The Complete Streets, it’s really, it’s been described as a philosophy, kind of an umbrella philosophy. And it covers some of the other things that you see on here. Context Sensitive Solutions is something that, you know, we at the Department are very familiar with. We were a pilot state ten years ago, or whenever that was. But there’s also a bunch of other philosophies or buzz words that you see up on here. One of the ones that’s very important is the Bike and Pedestrian Friendly Environments. That’s something that’s very much tied into the Complete Streets movement.
As far as why we’re doing this, why is the push for Complete Streets, really the top one is probably the most important is that the people want it. People want to be able to have an alternative way to get to work, to get to the shopping, recreation, whatever the case may be. They don’t want to always have to get into a car and drive. It’s something I’ve seen in my personal life as well. I moved from an area where I could walk to some of the local shopping and I moved away and it’s, now I have to get into a car and drive if I want to go get a gallon of milk. And it’s, it’s not a pleasant thing, but I can certainly understand why people want to have these alternatives.
In addition, people just want to save money, whether it’s on gas, insurance, car payments. They also want to reduce their environmental impacts. The sense of community is something that I think a lot of people like to see. One of the things that we see with bike trails, for instance, is when people are walking by another person on a bike trail they say hello. You know, you don’t see that when you’re passing somebody in a car. So, it does provide some sense of community. And then also, the health benefits. And this is a graph that I found and it’s pretty similar, or pretty simple to see that there’s a correlation between the percent of obesity across the world and also the countries that have higher use of walking and biking. USA, unfortunately, is all the way on the left hand side of that chart. But, again, this is where people are seeing that there is this correlation and you get out and you walk or bike and it’s going to be an improvement to their health.
For those that aren’t convinced that we should be doing it, the results of this law that tells us that we kind of have to do this. Now this is the Public Act 9154 and, you know, there’s parts of this that I don’t particularly care for, quite frankly, but this is the key part of that law, frankly. And it just says that we have to consider this and there’s really four words that I want everybody to focus on. All Users and All Highways. Alright. So this is, basically what they’re telling you is that you have to consider this for all roads and you have to consider everyone that could possibly use this road. So what’s All Highways mean? Well, it basically means whether you’re in a rural situation, an urban situation, or a suburban situation, it has to be a consideration. Whether you’re talking high volume/low volume. You know, we, as engineers, don’t have the choice of where we can choose to apply Complete Streets or not. Okay, we’re applying it to all these roads. And the only exception that we do make, that the law does allow us not to consider this on roads where these users are not legally permitted, like an expressway, but we’ll get into that later.
The tougher part, frankly, is the All Users. What does All Users mean? Well, the law says basically pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit users, as well as motorists. Well, what does that mean? Well, let’s talk about Pedestrians. They come in a variety of flavors. We’ve got the adults, and then you’ve got children. You’ve got to try to accommodate all of these people. Elderly is a very separate group of people that have their own certain needs. We also get into vision impairment. That’s a big part of what we do. You know, some of the features that we provide are specifically designed for the vision impaired or the disabled. These are all people that we have to try to accommodate. Same thing with bicyclists. You know, there’s not just one type of bicyclist. You’ve got the adults, you’ve got the children and the family type of bicyclists that you have to consider as well, and there’s different designs for different users that we have here. You’ve got the commuters or what we call the sort of the professional bikers, and then you’ve got the people that are just out for a stroll on the weekend. So we’re trying to fit all of these people in there.
And then Motorists is a whole ‘nother group. Now this is where we get into all kinds of different variety of people. You’ve got the so-called normal adults. You’ve got the crazy teenagers. You’ve got elderly drivers who have slightly different reaction times. You’ve got the crazy commuters that just want to get to work and back as fast as you can. Then on the weekends they all turn into the soccer moms and dads who are mad because everybody’s driving through their neighborhoods at high speeds. You’ve got shoppers who are really just trying to get to their, the store that they’re getting to. They’re not in all that much of a rush. And then you’ve got the Workers. There are a lot of people that have to drive for a living, and they’re much more concerned with being able to get to their point of destination quickly.
