Coverage of New Haven's Downtown Crossing project on the national Streetsblog website, excerpt below.
Does the story sound familiar? Hartford has been hit with this type of ConnDOT disaster in the recent past as well.
"In many ways, transportation planning in the United States — which for decades has focused on adding more lanes to squeeze in more cars — has yet to catch up to this kind of project. What’s interesting is how the feds have funded an effort to turn a piece of infrastructure designed to move cars into a multi-modal, urban place, while at the same time requiring the replacement to operate much like a highway."
“You’re making the assumption that you need five lanes of traffic,” said TSTC’s Steven Higashide, adding that he thought the city was under a fair amount of pressure from the state on that point. “We hope the improvements that have been outlined so far will make the area safer and more pleasant, but they don’t go as far as we’d hoped for.”
http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/07/25/when-livability-projects-meet-eisenhower-era-design-standards/
For more on the project's failures, see http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/downtown_crossing_debate/. The former Mayor of Milwaukee, who heads the nation's leading urban planning organization, referred to the project as "the worst highway project since the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere" in the Hartford Courant recently.