk signals integrate green pedestrian lights into every traffic light cycle.
Bike lanes: These are also among the most asked-for additions to the road amid New Haven’s thriving biking culture. Often, bike lanes take the form of a painted narrow track designated for bicyclists right alongside the automobile lanes. Increasingly, activists are calling for protected bike lanes — bike tracks that are physically separated from cars, whether by planters, parking, posts, or elevation. (Protected bike lanes weren’t mentioned in Sousa’s presentation.)
Sharrows: A less radical change to the road than bike lanes, sharrows are painted bike symbols that remind drivers to share street space with bikers.
Pop Quiz!
Zoom
Stasia Brewczynski and Adam Callaghan: Cyclists are good for business.
Armed with this esoterica, participants in the workshop proceeded to respond to questions about how to proceed on Fountain, with spirited side note-sharing on the Zoom chat function. The responses reflected a tension between the dynamics of New Haven’s automobile-oriented thoroughfares and street safety activists’ vision of a more pedestrian-friendly city.
Q: Should Fountain Street get a bike lane if it would mean eliminating parking on both sides of the street?
“Oh boy,” wrote State Rep. Pat Dillon in the workshop’s Zoom chat feature when the consultants raised this question.
At another neighborhood meeting, the notion of eliminating parking might have proved controversial. But most attendees of Monday night’s workshop expressed enthusiasm about the prospect of a Fountain Street bike lane. (Apparently, traffic safety workshops tend to attract the cyclist-and-pedestrian-minded.)
“Fountain Street would be fine with no on-street parking for the entire length of it,” declared Andrew Orefice. “There’s plenty of parking in downtown Westville to support our businesses, so therefore plenty of room to have protected bike lanes.”
Paul Bass Photo
Fountain’s commercial block.
Dillon expressed reservation about how Westville business owners would respond to a reduction in the area’s parking. She said she “learned the hard way” through her own advocacy for pedestrian-friendly infrastructure that “small changes can make an enormous difference in your business.”
“We need to be attentive and respectful to who’s there and think through the consequences of what we’re thinking,” Dillon said.
Zoom
Elizabeth Donius (pictured), leader of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance, stressed that business owners should be included in conversations about bike lanes. “From a business community perspective, I do think there might be some concern about losing parking,” she said.
Donius argued that pedestrian and bike-friendly measures can be beneficial to businesses, too. “What we gain from street parking in Wesville is not that much. What we gain from traffic calming is so beneficial … We need to make sure that we’re transforming Westville into a place where cars feel the need to slow down on a narrow street and stay.”
Neighbor Stasia Brewczynski, who was on Zoom alongside Adam Callaghan, echoed that biking infrastructure would help businesses, not hurt them. “Businesses make more money from pedestrians and bikers than they do from people in cars,” she argued.
In the chat section, Brewczynski and Callaghan later added that customers could park on side streets in order to get to businesses.
Claire Roosien pushed for even stronger protections for cyclists. “I would still be very nervous about riding in an unprotected bike lane on that street. Even with a bike lane, there’s a lot of red light rolling and stuff like that,” she said.
She was seconded by Brewczynski, Callaghan, and Donius.
The consultants took note.
“We could carve a protected bike lane out of the sidewalk,” posited Sousa, considering how space could be rearranged to allow for a buffer between bicycles and cars. “The solution of a protected bike lane could be different from block to block,” he added.
Q: Should the block of Central Avenue between Fountain and Whalley become a woonerf or pedestrian-only street?
Brian Slattery Photo
At the 2019 ArtWalk festival, artist Reinaldo Cruz setsup shop in the middle of the road at Fountain and Central.
Westville resident Joshua Kuhr raised this suggestion early on in the discussion — and found a receptive audience.
The transformation of Central Ave. between Fountain and Whalley into a pedestrian-only or pedestrian-priority zone has precedent. The mini-block, a small stretch by Westville’s business district just before Fountain and Whalley converge (right by Dunkin’ Donuts), is temporarily converted to a site of pedestrian life every year for the neighborhood’s ArtWalk festival. Otherwise it’s a slow-moving car connector between Whalley and Fountain, with the rear exterior walls of Dunkin and Westville Wines on one side and a vacant lot (site of the former Delaney’s) on the other.
“Any time that we can give over some livable street space to an essential business district like we have there, it’s a no-brainer,” said Kuhr.
Orefice said he supports the conversion of the Central Avenue block to a pedestrian area. He called the nearby Whalley-Fountain intersection a “disaster zone.”
According to data presented by the consultants, 73 car crashes occurred at that intersection from 2016 to 2018.
Q: How can traffic light patterns and crosswalks better serve pedestrians on Fountain and Whalley?
In the chat, Callaghan and Brewczynski pressed for longer pedestrian crossing periods and shorter crosswalks, possibly through the installation of bump-outs.
They also urged the street planners to consider integrating pedestrian walk signals into the traffic light cycles automatically.
Consultant Becca Hall noted that on the Jewish Sabbath and other holidays, when observant Jewish community members are obligated to avoid pressing buttons, the city coordinates forced walk signals in certain neighborhoods.
Traffic, Parking and Transportation Director Doug Hausladen added that due to Covid-19, traffic lights are supposed to incorporate forced walk signals so that pedestrians don’t have to touch the green light buttons.
Hausladen has stated that his goal is for the city to switch over to coordinated traffic signals, which would have pedestrians crossing the street when cars are permitted to drive in the same direction.
These crosswalk and traffic-light measures could feed into a broader vision for Westville as a hub of community businesses and gatherings.
“Whalley Avenue retailers are very dependent on their parking spaces and that’s the culture of business on Whalley right now,” Donius mused. “You can’t operate without having people able to pull in front. … They don’t stay and walk around.”
“We’re just beginning to start to build that culture” of pedestrian life, she added.
“We don’t just want people going into one store,” Brewczynski said. “We want them going into two or more, and really browsing.”
Donius agreed. “We need to make sure that we’re transforming Westville into a place where cars feel the need to slow down on a narrow street and stay.”
By law, there absolutely should be a protected bike lane from the Ramsdell Street area (if not all the way into Woodbridge) all the way into downtown.
The city's Complete Streets Ordinance requires accommodation for all road users. A safe lane for people riding bicycles is long overdue. Anything short of that is a violation of the law.
Presumably, a cycletrack or PBL along Fountain or Whalley could connect with the cycletrack/PBLs planned to run along the entire length of Edgewood Avenue.