So, again. We have a variety of people that we’re all trying to accommodate. And then, within the Motorists, we also have a variety of vehicles as well. Everything from bicycles and motorcycles, which are very, you know, skinny and don’t really take up a lot of room, all the way up to the 18-wheelers, which not only take up a lot of room but have a very different turning radius. Even within cars, we have a variety of different cars, pickup trucks, etcetera, and we’re trying to – not to mention the fire trucks, as obviously has to be a consideration on virtually every road that we have. And the last one on here is the oversize and overweight vehicles. Now this is vehicles that are, have special permits to go on our roads, but we do have to try to accommodate them. Now what do I mean by that? Well, this is a picture – just be thankful that we’re not out in the Midwest where they see this a lot, but, this is what we would call an oversized vehicle. And at some point this vehicle is going to have to make a turn and get to some sort of a destination. How is he going to do that? Well, these are the types of things that we have to think about and consider.
So, the challenge that we have as engineers is we have all of these variety of people, variety of vehicles. Everybody has their own special needs and yet, we’ve only got one road. We have to try to accommodate all of these people with just that one road. And with state roads, in particular, most state roads are arterials, and what I mean by that, that’s where we want the traffic to be. We’ve set up a road network with arterials. Arterials, collectors, and locals. And the arterials is where we want the traffic to be. Local roads your neighborhood type streets, and we don’t want people diverting from the arterials onto these types of roads. So, with state roads, again, most of them being arterials, we want to keep them on the arterials.
So, some of the design features that we can include for Complete Streets – Pedestrian improvements. Now, there’s a variety of different improvements. I’m not going to touch on them all, but one of the things that we obviously get very involved with is Pedestrian Crossing Signals. And they come in some different varieties as well, as they kind of have listed here.
Exclusive Pedestrians—that’s most of what our signals here in the state are, exclusive pedestrian signals. That’s where we stop the entire intersection, the pedestrian then crosses any of the legs. There are some signals out there that are what we call Concurrent Green, oh, I’m sorry, Concurrent Walk, where the, say, the north–south pedestrian is crossing the street the same time the north–south vehicles are moving. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of that. I know – where’s Sandy Fry? She was, at the last meeting, was not a big fan of the Exclusive Peds, but we disagree on that one.
And then, and then there’s Side Street Green, which is a big pet peeve of mine. I hate Side Street Green, but that’s basically where you come up to the button, you press the button and it just stops the main street so that the pedestrians can cross, but you’re crossing with the side street, with the green at the same time.
There’s also Crosswalks. And I put a question mark behind Crosswalks because a lot of people think that a crosswalk is a pedestrian improvement. I don’t really think that’s true. A lot of people, you know, if you go back to the definition of what a crosswalk is, what the purpose of a crosswalk is, the main purpose of a crosswalk is to tell the pedestrian where we want them to cross. A lot of people think it’s to warn the driver that there’s pedestrians in the area, and that’s a side benefit of a crosswalk. But the main purpose of the crosswalk is to tell the pedestrian where it’s the safest place to cross.
A lot of times with these public meetings we get – people come up to me and they’ll say it’s very dangerous to cross at this spot. We need a crosswalk. Well, if it’s dangerous to cross, the last thing we should be doing is put in a crosswalk there. So I think – that’s one thing that we can look at, crosswalks as a pedestrian enhancement perhaps, but again, it’s not a, an improvement in the sense that it’s going to make it any safer to cross there.
Wide shoulders is something that we can use in rural areas. It’s probably more applicable for pedestrians where sidewalks are typically not too widely used. And then Sidewalks are used in more of the suburban and urban areas. But as far as sidewalks go, you know, everybody thinks that sidewalks are an easy fix. Well, I can tell you that they’re not. Not everybody likes sidewalks. We had a project in Vernon. We proposed some sidewalks. They told us no. We had a project in Stamford. We proposed sidewalks. They told us no. Killingworth—they said no. Wallingford—they said no. We’re going to put them in anyway in Wallingford. East Haven they told us no. We’re going to put them in anyway.
So, these are not the most popular things to put in and one of the reasons is what I call NIMFY’s. You’ve probably all heard of the NIMBY’s—Not In My Back Yard. Well, this is a phrase that I came up with. NIMFY’s is Not In My Front Yard. People do not want to have sidewalks in their front yard. They don’t want to have to shovel them, or they don’t want trees cut down, or whatever the case may be. But sidewalks are not the most popular things in the world, and Tom kind of alluded to that a little bit earlier.
Some of the different features we can include for bikes; some of the pictures here show some of these features but Markings, we’ve got Separated Lanes, we’ve got Off Road Trails is something that we’re obviously looking at. And again, these are just some features that are used in, in road design and are things that we can consider as we proceed forward with a design and where we’re trying to accommodate bicyclists within a road system.
