Has anybody looked at State Street for Bike Lanes?
It is a heavily traveled bike route to Downtown and stays wide all the way. Cars also are generally respectful.
The Upper State Street Association would help advocate if needed.

Great question and I agree it is an excellent bicycle route. Yes, State Street was determined to be too narrow for Chicago-standard lanes (like the ones on Orange Street), unless parking was removed (which is not a possibility in the near future). ElmCityCycling is currently working with the City of New Haven Transportation on alternatives, which could include other types of street markings or signage (on street, on parking meters, etc.) identifying State Street as a bicycle route. We anticipate having more info on this at some point in the next few months as we work to make New Haven a truly bicycle-friendly community.

I just looked on google maps and State Street and Orange Street are both 42' wide.
Maybe we should rexamine.

From what I've heard, the Orange Street is actually a non-standard lane - the lane widths are 4.5' each there, instead of the recommended 5' . A few inches is important in how the city determined which streets were wide enough, and I think they made a slight exception for Orange St because the demand for it was so high.

I will ask again about the city's rationale for State Street, though, to see if they may have been too conservative when they did their initial analyses of street widths. Given that they probably can't reduce the width of the car and bus travel lane, though, we are looking closely into other alternatives, such as a sharrow marking (see http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLR_enUS235US235&q=sharrow )

I live and bike in this area all the time. I'll definitely join your list. Thank You.

These concerns have and are being reviewed in other, more recent postings within See Click Fix as well as in other forums.