Connecticut still has parkway entrance ramps with stop signs. Here’s what could change
When entering a highway from a complete
stop, good judgment is key.
Ron Parrs, who has been an instructor with The Next Street
driving schools since 2018, said new drivers must develop that skill. They need
to learn how to determine whether they have enough time and space to speed up
and match the rest of traffic without forcing cars on the highway to brake.
“Can this be nerve-wracking? Absolutely,” Parrs said. “Will
‘experienced’ drivers behind them blow their horns or act aggressively? Yes.”
Still, entering a highway from a stop is a skill Connecticut
drivers must learn to drive on some
highways.
On the Wilbur
Cross Parkway, which is part of Route 15, there are eight interchanges with
at least one entrance ramp controlled by a stop sign.
The Connecticut
Department of Transportation has projects in the design stages that
would include removing
stop signs and adding acceleration lanes at some of those interchanges
to reduce crashes. At one entrance ramp, located at Interchange 51 in Hamden, there were more than
400 crashes over a five-year period.
The Wilbur Cross Parkway was constructed in the 1940s as an
extension of the Merritt Parkway, which was designed
for speeds of 30 to 45 mph. The speed limit on the parkways today is
55 mph, but Parrs said instructors know many drivers travel faster than that.
Over the years, some stop-controlled on-ramps have been
modified or completely reconfigured, said DOT spokesperson Eva
Zymaris. Drivers still encounter stop signs when entering the Wilbur Cross
Parkway at:
Interchange 38B northbound (old Interchange 55B) in Milford;
Interchange 41 northbound and southbound (old Interchange
56) in Orange;
Interchange 42B southbound (old Interchange 58) in Orange;
Interchange 46 southbound (old Interchange 59) in New Haven;
Interchange 51 northbound and southbound (old Interchange
61) in Hamden;
Interchange 52 northbound (old Interchange 62) in North Haven;
Interchange 53 northbound and southbound (old Interchange
63) in North Haven; and
Interchange 62 northbound (Old “Maintenance Exit”
Interchange) in Meriden.
DOT is looking to make major changes at three of
the interchanges in the next several years.
As part of a project at Interchange 51 in Hamden, the agency plans to
remove the stop signs at the northbound and southbound on-ramps and build
auxiliary lanes. Drivers will use those lanes to more gradually speed
up and merge with traffic.
Construction is expected to begin in spring 2028 and cost an
estimated $28 million. DOT has scheduled
a public meeting on the project for Sept. 15.
About 465 crashes occurred at the interchange’s southbound
entrance ramp from 2021 through 2025, and the vast majority were front-to-rear
crashes, according to Connecticut Crash Data Repository statistics that DOT
compiled for CT
Insider.
The northbound on-ramp had about 160 crashes during that
period, and nearly all were front-to-rear collisions. There were far fewer
total crashes at the off-ramps: about 25 at the southbound ramp and fewer than
10 at the northbound ramp.
The Interchange 51 project includes the addition of
acceleration lanes for both on-ramps, the addition of a deceleration lane for
the northbound off-ramp, the elimination of the southbound off-ramp, and
sidewalk and crosswalk installations along Whitney Avenue.
The agency is also targeting spring 2028 for the start of
construction at Interchange 46 in
New Haven. The plan is to build two acceleration lanes where a stop sign
currently sits at the southbound entrance — which was the site of more
than 200 crashes over a three-year period, according to DOT.
The project, which additionally includes the relocation of
the entrance ramp for Route 15 northbound, will require major work on two
bridges. All the construction is expected to cost about $90 million.
Back in the Hamden-North Haven area, DOT has plans to
reconfigure Interchange 52, but the timeline
for that project is unclear.
Could a day come when there are no stop signs at any
entrances?
“CTDOT continues to strategically review all of the
interchanges on the Wilbur Cross with a focus on the ones that include
stop-controlled ramps,” Zymaris said.
New London celebrates a downtown development boom years in the making
John Penney
New London — For weeks, the sounds of muffled explosions and
rock-splintering work have reverberated from a busy construction site at the
corner of State and Unions streets, shaking nearby City Hall windows and
startling passersby.
But the cacophony is music to the ears of Felix Reyes, the
city’s director of economic development and planning.
“I’m so happy,” Reyes said Tuesday as excavators dug deep
into a former church property at 66
Union St. in preparation for construction of a 46-unit apartment complex.
That project is one of several similar developments either
underway or planned for the downtown area that primarily encompasses Bank and
State streets.
Reyes, at a recent City Council meeting, said there were
more than eight major development projects in active construction, most of them
related to housing.
“There’s trucks, there’s cranes, there’s bulldozers all
over,” Reyes said. “The last time we saw this much activity was probably when
they were demolishing buildings in the '40s and '50s and into the '60s.”