So, what is a Complete Street look like? You know, we hear a lot of the terminology about it and yet, you know, engineers tend to be very visual people. We want to see a picture of what a Complete Street looks like and then try to copy that. Well, for what we’ve heard, Complete Streets, you want to include sidewalks if possible, you want to try to include a wide area for, for bikes, and you want to have safe pedestrian crossings, right? So, my question is, is this a complete street?
Those of you that may know this area, this is Route 32 as it goes through Connecticut College. We have sidewalks, we have wide shoulders – there’s nothing safer for a pedestrian than a pedestrian bridge, right? And if you look, it’s got to be a low speed environment. It’s only 40 mile an hour speed limit, right? And, now this bridge was built before 80-80 requirements came in, but if you look we do also provide a crosswalk. It may be, I don’t know 80-90 feet long, but we do provide a crosswalk here. So is this a complete street? How many think this is a complete street? Nobody. A couple.
Well, I would argue that this could be considered to meet the, the letter of the law perhaps, but it certainly, I don’t think, meets the intent of the law. When people think of complete streets they’re typically looking at something more like this. Now the top picture happens to be a roundabout, and yes, I am a roundabout advocate. But you don’t need to have a roundabout to make it a complete street. On the bottom you see a more conventional type of road system. And you know, one of the things that you’ll notice in this, you’ve got crosswalks, you’ve got the people walking, you’ve got the bicyclists. Whenever you do a complete streets rendering make sure that you have a picture of a happy retired couple like on the bottom right there.
But this is, this is more typical of what we’re looking at when we’re talking complete streets. This is another picture. This, I think, is in Charlotte, and this includes just about everybody, I think. We’ve got the bicyclists, we’ve got the person in the wheelchair, we’ve got a blind person crossing. You even got a hybrid bus, I believe, in the – on the right hand side there. So this is kind of, again, more of a typical – what we’re typically thinking of as a complete street. But again, remember what that law says is, it’s not just in the urban areas. This is on all highways, we have to start to consider this.
I want to talk a little bit about road diets. And I think we showed you a picture of one before, but this is something that we haven’t done a lot of in Connecticut, but we have done it in a few places. Typically, we’re talking about converting a four-lane road, usually a four-lane, say undivided road, to either three lanes or two lanes and then providing either a wide shoulder or a bike lane. One of the typical, or really the typical concerns whenever you talk about road diets is you’re either going to lose capacity or safety or both. And, you know, while that is possible, one of the things that you really have to think about is, is that four-lane road really a four-lane road? Do you have on-street parking? Do you have bus stops? Do you have left turns along that corridor? If so, you may not really have four true lanes. Now this is some pictures of a – on the left-hand side here you’ll see some pictures where we do have some on-street parking. On the top picture, yeah, you might get by. Somebody might drive by in that right lane, but most people would tend to want to avoid that lane and probably use the left lane. And the bottom picture, there’s nobody going to use that right lane. They’re all really going to stay in that left lane. So, on-street parking can really, you know, essentially eat up one of these lanes.
On the right two pictures you’ll see some areas where we’ve got some bus stops. And on that top picture, when the bus stops to pick up this woman and her child that bus is going to be stopped for maybe up to a minute, I don’t know. But that whole time nobody’s using that right lane. And the bottom picture, again, if you’re driving down that road and the bus is stopped there you’re probably going to shy away from trying to pass that bus in that right lane, just because it’s tight. You don’t know if the bus is going to pull out. So again, you don’t really have four true lanes, I would say, in any of these pictures.
One of the things they talk about is loss of safety. Well, this happens to be Albany Avenue in Hartford, but one of the things I’m going to show you here is watch this car, this silver car here in the left lane, and watch what happens when he comes up to the intersection. As you can see, that’s not exactly the safest maneuver. He did have his turn signal on both times, which is unusual for Albany Avenue, but – but, you know, that’s what you’re going to typically find. When you have somebody that’s stopped to make a left turn in that left lane, the people that are going straight through in that left lane are going to swerve to avoid him. So, you don’t necessarily have a safe situation to begin with, frankly, with these four-lane roads. You know, going to a road diet where you’re providing one good through lane in each direction and then a center lane for left turns, in many cases, it’s probably even a safer situation. You know, again. You’ve got to look at each one of these case by case, but road diets are not something to be afraid of.
