Description
Whitney Ave. street parking between NH town line and Peabody Museum during morning and evening peak. People left their car parked during 7-9am and 5-7pm essentially turning capacity of Whitney Ave. into one-lane street. Some aggressive driver changes lanes due to this and create safety issue. The delay due to all this is 10 minutes per direction per day, which is around 80 hours per person per year, 10 days of working days. We cannot afford the luxury of few to break the no parking rules at this cost. 1 fix solves all problems: Just enforce the no parking rule during peak time, the rule is already there.
7 Comments
CT Livable Streets Campaign (Registered User)
I understand the frustration when it takes a few extra minutes to get somewhere in the city, but parking may be a benefit to the neighbors by slowing traffic speeds. The two lane stretches of Whitney become dangerous, noisy and unpleasant speedways.
Traffic flow is great, but all social and property value impacts within the neighborhood must be considered and evaluated before making changes like these -- not just the needs of drivers passing through. For this reason, the city will generally not widen neighborhood streets that are considered attractive precisely because they are smaller and have slower speeds, e.g., Orange Street.
With regards to Whitney, over 100 neighbors in East Rock have met specifically on this issue in the past year and the general opinion has been for limiting Whitney to a street with one lane in each direction (improvements such as a center turn lane would actually make vehicular traffic flow more smoothly and efficiently on Whitney than it does right now as a two lane street).
Other "high priority" improvements included traffic calming (e.g., circles), improved crosswalks and bicycle infrastructure. The city's Complete Streets Order requires a balance between these user groups - which currently does not exist on Whitney but which must be addressed by the city as soon as possible.
Please note this is a local road and entirely within the city's control.
juli (Registered User)
pete, i have a different idea of "capacity". consider two lanes completely open for cars to speed through vs. one lane of traffic moving at a steady, lawful speed and a lane of parked cars (or, imagine further, a bike lane). when cars travel at slower speeds, they don't require as much space in between each other to stop, so they can travel closer together, thus the street can accomodate more cars. your sense of lost time is only because psychologically, waiting @#$% you off more. do you really believe that racing to each stoplight, maybe making it through one or two extra lights on your way to work is actually saving you the amount of time you claim?
you might be interested to read "traffic; why we drive the way we do" by tom vanderbilt.
i am curious- what type of street do you live on? do you drive the same speed on your street as you do on whitney? what if i drove past your loved ones the way that you do mine?
Anonymous (Guest)
Melissa (Guest)
CT Livable Streets Campaign (Registered User)
Melissa (Guest)
Closed City of New Haven (Verified Official)