'New' Urbanism Threat to Pedestrians?

Route 34 Freeway Chock:
new development
that could have accommodated subterrain freeway extension
but which does not
thanks to Yale University selfishness

Official planning claims to to seek a more pedestrian friendly New Haven Route 34 corridor, particularly in the area around York Street which crosses over the freeway beneath the Air Rights garage.

Yet such planning truncates the freeway to the east, placing the full direct stream of freeway traffic upon the frontage road along this garage in the area with the greatest need for pedestrian cross connectivity.

It can not turn back the clock to eliminate I-91, I-95 and their connecting interchange.

Yet it blocks a short extension of the subterranean freeway that would allow a greater dispersal of traffic and allow it to continue below ground to the west of this area of proposed pedestrian connectivity.

And it seeks to attract even greater amounts of vehicular traffic with massive new real estate development (far larger than the pre-existing residential neighborhoods) with large amounts of parking.

Could the 'planners' ' responsible of failing to require these new buildings to be built with subterranean passages for the highway extension be somehow held liable by the families of pedestrians injured or killed in the area around the garage?


http://cos-mobile.blogspot.com/2008/04/yale-and-pfizers-transportation-treason.html
http://www.tstc.org/press/2008/052708_Rt34_signon.pdf

CNU Mis describes New Haven 34 Freeway

Congress for 'New' Urbanism mis-description avoids mention of depressed grade permitting buildings and park land atop freeway

http://www.cnu.org/highways/freewayswithoutfutures

4. Route 34, New Haven, CT

(excerpt)

The Oak Street Connector, or Route 34, begins at the junction of Interstates 95 and 91 and extends on columns into downtown New Haven for 1.1 miles before dropping to grade and continuing as a pair of one-way streets. Built in 1959, the Connector was an urban renewal project, occupying 26 acres of land between downtown and the nearby neighborhood. The original plan was to extend the road another 10 miles, but that long section was never built. As a result, 600 families and 65 businesses were displaced to make room for a highway that was never completed. As of 2005, 73,900 vehicles traveled on the Connecter per day.

Route 34 looking east

http://blog.tstc.org/2008/03/27/new-havens-road-to-revitalization-re-creating-a-community-from-the-route-34-connector/

Note from the photos above that the Route 34 Freeway has an elevated segment crossing over railroad tracks that connects to an interchange with I-91 and I-95 , yet the segment closer is depressed (below grade) with overpasses visible for Church and College Streets. Although the freeway was built further in, beneath York Street to the western edge of the Air Rights Garage, traffic is forced off of it to the east, denying the freeway use beneath the Air Rights Garage.

The proposal would eliminate the depressed segment, even though that could accommodate air rights development, while likely preserving the elevated segment.

http://blog.tstc.org/2008/04/22/route-34-connector-piece/

Route 34 development proposal looking west
with depressed freeway segment eliminated
but retaining elevated segment crossing over railroad

TSTC Big Mistake on Rt. 34 Freeway

http://blog.tstc.org/2008/03/27/new-havens-road-to-revitalization-re-creating-a-community-from-the-route-34-connector/

Check out the following spin, which fails to mention idea of buildings atop subterranean freeway:

http://www.designnewhaven.com/2008/08/route-34-hospital-projects-update.html

New Haven Hospital Projects May Heal City’s Route 34 Rift
Commercial Record (Boston), May 16, 2008, By Jeff Haynes, Reporter

The so-called connector route was anything but. After decades of division created by New Haven’s Route 34, efforts to start punching through pedestrian links between downtown and the Yale-New Haven Hospital are coming. Two mixed-use developments ready to break ground have the city’s residents, planners and real estate professionals waiting to see if the trend will move westward, bridging the gap the connector route filled with heavy traffic and vacant land.

Separated by a block, the two developments along Route 34 will serve the hospital in different ways. The $40 million Park Street building, with its groundbreaking scheduled for May 27, is designed to provide laboratory and support space to the hospital. A little farther west, Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. is slated to break ground in September for a mixed-use project that will include an 845-unit parking garage for the hospital.

But it’s the other functions of those sites that have everyone watching.

“Urbanistically, [the Park Street building] is a linking piece,” said Barry Svigals, of New Haven architectural firm Svigals & Partners. His firm and Behnisch Architects of California designed the building. The structure is intended to connect pedestrians to the Air Rights garage, the street, and Yale-New Haven’s $470 million Smilow Cancer Hospital, now under construction.