I’ll talk a little bit about some of the recent changes that we’ve made here at ConnDOT. I think Tom mentioned this. This is our construction staking specification that we’re using in our projects these days and I want to blow up one section of it where this is really all we’re talking about. When we repave a road we’re looking at the lane striping. We’re not just putting back the lanes that, the lane widths that used to be there. We’re putting back either an 11- or a 12-foot lane, nothing wider than a 12-foot lane. And we’re trying to provide at least a 5-foot shoulder wherever possible. And again, this is really done to try to accommodate bicyclists.
This is our previous sidewalk policy and, again, I blew up a couple sections. And, essentially what this old sidewalk policy said was that if the community wanted us to put in a sidewalk, they had to pay the non-federal share of the cost of that sidewalk. So, if it was an 80 percent Federal/20 percent State funded project, which is pretty typical, the community then had to pay 20 percent of the cost of that sidewalk. Which wasn't bad, but it still, it required the community to come up with some money. It also required us to come up with a cost hearing arraignment, which was a pain in the neck. But, so – and then also, we did not allow any exclusive sidewalk projects under that old policy.
We’ve come up with a new policy, about – I think it was about a year and a half ago, and again, I blew up a couple sections of it. And essentially, what we did was we changed it such that the funding ratio for the sidewalk work will match the funding ratio for the rest of the project. So, if it’s an 80/20 project, the sidewalks get funded 80/20, and then there would be no town share or town match with that. We also now do a lot of exclusive sidewalk projects. Again, they have to compete with all the other projects, but they are a consideration now.
This is the Bike/Ped Assessment Form. We came up with this in May of last year and it was really intended to make the designer think about the bike/ped needs. Now, the law, as you remember, said that we have to consider this on all projects, so this is really intended to not only make the designer think about the needs, but also to document how you did consider those needs. To say the form was not well received is probably an understatement. Everybody hated it. It’s too confusing. So, we’re working on Version 2.0, and hopefully that will be coming out later this year.
We do have the Complete Streets Committee that Ted mentioned and yes, I was put in charge of it. Tom asked for a volunteer and I volunteered and he said that’s good because we were going to pick you anyway. But we do have representatives of these different offices. We are going to be working on a Complete Streets Manual, and then we’re also going to be looking at the need for any changes in policy or guidance as it pertains to Complete Streets.
Talk a little about some of the projects that we’ve had some success with, and these are really just a few of the projects within DOT. These are just, frankly, the ones that I’m familiar with. We’ve had many more, but I was lazy and just picked the ones that I knew.
The first one I’m going to talk about is one that I’m actually very proud of. This is in Manchester. I’m proud for a couple reasons. This is my home town, so that’s one reason. But also it’s – there’s a lot of good that came out of this project. And, if you look at this, this is a – on the left-hand side, this is I-84, and Route 6 and 44 comes through, cross I-84, and then, if you look on the right side you’ll see that it sort of splits into three different roads. You’ve got New State Road, Middle Turnpike, and Center Street. But you’ll also notice that on the left-hand side of the picture is kind of a high-speed environment, especially if you go off the left of the picture, it’s sort of a high-speed area. And then on the right side you’ve got a residential area. Very heavy residential area. You’ve got some single family homes, you’ve got a lot of apartments, you’ve got some condominium complexes, and there really isn’t a good transition between that high-speed environment and the residential area. And then, of course, right in the middle we’ve got two high schools: Cheney Tech and East Catholic High Schools. So, and then, if you look at the – this is a little bit closer picture of it – you can see that this is the – this is the previous configuration of this area. And it was very confusing. It had this sort of X in the middle of these two roads. People just really didn’t understand how to drive it. The alignments were very conducive to high speeds.
Now, you can kind of tell by the roads going through there, they’re very straight or very flat curves. So we had a very high-speed environment coming through here. We had a lot of accidents. There was a – there’s a U-Turn maneuver, which I can’t really show you on this picture, but it was a very crazy maneuver. But that, in combination with the high speeds, we had a lot of accidents there. But we also found that it’s really not a very bike or pedestrian friendly environment and the schools, you know, typically schools in a neighborhood are kind of the local feature of a neighborhood. Well, in this case, these schools were very much disconnected from these neighborhoods. You really couldn’t get to them. You certainly couldn’t walk to them very easily. And even in a car it was tough to get to some of them. To get from like Center Street to Cheney Tech, for example, was a very difficult maneuver. And then, to get from Cheney Tech back to Center Street was also very difficult. So there was definitely a disconnect between the schools and the neighborhoods.
