Description
Along the entire 1.25 mile length of Goffe Street from Broadway Downtown to Osborn in Beaver Hills, only a dozen frequently used on-street parking spaces would need to removed in order to accommodate dedicate bike lanes along both sides of the street. The parking loss, however, would come to an area that has seen a large increase in off-street surface parking lots in recent years. Goffe Street, one of the oldest routes in New Haven dating back to the aboriginal habitation of the area, connects Downtown to Westville through the Dixwell and Beaver Hills neighborhoods. Dedicated bike lanes could help calm traffic, connect neighborhoods and schools, improve safety for all road users, encourage more active recreation in the area, and be included with targeted public and private investments in surrounding streetscapes - all with little to no impact on automotive facilities.
With enough interest, this issue could be further studied by the City and potentially come to fruition as funding becomes available from State, Federal, and local sources.
For more information on how dedicated bike lanes along Goffe Street might look, see here: https://newhavenurbanism.org/new-haven-planning/multimodal-transportation-planning/goffe-street/
6 Comments
jack (Registered User)
Caroline (Registered User)
Thank you for posting JHop!
During New Haven Bike Month this past May, the Whalley Main Streets Team (in particular, Nadine Herring and Chris Peralta) hosted the 1st ever biking event in the Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills. At least over 150 people came out – kids, families, older folks — all on their bikes. Milone & Macbroom, an urban planning firm, even worked with some neighborhood kids to built a temporary pop-up bike lane on Winthrop.
From that event and others, it was clear that many neighbors in the Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills and nearby Dixwell neighborhood would love more biking infrastructure. In fact, here's a quick video made during New Haven Bike Month showing many neighbors give their reason why they want protected bike lanes in their neighborhood: http://www.newhavenbikemonth.com/4lanes/
Sending this issue to Nadine for input she might have too!
Nadine Horton (Registered User)
Thank you so much for posting this issue Jonathan! As someone who rides my bike down Goffe on occasion to get to work I would personally love to see this become reality, but I've also seen many neighborhood kids and others who live in Beaver Hills, Dixwell and Westville ride through this area on a regular basis and it would make it much easier and safer for all of us.
As Caroline said, we had a great turnout for our 1st bike month event on Whalley and one of the things we heard a lot of was that we need to get bike lanes in our area to encourage even more people to ride safely. As someone who bikes as my primary form of transportation now, I am really happy to see more of these conversations happening in our neighborhood and would readily support a plan like this and I know my neighbors would too!
New Haven resident (Registered User)
Jonathan Hopkins (Registered User)
The details would need to be worked out by the city, but I don't think the roadway would not need to be widened - only the on-street parking along the north side of the street would need to be removed, which shouldn't be an issue since no houses face that side of the street and no one currently parks there. Parking on the south side of Goffe Street would need to remain in order to serve all of the multi-family houses along that side of the street though.
Closed Manager of Operations, Process Improvement - Transportation, Traffic, & Parking (Verified Official)