To help draw in people, the Park Street space includes retail – “things that will involve activating the street,” Svigals said. “There is an atrium – a public atrium – that people will be able to walk through and go to the shops down in the lower level.”

The Intercontinental project plans include 57,000 square feet of office space, 15,560 square feet of ground-floor retail and 29 residential housing units in a “wrap” structure around the garage. The housing component is something residents on both sides of Route 34 have been seeking in hopes that new housing will help recreate neighborhood ties severed long ago by the highway.

Getting the housing units included in the plan took some negotiating, however, as the hospital’s original proposal for the site was a 1,400-car garage.

“So while 29 units may sound like a small number of residential units for a whole city block, we’re very pleased that we were able to convince the hospital to reduce the size of the garage to 845 [spaces] and include these other uses on the block,” said Karyn Gilvarg, executive director of city’s planning department. “We think they are key to healing this gap between the neighborhood that has been there for 40 years.”

The mixed-use style is consistent with redevelopment plans for the area drawn up two years ago, in part by Svigals and Maura Cochran, chairwoman and chief executive officer of Hartford-based Bartram & Cochran, which specializes in adaptive reuse of functionally obsolete properties.

“Part of the plan was to take the area closest to [the hospital] and make it a garage with a facade of residential [uses], putting retail on the first floor,” Cochran said. “There was also a strong need for retail. The retail market right around the hospital is – no surprise – the strongest in the area. You have both the commuters and all the people coming to Yale. So it could support new development.”

.... more high-density, mixed-use developments could be coming, depending on the success of the Intercontinental project.

“I think it’s a big factor,” Gilvarg said. “The [neighboring] Pfizer development was, to a great deal, driven by the state Department of Economic and Community Development. So to my mind, they let Pfizer get away with building a 3-story building and surface parking. And we need much denser development in this area.”

“Hopefully the next site, the balance goes the other way [toward] the commercial, the retail and the residential uses,” she added.

The broker community feels the same way.

“For us, that’s 20 to 25 acres of prospective retail and commercial space,” said Rich Guralnick, senior commercial broker for North Haven-based H. Pearce Commercial Real Estate. “My guess is that is going to ultimately wind up being a good mix of medical office and retail.”

In addition to its proximity to the Yale-New Haven Hospital, the land also is close to the St. Raphael Hospital.

“We’re in unbelievable proximity to both the major hospitals in the city,” Guralnick said.

A lot of the area doctors are now located in offices that are either converted older homes or outdated medical buildings, he said, so “there’s a pent up demand both from Yale-New Haven and St. Raphael for doctors to have their private practices in close proximity to the hospital.”

Whatever development goes in likely will have a residential component, too, he said. “I think there’s going to be a demand for residential and affordable housing in that strip as part of the mixed use,” Guralnick said.

For Svigals, the development potential is there.

“With the hospital and the medical school on one side of this connector and the city on the other, you have two very strong generators that will easily fill in that space in between,” Svigals said. “There are two concepts here. One is a stepping stone concept that if you can create – without having to do an entire redevelopment – if you can begin to build upon what’s there and create stepping stones from one place to another, that’s one concept.”

“The other that’s really important is that any urban development has to be synergistic,” Svigals said. “There is no independent piece that can solve an urban problem. You need to be firing on absolutely every cylinder in concert.”

.... “Mixed use is really where the trend has been – how to recapture what got sent out to the suburbs in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with the urban mall spread,” Guralnick said. “Everyone is coming back into the city. So this is a fun opportunity for the city of New Haven to recapture and reposition itself against suburban sprawl.”

According to Gilvarg, the redevelopment of the lots will be concrete evidence of progress.

“When that starts to happen, I think people will recognize that within five years, two blocks will have been redeveloped after 40 or 50 years of nothing,” Gilvarg said.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

New MD Bay Bridge Needed

From TOLLROADS

National Capital to the Ocean needs an elegant & efficient bridge - P3 potential (EDITORIAL) Posted Fri, 2008-08-29 17:10

EDITORIAL: America's national capital region with a population of over 7.5 million people needs an elegant and efficient bridge on the way to the Atlantic coast. The existing pair of troubled, obsolete and ugly spans called the Chesapeake Bay Bridge need to be phased out, and a modern bridge put in their place.