And that housing expansion is extending beyond downtown and
into Fort Trumbull, where a 250-unit complex just broke
ground — the first of two such projects planned for the peninsula.
A development boom years in the making
Just across the street from the $26 million Union Street
project, headed by the Eastern Connecticut Housing Opportunities group, the
Maine-based High Tide Capital firm is busy adding 40
apartments onto two new floors above the former Frontier Communications
building where The Day leases ground-floor office space.
High Tide on Tuesday announced an Oct. 3 groundbreaking
ceremony for a 68-unit apartment complex at The Day’s former
headquarters on Eugene O’Neill Drive, a project that also entails adding a
new public
park on Atlantic Street at the rear of the property.
The company next month will also update its plans to turn a
former bank adjacent to the former Day building into a hotel/restaurant/retail
complex. The prolific High Tide also received approval to renovate a former sail-making
business at 6 Union St. into a workforce housing complex with 18 units.
Several other downtown housing projects are planned that
entail renovating existing structures in anticipation of introducing
upper-floor apartments above retail or restaurant businesses. The Mystic-based
ES Goodman firm plans to use a $2 million state loan to help add 25 apartments
into the long-vacant Cronin
building on State Street and renovate its 134-year-old ground floor into
space for a new public market.
“We’re expecting to see 300 or so new downtown apartments,
when you include projects still in the pipeline,” Reyes said. “That’s a mix of
workforce, affordable and market-rate units.”
Reyes said the explosion of downtown construction is the
result of years of work with a variety of partners that coincided with a market
hungry for new housing.
“We’ve spent 10 years working with groups from the federal
level down to our local Planning and Zoning Commission,” Reyes said. “Everyone
understands there’s a great need for housing, and our partners understand New
London is a good place to invest.”
Reyes said getting the housing projects off the ground meant
searching for various state and federal monies, as well as state tax grants
that support — up to 30% of the project cost — the rehabilitation of certain
historic buildings.
But it’s not just new housing on the downtown horizon. The
Garde Arts Center plans to use a $4 million state Community Investment Fund
grant to help transform
a long-vacant Mercer Street catering hall into a new gathering and performance
venue.
But while housing advocates are cheering the influx of new
apartments, other downtown businesses, including some restaurant owners, are
skeptical that those projects, on their own, will revitalize the city.
‘More than just housing’ needed
In January, the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut
hosted a well-attended grand opening ceremony welcoming the Water
Street Waffle Co. to its new home at 133 Bank St.
Dozens of city and state officials, along with community and
business boosters, praised co-owner Bobbi Seger’s decision to open a new branch
of her and her husband's successful Texas locations by sampling the
restaurant’s signature Belgian waffles.
But on Wednesday, Seger said her business is essentially
treading water, hamstrung by slow weekday foot traffic she said was exacerbated
by other issues.
“The economy isn’t great, but we’re having to go out every
morning and clean up litter from nearby businesses while our employees and
customers are dealing with loitering and panhandlers,” Seger said. “The lack of
parking is outrageous and there’s drug deals on the corners. People don’t want
to come downtown.”
Seger said her weekend customers are keeping the door open,
but there needs to be significant changes made if she’s going to stay open.
“There needs to be more around here than just housing,” she
said. “There needs to be shops and boutiques that actually bring people here, a
reason to come downtown — and not another vape shop or tattoo place.”
Seger said other nearby tourism spots, like downtown Mystic,
seem to have cracked the code of keeping their streets clean and filled with
sorts of specialty stores that keep visitors coming back.
“New London is beautiful, but the city needs to enforce its
littering rules and figure out how to attract new businesses here,” she said.
‘Always a work in progress’
Reyes said commercial enterprises, especially retail
businesses, have seen a dramatic customer shift in recent years as people pivot
away from brick-and-mortar establishments toward online shopping.
Most ground-floor downtown buildings are zoned only for
commercial use, with housing relegated to upper stories.
“Our Planning and Zoning Commission does work hard to
protect those ground-floor businesses,” Reyes said. “But it’s those niche
businesses — places like (the Telegraph record store) — that seem to do
better.”
Reyes said there’s a fundamental error many people make when
it comes to downtown activity, especially restaurants.
“Though there are exceptions — like Tony D’s or Tox Brewery
— they typically come and go just like in every city,” he said. “There’s always
going to be work in keeping downtown spaces full; there’s never going to be a
moment when we look around and see everything’s filled. It will always be a
work in progress and then passing the baton to the next generation.”
The key, Reyes said, is to use the housing boom and existing
popular attractions, like the Garde, as a commercial attractor.
“From a planning perspective, housing can breathe new life
into a downtown,” he said. “We want to use art, culture and tourism venues to
support our smaller retail operations.”
