Cosmobile Cosmopolitan Transport: Yale and Pfizer's Transportation Treason

Monday, April 21, 2008

Yale and Pfizer's Transportation Treason

Ripping off the public right of way;
New Haven, Connecticut Route 34 Connector

http://newhavenindependent.org/archives/2007/06/what_will_happe.php

Posted by: Our Town | June 19, 2007 3:10 PM

I really don't get it. You concentrate economic activity to the downtown area and the Route 34 "Corridor", and then you restrict access to the area by choking its main artery? Let's not be silly. We do not have alternate transportation; we do not even have near the population density to support mass transit without massive subsidies (a much larger subsidy than required for the roads). You talk of pedestrians and safety, and I can think of nothing safer than keeping the vehicles away from the people in limited access cuts or covered roadways. Just think, a limited access roadway can handle approximately 1200 cars per lane per hour, a surface street can handle about 600 under ideal conditions. You need twice as many surface lanes for the same amount of traffic, and that traffic which now moves at a steady flow would have to start and stop at traffic lights, a major source of air pollution. Pedestrians that now cross the Rt. 34 roadway on bridges would now have to cross twice as many lanes in a crosswalk.

If the purpose is to reduce the traffic in the "Corridor", which is not what a developer wants to hear (one of the comments about Yale's purchase of the West Haven site was "Access to I-95"), where will the traffic go? Onto an adjacent local street, exacerbating traffic conditions on those nearby streets to the point of gridlock? Or maybe not come to New Haven at all, as Yale has shown us with their West Haven site.

This isn't an issue of cars vs. pedestrians and bicycles. Cars and trucks are and will be the transport of choice for a long time. It is safer and better for pedestrians and bicycles to keep as many cars and trucks as we can off the local streets. This idea that a "Boulevard" is more pedestrian friendly than an expressway is a crock.

The problem with Route 34 is that Henry Fernandez and JD gave it away to Pfizer when they didn't demand that their building be built on a platform, and JD has now let Yale build in the Rt. 34 right-of-way also. Now JD is cramming Gateway College into the mix, Yale is continuing to build, and the Hospital continues to grow. All this traffic in two surface lanes...What ARE you thinking?

Posted by: nfjanette | June 20, 2007 1:20 AM

The problem with Route 34 is that Henry Fernandez and JD gave it away to Pfizer when they didn't demand that their building be built on a platform, and JD has now let Yale build in the Rt. 34 right-of-way also. Now JD is cramming Gateway College into the mix, Yale is continuing to build, and the Hospital continues to grow. All this traffic in two surface lanes...What ARE you thinking?

Thank God I've lived long enough to see someone else understand the problems with those decisions. If that one block next to the Air Rights garage had been built differently, the connector traffic could at least continue under the garage and surface up ramps into that block, or even better, the next block. Look at the snarled traffic in that area during any rush hour - New Haven traffic engineering at it's finest.