Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. Six years later, activists say nothing has changed.
They say the streets have become the “Wild West.” That their chests seize with dread as they step on the asphalt. That cycling feels like a “full contact sport,” but it’s their fault if they get hit. That the two of them just wanted to get an ice cream cone, and now their friend will never eat one again; that it’s traffic violence, not mere accidents; that everyone is afraid and too many have died and reassurances aren’t enough anymore. That they were promised change.
Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. The city consistently has the highest rate of pedestrian crashes in all of Connecticut. There’s an unspoken rule among cyclists and pedestrians: wait at least three seconds before you cross the road. Red light runners won’t wait for you to look both ways. In 2021, 305 Connecticut residents submitted written testimonies in support of a state-wide omnibus traffic safety bill; over half were from New Haven. One of them, Carmen Viudes, was almost run over the morning she planned to write her letter. In her testimony, she described the incident succinctly: “He was protected by a one-ton metal cage, while I am a soft bag of flesh and bone.”
Of the dozen cyclists, pedestrians, and activists I spoke to, nearly everyone knew someone killed in a car crash, and all had their own close calls. The first reaction to a traffic-related death is usually to blame the people involved: brake-averse drivers, reckless cyclists, distracted pedestrians. But in the wake of several high-profile deaths in 2008, a growing number of New Haveners began noticing that crashes were concentrated in hotspots across the city, such as Ella T Grasso Boulevard, Whalley Avenue, and the lower-income neighborhoods of Fair Haven, Dixwell, and The Hill. There must be systemic reasons.
Since its emergence in 2008, the Safe Streets Coalition has refocused conversations surrounding traffic safety toward New Haven’s enduring infrastructural issues: faded or wholly absent crosswalks, ill-timed pedestrian signals, wide lanes that encourage speeding, and inconsistent bike lanes. Bringing together residents and experts, the coalition has applied pressure to key projects and collaborated with the city to develop actionable roadmaps for change.
But the fatalities are unceasing. New Haven must radically rethink its street designs, activists say, and stop treating traffic violence as inevitable. In its way, however, stands a city bureaucracy riddled with inefficiencies.
II. Co-Op and Coalition
Doug Hausladen’s life of public service was foreshadowed. When he was four, in the bluegrass rolling hills of Kentucky, Hausladen went door-knocking with his mother to gather signatures for a sidewalk installation. After a brief stint as the Ward 7 Alder of New Haven, he would direct the city transportation department from 2014 to 2021. Affectionately dubbed by fellow public servants as “Downtown Doug”, his commitment to progressive transportation infrastructure landed him a spot in Connecticut’s 40 under 40 in 2022.
Two deaths galvanized his advocacy. In 2008, Mila Rainof, a student at the Yale School of Medicine, was struck by a car while crossing South Frontage Road and York Street, a busy intersection in front of the hospital where she worked. Her death left the Yale community in disbelief. Hausladen couldn’t shake the similarities between himself and Rainof. Both were twenty-five, with aspirations to help others; she was headed to an emergency medicine residency in California, he wanted to one day be an alder; she was hit on her two-block commute home, he walked two blocks to work every day. It could have easily been him, he realized, killed randomly on the streets, his life cut short.
Then, just a month after Rainof’s death, Gabrielle Lee, an 11-year-old girl, was killed in a hit-and-run while crossing Whalley Avenue on her way to the laundromat. The two deaths jolted the entire city: traffic safety was no longer an afterthought but the subject of heated discourse. Having first joined Elm City Cycling, one of the advocacy groups out of which Safe Streets grew, Hausladen became a key member of the nascent Safe Streets Coalition. The coalition’s first project was momentous. In the spring and summer of 2008, citizens and experts worked together to pass the Complete Streets Manual, a sweeping mandate to prioritize active transportation across city streets. After the Coalition delivered a three thousand-person petition to the Board of Alders, the legislation was passed in 2008.
Cycling in New Haven requires you to keep your “head on a swivel,” Kyle Anthony, general manager of the Bradley Street Bike Co-Op, told me. A lapse in vigilance could make you eat concrete or metal. Bike lanes end abruptly, forcing cyclists to veer into the car lane. Many beginner cyclists end up taking the sidewalk—illegally. Even the experienced likened their commutes to constantly merging on and off an interstate. Kai Addae, a Safe Streets organizer and adventurous cycling enthusiast, described how she used to have to cross four lanes of traffic to reach a bike lane on the other side: “There’s no predictability for me there, there’s not even an expectation that bikes would be there.”
In the face of sluggish progress and near-monthly fatalities, a sense of community is indispensable for activists. There are three types of cyclists, Anthony tells me: commuters, athletes, and those who want to heal their inner child. “I’m in the camp of never wanting to grow up,” Anthony said. The coalition brings together all three. After all, as Hausladen told me, “everyone owns the streets.”