And the city is poised to welcome what is expected to become
its biggest tourist attraction: the National Coast Guard Museum, which, when it
opens
next August, is anticipated to bring 300,000 annual visitors to the city.
“That museum is going to be a shot into the local and
regional economy, but it’s not a silver bullet,” Reyes said. “It’s up to us to
brand ourselves correctly.”
Reyes noted it’s not just about sheer numbers. He noted the
local ferry service operating from the city’s waterfront brings in as many, if
not more, people, to New London each year as the museum will.
“But (the ferry visitors) are going to Block Island and
other places and then leaving without staying to eat and shop,” he said. “With
the museum, the city becomes a destination on its own.”
Seger said she also hopes the museum will bring in a fresh
wave of customers but was dubious whether it would be enough to solve core
downtown issues.
"Relying on the museum as our only hope, I'm nervous
about that," she said. "There should be other reasons for coming
here."
‘Things are now accelerating’
When asked about the downtown development surge last week,
Mayor Michael Passero ruefully referenced a 2018 column in The Day titled
“Passero: The empty buildings mayor” that ran soon after he was elected to a
second term in office.
The column lambasted Passero’s seeming inability to address
everything from empty and blighted storefronts and littered streets to the
dearth of new development opportunities.
“And some of that was true at the time,” he said. “But we’ve
come a long way since then and things are now accelerating.”
Passero said one of the biggest regional development spurs
is an Electric Boat hiring spree that requires a substantial amount of new
workforce housing.
“But we’ve also done a lot of hard work in recruiting
investors to the city thanks to the work of our building and planning
departments,” he said. “Developers don’t want to waste their money if they
don’t feel welcome. And we don’t have a lot of unnecessary red tape preventing
development.”
Passero said the frequent turnover of some downtown
storefronts isn’t unique to New London.
“I go to Greenport, N.Y., frequently — which is busier than
New London — and while there’s always a couple of the same anchor stores
and restaurants there, there’s still always newer places replacing old ones,”
he said.
Passero said he’s betting that all the new housing can help
stabilize some of the retail losses.
“We’re not there yet, but it’s about turning downtown into a
neighborhood,” he said. “The more you increase a population density, the more
sustainable it is for the storefronts there.”
After deciding in a landslide vote to spend
$250,000 for attorneys, Plainfield taxpayers are preparing to tell state
regulators why they vehemently oppose allowing a
massive trash-to-energy plant in their town.
Roughly 90% of voters at a referendum endorsed the town
hiring a legal team to fight Smart
Technology System’s proposed 81-acre facility.
Just a year earlier, the town voted about the same way in an
advisory referendum on Smart Technology’s proposal: 1,148 opposed the project
and just 125 supported it. At Thursday’s referendum, residents agreed to back
that opinion with money, voting 770-90 hire lawyers to fight the proposal when
it goes to a regulatory hearing — and then possibly in court if the company
wins a permit to build.
State Sen. Heather Somers, who has opposed the trash plant idea since it arose two years ago, is urging residents to address their concerns to the Connecticut Siting Council immediately. The council for several weeks advertised a deadline of this Sunday for written public comment, but this week it voted to conduct a public hearing sometime in the fall.
“Plainfield is already designated as an Environmental
Justice Community, and residents deserve careful consideration of the
cumulative environmental impacts of another waste-to-energy facility,” she
wrote in a Facebook post to townspeople.
“The proposed location is on an aquifer and in a residential
area, raising concerns about potential impacts to air quality and water
quality,” Somers wrote. “Plainfield already has a trash-to-energy facility, and
there is another facility nearby in Lisbon. Residents have legitimate questions
about the need for additional waste-to-energy capacity concentrated in this
area.”
Katie Prokop, a conservative activist in eastern
Connecticut, wrote that state
government should pay attention to Plainfield voters.
“This is exactly what people in northeastern Connecticut
have been screaming about for years.
Our towns are not Connecticut’s dumping ground,” she wrote.
“Our relatively inexpensive land is not an invitation for
Hartford to treat this corner of the state like the place where every massive
industrial project nobody else wants should go,” Prokop wrote. “At what point
does the state of Connecticut acknowledge that the people who actually live
here have spoken? Because this isn’t some little recycling center tucked away
in an industrial park. The proposal calls for approximately 1,800 tons of trash
a day. The developer itself estimates around 120 truckloads every weekday.”
Smart Technology has said its gasification process is far cleaner than burning trash in municipal incinerators, and maintains that its project would be a huge boost to a state facing the loss of both landfills and traditional trash-burning plants.
Torrington-based construction giant O&G Industries is the primary driver
advancing the Smart Technology plant. The company employs about 850 people,
does hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure work around the
Northeast, and is frequently Connecticut’s choice on big-ticket contracts to
construct schools, rebuild highways or repair bridges.