These are some pictures showing you what it used to look like. Again, not a very pedestrian-friendly environment. And if you look at the bottom left picture, it’s – it was a very confusing road network. On the bottom right, this is how, if you were – there’s a condominium complex, and if you had to walk from there up to either one of these schools, this is what you had to walk along. You didn’t really get, have much of a shoulder, not to mention even anywhere off the road where they could really walk. So. And then, when it came down to the, there is, I think, three bus routes that go through this area and I think all three of them share this particular bus stop. So when a bus was stopped, the backup that resulted from that is, as you can see on the bottom picture, it was pretty substantial.
So what we did with our project, we took this kind of confusing mess, frankly, and we turned it into this. And what we ended up with was, if you look at the picture – the old configuration is on the top, the new configuration is on the bottom. Some of the changes we made, we took that intersection and we reconfigured it into a much more conventional intersection. We kind of created a real corridor through this area as opposed to the sort of dual corridor that was there before. We created a signal for Cheney Tech High School as well. We also introduced a number of progressively sharper horizontal curves. And this was really done in an intent to transition people from that high-speed environment on the left side of the picture to the residential environment on the right side. So each one of those curves that you see gets progressively sharper. Also, if you’re going to, if you remember the way, or if you can see the way that people got from Center Street on the bottom – the leg on the bottom of the top picture – it was really a very flat right-hand turn. So people would go whipping through there at pretty good speeds. Now you have to come up and you have to make a right turn. So it really does slow traffic down, as they get onto Center Street in particular.
We also added 4200 feet of new sidewalks and this is where we connected the residential areas to this, the school areas. You know, we had sidewalks in various spots. There was a lot of gaps in the sidewalks. We completed all of those gaps, and we really came up with a good network of sidewalks through here.
We also created bus turnouts, which you can kind of see in this picture. There was four of them, and that allows the buses to pull off, let their passengers on and off the bus without feeling the pressure of the traffic backing up behind them.
We also, in conjunction with the Department of Public Works, redesigned the parking lot for Cheney Tech. And this was done to better configure into the new intersection configuration, but it also gave us an opportunity to do some nice site design type of stuff, which we typically don’t get involved in, but this was a nice challenge for us. And one of the things we created was this sort of peninsula type of area. This is where the school told us they had this number of buses, and they needed to be able to line them all up so that when the students get out they can all get onto the buses and then drive off. So what we did, we kind of created this sort of peninsula type area and the buses will line up, as you see in those yellow squares there, and they’ll line up along that peninsula and then, the nice thing is, the students then walk along that sidewalk. And, as you can see, they’re sort of corralled by the buses, so it prevents these crazy students from going all over the parking lot. But the nice thing, too, is that all the doors of the buses are on the inside so the students can just walk right in, get onto their buses, and then the buses pull out.
It also created a couple of opportunities for some landscaping and some, if you look on the, the one on the left there, that area, they put in some sort of a statue. I have no idea what that statue’s supposed to be, by the way, but I’m not an art major. But, this was something that they came up with and I guess it means something to Cheney Tech. But, in any case, it did provide the opportunity for that, so we were able to – rather than just putting in straight sidewalks and paving everything over, we provided a couple of landscaping type opportunities there.
We also provided five-foot shoulders throughout the length of this project, which was done for bicyclists. And the section of East Middle Turnpike was restriped by the town. This was essentially a road diet, or it was a road diet from a four-lane road to a two-lane road. It was four very tight lanes. They went to four lanes with some wide shoulders for about a half a mile. And then, up on the left-hand side, or the west side of the project, where Routes 6 and 44 goes over I-84, we also restriped this bridge. We narrowed up the lanes and provided wider shoulders, again, for the bicyclists. And, just off the left of the picture is where the existing bike trail from I-384 comes and connects into this area.
So we took this sort of very, again, pedestrian very unfriendly environment and we created a much better environment, particularly for pedestrians as well as bicyclists, and even for the motorists as well. It’s a much safer entrance and exit from Cheney Tech, as well as from East Catholic, and generally speaking, I think it’s gone a very – the project has gone very well and we’ve gotten a lot of compliments on it.