On the existing decrepit spans there's always some huge disruption. In 2005 it was a deck repaving project that was botched and required months of lane closures. In 2007 it was a spectacular collision after a trailer came unhitched during two-way operations on the 3 lane span, killing several people and stopping traffic for more than a day. This year it's a fall-asleep driver wandering into the path of a tractor-trailer - also in unprotected two-way operations - which instead of being contained by the heavy concrete parapets effortlessly punched through and ended up in the Bay, the driver killed of course.

This Labor Day weekend and for perhaps another ten weeks only a single lane of the southern span will be in operation. After the latest fiasco they discovered corrosion in the steel bolts which hold the parapets to the deck - a 1980s add-on gone awry. Emergency repairs will occupy a lane around the clock.

It will be a maximum 2 lanes open per direction on a 3+3 lane road on either side.
Smaller incidents create less dramatic delays every few weeks.

The present spans are an operational nightmare.

The operational problems of the spans derive from:

- their incompatibility with the approach highways on either side 3+ 3 lanes going into 3+2 bridge lanes

- the lack of deck space on both spans for a central median barrier let alone for breakdown lanes and workzones

- steep grades up from the shallow water structures to the shipping channel spans

- the age of the spans especially the southern span, 56 years old, designed to much lower than current weight loadings and traffic densities

Without providing for greater traffic volumes than now the new Bay Bridge needs to have deck sufficient for:

- three travel lanes each direction to match the approach highways on either side

- sufficient spare space on either side of the travel lanes for broken down vehicles and work space

- a configuration that allows for two-way traffic on either side of a moveable/temporary barrier



Ideally there should be a sufficiently gentle vertical profile to the new bridge to allow heavy trucks to maintain speed on the upgrade but otherwise the deck needs to provide for an extra climbing lane on the upgrades.

About 138 feet (42m) of deck in total or 69ft (21m) each direction is needed to satisfy these requirements, which are normal on new interstate standard construction.


69ft (21m) allows for:

- 3x12ft (3.66m) fullsize travel lanes and 16.5ft (5m) each side for breakdown and work space, and space for runners & cyclists' lanes

- 4x12ft (3.66m) fullsize travel lanes plus 10.5ft (3.23m) each side for breakdown and work space, if the approach highways either side should be 4th-laned

- 6x11ft (3.4m) tight travel lanes plus 2ft (0.6m) central barrier for temporary or emergency 3+3 lane operations if the other direction was out of action

The 69ft (21m) each direction compares with:

- the 1952 southern span 2-lane deck of 28ft (8.5m)

- the 1973 northern span 3-lane deck of 38ft (11.6m)

The present deficient pair of spans provide 66ft (20.1m) total deck width compared to a needed 138ft (42m).

In an area that hurricanes very occasionally reach, and in an age of terrorism our new ideal Bay Bridge should probably built as twin spans - identical twins for esthetics.

Staging

The first new span is needed on the southern side to provide a regular 3 lanes eastbound. This would allow the 1952 span to be retired from regular use. It could be kept for occasional use or for regular use by bike riders until it needed to be removed to make way for the second new-span.

The project is not especially challenging in engineering terms. The sea floor is similar in profile to the sea floor under the east span portion of San Francisco Bay Bridge - minus the severe earthquake dangers. The two bridges are similar in total length.

Affordable?

The Maryland establishment - the Transportation Authority, legislators of both political parties, the governor and former governors, the Baltimore Sun - all say a new span is unaffordable.

It's one of the most affluent metro areas in the world and it can't afford a modern, comfortable road to its coastal playgrounds? This is preposterous.

What they mean is a new Bay Bridge can't be accommodated within the budgets and ways of doing things at state agencies.

The state toll authority MdTA doesn't want to take it on.

It's probably best that they don't. They have some big new projects on the go already - ICC and I-95 HOT lanes north of the Baltimore tunnels. Their management of the Bay Bridge has been so consistently awful a great cheer would go up on both sides of the Bay if the bridge was taken away from the MdTA.

The new Bay Bridge will almost certainly be a self-financing toll project.

There's an easy way to find out.

Set up a process to find out from investors what they'll fund in return for the right to toll. It's a perfect P3 or concession project.

Finally the existing spans are an esthetic atrocity that mar the beauty of the Bay with their trashy complexity and their jarring lines, so out of respect for the beautiful Bay we should be looking for ways to be rid of them while building a functional substitute.

(SOURCE: Data here mostly from Bay Bridge Transportation Needs Report, Maryland Transportation Authority, December 2004, which is a useful source of carefully assembled data but like every MdTA study on the Bridge wimps out when it gets to recommending needed improvements.)

TOLLROADSnews 2008-08-29