I am hopeful that all of the paint on State Street will be striped this year. Its gone way too long.

It only costs .20 a foot for a 4" stripe, .30 a foot for 6". We're looking at 24 feet approximately of road, so we're looking at approx. 20 dollars, extreme worse case scenario. They could drop a "pedestrians have priority" sign in there for what, another 100?

What's the fix here? If a city is unwilling or unable to provide basic services even when times were good, it's time to have a public discussion on this. I don't think the city can cry budget season--this has been a problem for years all over--I think they can only admit apathy & promise to start doing this.

People care more about potholes & crosswalks than they do long-term promises & sweeping visions of change, because one actually happens & works, and the other may work down the road so long as we keep riding the same horse.

My proposed fix is that the city apologizes for years of neglect & get on this--or explains why they've failed at it, & let's us know what they need to succeed. We're all in this together, as long as one side of the table shows up.

I wonder what New Haven's road paint budget is compared to the towns in Fairfield County, or even cities like NY City and Cambridge. Their road paint seems to be in much better condition.

What do you guys think of my idea of intentionally letting the double yellow centerline fade away between signalized intersections? I don't know if it would save any money, but I think it might slow down traffic by making State Street seem less like a highway.

As for the Lawrence St crosswalk, Mike Piscitelli gets like a zillion emails per day, so he probably hasn't had a chance to respond to this. My understanding is that the city is interested in developing a more logical and organized protocol for making sure everything gets properly restriped. Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to create some sort of map-based database of striping treatments so they can keep track of it all. Ideally it'd be nice to create a website where they'd be able to click on a road segment and a CAD diagram of the paint treatment would appear, along with other data stored in the database. Then there just needs to be like a one-step process to go from there to the work order. I guess I could do all this in GIS, but it would be so much cooler if it were online and scalable to other cities.

Hmm, I think average speeds on State are about 27 mph--which portion do you mean?
The frustration isn' t with Mike, either, but the poor choices that led to the current road situation all over New Haven--for too long, people who had no background in the field were the directors of traffic & parking, so they never bothered to implement any of the smart policies & improvements that Mike has been working on--leading to his office being besieged by all these problems.

I would even go further than Streever in not blaming Mike. Yes, there are places that are way ahead of New Haven in creating truly livable cities, but we are where we are. Maybe there could have been stronger leadership in this arena in the past. But now we have an opportunity to leap frog even the cutting edge. How so? We now have a much richer field of knowledge and experience and connection in our world with which we can co-create resilient communities that take advantage of the twin challenges of peak oil and global warming and emerge with beautiful "energy descent plans" These are whole-community designed, annually updated very practical yet visionary methods for being ready to withstand the impacts of global warming and peak oil without social collapse. Seems far from the walkable street? The ozygen of we breathe is produced by trillions of organisms all over the planet. Likewise the solutions to planetary problems will arise from how we operate in our minute activities. Check out http://sites.google.com/site/localresilience/ for more info.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough :D! I didn't even mention Mike because in my head, he is completely removed from this. The guy is a real treasure for New Haven & worth our respect & patience. That's why I hadn't even mentioned his name, I don't feel qualified to bring him into this because I know pretty well where these problems come from.

I'll check out your site, Nate, thanks for sharing--

maybe the paint budget in the city is just too small. i think it works out to less than $50 per intersection per year or something like that. not sure that is enough to maintain everything. hopefully mike is looking into it!

exactly what i was getting at
city hall needs to prioritize
these are social & political decisions we are asking them to make
what do you prioritize?
i think our cities infrastructure should be high on that list,
and it currently isn't

good points . how can we get to the mayor?

See photo

The intersection had been restriped.