Next project I want to talk about is in East Hartford. This is the intersection of Silver Lane and Forbes Street. With this project, we were asked to provide left-turn lanes on Silver Lane. There’s a lot of left turns in both directions here and those lanes were definitely needed from a safety point of view. And as we got into the design, one of the things we found was that there’s a gap in the sidewalk on that north side of Silver Lane between those two yellow lines. It was about an 835-foot gap in the sidewalk. So we eliminated that gap. We made that connection and, if you’ll notice on the bottom there, this is in the vicinity of the Sunset Ridge Elementary School. So, connection of these sidewalks was certainly a very big improvement.
And then, some of the other things we did, we narrowed the lanes on Silver Lane so that we could widen the shoulders. The shoulder on Forbes Street was widened and, again, this is, just to the north of this picture is another bike trail that the – so we’re providing a connection between this intersection and that bike trail, at least within the limits of this project. And then, one of the other improvements that we did here is something that is typically considered sort of a no-no from a pedestrian environment.
Typically, people are looking for – when they were talking about pedestrian-friendly, they want to see us making these radii as small as possible. You want to keep this crosswalk as short as possible. Well, in this case, we actually increased the radius on these corners and we did that for pedestrians. And that sounds a little counterintuitive, but we talked to – during the design of this project, we actually talked to one of the crossing guards. And remember, there’s a school on the bottom right side of this picture. And the crossing guard at that time told us that when she crosses these kids she tells them to stay away from this corner because that radius was so tight that the school buses, in order to make that turn, had to run over the sidewalk. So, really, by making it bigger we’ve actually made it safer for the pedestrians. That’s the way we’re looking at it. And, yeah, we added a couple feet to the crosswalk, but again, this is an exclusive pedestrian phase signal, so when the pedestrians do cross they’re not cross – they’re not really conflicting with traffic. We felt it was a good improvement to do this.
Now, this is a good example of when we’re using, when we’re doing state roads and you have to consider all of the users, you’ve got to consider pedestrians, obviously, but you’ve also got to consider all the motorists that are going to be using this, and all the types of vehicles. You certainly have to consider school buses here and when we did that, we found that we really had to make this improvement, and I do think that this is an improvement.
This is the area where we, where there was a gap in that sidewalk on that north side of Silver Lane. This is what it looked like before, and rather than just put in a piece of sidewalk, we wanted to try to make it as friendly as we could, so we came up with a plan to put in some landscaping and make it somewhat pedestrian friendly. We didn’t put in any trees quite this large but eventually they’ll grow up to be there. And you’ll notice, we got the retired couple so that you know that this is a Complete Street type of a application. But again, this is, rather than just stick in the sidewalk we wanted to try to make it as friendly as we could and the landscaping certainly helps with that.
Now, just to the east of that intersection, so on the left side, that circle is the four-lane intersection that we just talked about. Well, to the east of that, the section of Silver Lane, this photo is from April of 1990. Well, in August of 1990 we were overlaying this road and I was in traffic at the time and I was asked to get involved with this. And what we did, we actually changed that from a four-lane road to a two-lane road. So this was a road diet 22 years ago, before the term road diet even was created, I’m sure. But we found it, again, the four lanes that were out there were very tight. We really didn’t need them from a traffic volume point of view anymore, so we went back to a two-lane road with wide shoulders and, and I remember when we were out there, the guy from maintenance that was doing the pavement markings, he said, you’re never gonna let this – it’s never gonna stay this way. And he bet me $5 that we were going to change it within three months. I won that bet. But this was a case, like I said, this is a case where you had a four-lane road, it really didn’t need to be a four-lane road, and it operates much better as a two-lane road.
This is a section in East Haven. We have a project actually just to the sort of south of this picture, but just prior to us getting involved in this, we were asked to look at converting this road from the four-lane road that it was to the, to a two-lane road. And this is what we created. Two-lane road, wide shoulders on both sides. Within our project we’re actually proposing to change it again to actually remove some of the existing sort of excess pavement out here and put in some sidewalks. So the proposal is that all of the road and the sidewalks would actually fit within the footprint of the existing pavement. This is one of those places where they told us they didn’t want sidewalks but we’re going to build them anyway. So, this is a proposal that we’re going in with and this is sort of a road diet on top of a road diet, if you will.
This is a project we built some years ago in East Granby and this is one of the few projects I think I’ve ever worked on where we actually widened the road from a two-lane road to a four-lane road. But we had to do it out here. The volumes just exceeded the capacity of a two-lane road, and actually, the community asked us to widen this road. I should mention that, too. But rather than just widen it, we actually widened it and we put in a raised median in the middle, planted that raised median and, if you notice, there’s this school here, Allgrove School. I think that’s the a – it was a, I think, a third and fourth grade school, or something like that, but we actually put in a raised bern between the school and the road to try to keep some of the noise and the visual pollution down a little bit. But then, during the design of this project the town asked us, we had this Metacomet Trail, which is off on the left-hand side of the picture, and then we’ve got sort of the center of the town on the right-hand side with the Town Hall and the Library and all the shopping, and they wanted to be able to connect it to. So, we built a multi-use trail along this side of the road and, you know, it was nothing fancy. It’s basically just a paved path that connected the trail and the center of town. The interesting thing is, years ago there was a series of articles in the Hartford Courant and it talked about the DOT being auto-centric and not thinking of pedestrians enough, and they had a picture, during construction, of them with an excavator, I think, and it was on this project. And the excavator was actually building this multi-use trail at the time. But, and, you know, as soon as we built this thing people started using it. I’ve heard, Mark Carlino from the Town of Manchester –I don’t think he’s here today, he’s mentioned that the bike trails out in Manchester, people started using it as soon as the asphalt is cool. Well, that was pretty much the case out here, too. And you can see, this is – we were still in construction here and people were already starting to use it.
Now this is in West Haven. This is an intersection. This is the way it used to look. This is an intersection we were asked to signalize, and as we got into the design of it we found that there were some real pedestrian concerns out here. This is on the eastbound approach to that intersection. The shoulder, as you can see, was fairly wide and it’s – there is no sidewalk out there but we at least had a wide enough shoulder that pedestrians and bicyclists could use this. But the concept that we had at the time was to add a left-turn lane, signalize the intersection, and then we were going to have to nail that shoulder down from about an 8-foot shoulder to about a 2-foot shoulder. So again, not the best environment for pedestrians. The – just to the south of this picture is Long Island Sound, so we really couldn’t widen the road over there anymore, and we had some endangered species of grass and whatnot, so it was not like we could really put in a sidewalk.
So we looked at some options out here and one of the things that we looked at, by the way, was this crosswalk on the left-hand side of the picture. There were three pedestrian accidents. I think this was over a five-year period, but there were three pedestrian accidents in that one crosswalk. Now that’s pretty unusual for us, you know, to see one pedestrian accident is kind of unusual, frankly. To see three, that really raises some eyebrows. So, we knew there was a concern with pedestrians, particularly through the curvature and the high speeds of this area. So, rather than the signal we proposed a roundabout, and this was the first modern roundabout on a state road. And this was one of the ones that we got a lot of yelling and screaming at but we did. We went to the town. The town was supportive of it. We went to the public. They hated the idea. But we built it anyway. The – this is the finished picture and one of the things that we’ve, what we were able to do is actually reduce the pavement, so rather than build it, widen the road for a left-turn lane, we actually reduced the pavement and we were able to put in these splitter islands which provide a pedestrian refuge area, so it’s a much safer pedestrian crossing across all three of these lanes.
But one of the keys is, we really created a low-speed environment out here. You just cannot drive through here much faster than about 15 miles an hour. If you do 20, you’re probably really pushing it. You know, as opposed to the old configuration where you could easily go through there at 40-50 miles an hour. Now this is not a staged photo. I swear. But, this is a picture kind of looking towards the roundabout and this was done, taken during construction and you can see this is a much more pleasant environment. You’ve got bicyclists that are riding through here. You’ve got a pedestrian crossing from the – just got some ice cream and he’s trying to cross the road. And, but what’s really amazing here, if you look a little bit closer, is this car is actually yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. And this is not something that we see a lot in Connecticut. This guy was actually stopped. He waited for the pedestrian. The pedestrian was going to talk to the bicyclists so he waved him on, but it’s something that you don’t typically see. But it’s because of that low-speed environment. People yield in a low-speed environment much more readily than they will in the higher speed environment.
Talk a little bit about expressways that they are excluded from that Complete Streets law, but it doesn’t mean we can’t consider them. This is I-384 as it goes through downtown Manchester and what most of you probably are familiar with is we do have a multi-use trail there. A shared-use path or whatever you want to call it, but it’s, it is a pedestrian and bicycle environment that can be used. And if you’ll notice, it comes right up to that sort of downtown Manchester area. You know, in my opinion, I think the downtown Manchester could probably utilize this a little bit better and perhaps provide some more, you know, bike racks, bike facilities and whatnot to attract people to that downtown area. But it is a resource and it does get a lot of use, I can tell you. It’s – especially on the weekends it’s almost packed sometimes. And it’s probably used more by walkers than it is by bikers. It’s a very pleasant environment and it does create that sense of community that I talked about earlier.
Then these are just some pictures of that. The top picture on the left is the newest section that was recently built, showing some of the switchbacks. And then on the bottom right they sort of create a way of getting underneath one of the ramps. This is closer to East Hartford where I think this is a route that takes you over from 84 to 384, but you know, in general it’s a very pleasant environment. Even though you’re walking or riding very near an expressway, you know, you can hear each other talk. It’s, for the most part, it’s a very pleasant environment.
So one of the things that we’re working on is closing some of these gaps in the trails. That red line is the section of the Charter Oak Greenway that was just recently completed. We just, we just cut the ribbon on it a couple weeks ago, I think. And on from the right you can see there’s the Valley Falls and Hop River Greenway in Bolton, so one of our projects is to connect these two. And this is the, we call it the Gap Closure Project but this will connect the Charter Oak Greenway to the Hop River and Greenway in Bolton. And at the ribbon cutting ceremony a couple weeks ago, the Commissioner actually made a dedication that we’re going to then continue this all the way to the Rhode Island State line, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.
One of the other things that we’re doing is we’re doing a study of the Merritt Parkway. Very controversial, but we’re looking at the entire 37 mile stretch of the Merritt Parkway and we’re looking at the potential for a trail adjacent to the parkway. Now this is just a sort of conceptual rendering of what a trail might look like and again, it’s really intended to show that it would be – well, first of all it would be on the south side of the parkway, adjacent to the northbound direction, but we’re looking at, you know, the potential to provide like a scenic outlook type of thing where you could look at some of these, the historic bridges of the Merritt Parkway, and get an appreciation for that road that you really don’t get at 60-70-80-90 miles an hour that people drive. But then we’re also showing that as we come up to some of these side streets we’re looking at, right now we’re looking at-grade crossing of those roads. So we’re not looking to provide bridges and tunnels across most of these roads because of the scenic and historic characteristic of the parkway. That’s something that we want to make sure that we’re very protective of.
So, this is our rendering of it. There’s another view of it that somebody came up with that I kind of liked, too. This is what they’re calling the Express Commuter Lane. And if you’ve ever driven on the Merritt Parkway at peak hours you know this is probably a fairly accurate picture.
So, some of the challenges that we have, just to kind of sum up, again state roads are typically arterial roads. That’s where we want to keep the traffic. So as we get into some of these features, you’ll want to make sure that we’re trying to, to the best of our ability, that we maintain the traffic on that road and that we’re not diverting them onto roads that are less desirable for that traffic. Businesses is certainly a concern of ours. They will come to us any time we’re talking about something that will reduce traffic on the road, they don’t like that. They live on the traffic. Loss of, any loss of parking due to let’s say a sidewalk, for example, they’re going to have, they’re going to tell you that you’re putting them out of business. It’s a big concern for them.
We talked a little about the NIMBY’s and NIMFY’s. This is something that we have to deal with on just about every project. There are also sometimes conflicts between bikes and peds and we’ve seen that where, you know, we can provide a wider shoulder for a bike, let’s say, but then when the pedestrian has to cross that road, he now has a little bit more pavement to cross. And then we have, sometimes we build in these bumpouts to shorten up that crosswalk length and that becomes a conflict with a bicyclist that’s trying to ride in that shoulder.
And of course, we have the taxpayers who like to tell us how to do our jobs and they’re very concerned about whether we should be spending money on these types of improvements rather than widening I-95 or whatever the case may be. You know, everybody has their own sort of agenda and they’re more than glad to tell us what that agenda is.
And then a lot of times people want to say is this transportation or recreation? And we get this a lot with the Merritt Parkway Trail, for example. Is this really going to be used for transportation use or is it more of a recreation use? And it kind of gets back to the taxpayers and how you’re spending their money. These are some of the things that we run into a lot.
And as a closing thought, again, I’ll go back to the All Users and All Roads, and remember that this is something that’s supposed to be applied to every project. You know, when we got into the context sensitive solutions movement, people started talking about whether or not this was a CSS project or not. They’re all CSS projects. There is no CSS project. You know, CSS is a philosophy. Complete Streets is really a philosophy that apply to all projects. So, as we go forward, again, you can’t exclude any of these roads. You have to be considered, or you have to consider these things on all these roads. And remember the importance of signage.
Thank you.