III. Roadblocks
Since Rainof’s death, there have been several lectures in her honor by the Yale School of Medicine, hundreds of Facebook posts dedicated to her memory, and innumerable pink and white carnations laid down gently where she died. But, seventeen years later, the intersection of South Frontage and York has seen two more fatalities and few changes. Ownership of South Frontage Road was passed from the state to the city in 2020, yet promised safety improvements—$1.5 million in raised crosswalks and bike lanes—have yet to begin.
Comprehensive traffic safety improvements are, unsurprisingly, expensive. A block of sidewalk demands a couple thousand dollars, and a single intersection project depletes the city’s funds by at least a million dollars. Ambitious projects looking at an entire stretch of road require consultants to hold design meetings and draft and redraft plans—the upcoming Chapel Street two-way conversion was only made possible with an eleven million dollar state grant. The transportation department cinches most funding for large projects from competitive state grant processes. The rest is then scraped up from what’s leftover of property taxes.
“What ends up happening in Connecticut is everybody gets a little bit. Nobody gets enough,” Hausladen said. “So everyone just sort of pisses and moans and complains.”
The city is also still healing from history. In 1957, Mayor Richard Lee ordered the Oak Street Connector project, displacing communities he deemed “slums” to make way for a highway that connected the suburbs and tore through the city. New Haven was the nation’s urban renewal testing ground, having received more money per capita than any other city. Not only was the connector never fully realized and ultimately an economic embarrassment, but it also left behind a web of one-way streets—a fatal precedent for a car-centric city. Today, New Haven’s gridded streets shuttle cars through downtown as if they were on race tracks.
South Frontage Road, half of the Oak Street Connector, after it was demolished and rerouted by the Downtown Crossing Project, still bears the scars of a hasty and rude birth. In 2020, Yale Law student Keon Ho Lim was killed in a “right-hook accident” while cycling through South Frontage and York. In a right-turn-only lane, he attempted to continue straight, only to collide with a truck turning right from the lane to his left. Neither was at fault; bikers are taught to stay right in the absence of a dedicated bike lane, and the driver could not have seen him. A commenter under an article about Lim’s death called the street design “criminal.”
From I-95, North and South Frontage run antiparallel to each other, one starting and one ending at Ella T Grasso Boulevard. The road has been dubbed “Death Boulevard” by the New Haven Independent, as nine people have been killed there alone since 2019.
Ella T Grasso is a behemoth to cross as a pedestrian. A four, at times five, lane “stroad”—combining the deadly speeds of an arterial road with the multi-purpose usage of a street—the boulevard is an example of how state ownership of a street can hinder its progress. Hausladen worked for years to add nearly a mile of sidewalk, and even then, one side still lacks a sidewalk.
Aaron Goode, longtime traffic safety and environmental activist, invited me to the West River Peace Garden, which lies right by the boulevard. Carrying a plastic bag to collect trash, Goode wore a bright orange Connecticut Trails Census vest over a windbreaker and argyle sweater. He works at the garden often, and today he brought a friend. They both wear newsboy caps and slip into Yiddish as we chat.
Six years ago, Goode was cycling along the Farmington Canal when he was hit by a truck. The road was double-laned, and while the nearest car had yielded, the car in the other lane, obstructed by the first, could not brake in time. “I was completely immobilized for weeks, months. But after that, you have to get up and get back to work.”
Back at Ella T Grasso, the city has made the boulevard safer after hard-fought negotiations with the state with a new crosswalk where four pedestrians died in a single year and a lane removal to reduce the possibility of a crash like Goode’s. Behind the garden, construction crews are building a new suite of townhouses, championed by the city to stitch the neighborhoods together again.
Goode and other activists don’t blame any individual in the city government. The slow progress, rooted in a risk-averse and incremental culture, surpasses a single person; after all, as Goode said, Connecticut is the “land of steady habits.” In the meantime, though, pedestrians and cyclists must navigate the deadly streets left in place by the city’s historically car-centric mindset. Last April, Goode’s friend and peace activist Yusef Gürsey was walking home from a protest when he was struck by a car on Whalley Avenue in a hit and run—on the same street where Gabrielle Lee died in 2008.
IV. Black Box
Somewhere in the depths of City Hall, perhaps in the aldermanic chamber or perhaps in a smaller, shadowy meeting room, five people oversee the annual milling and paving list. Traffic safety improvements are contingent on this list, as the transportation department must wait for a road to be repaved by the Department of Public Works before restriping to narrow lanes or adding bike paths.
The Resource Allocation Committee was formed in 2012 and consists of two city officials, two alders, and a civilian chosen by the board of alders. It was created out of alders’ concerns that Mayor John DeStefano held a dictatorial grip on the transportation infrastructure budget. Hausladen and Mayor Justin Elicker, then alders themselves, were the sole two nay votes among the thirty-member board. They were concerned the change would merely shift power to another political body, failing to “depoliticize” the oversight of transportation infrastructure.
Over a decade later, the committee’s standing members are not listed on the city’s website. Residents have no way of attending its meetings, and many likely do not even know it exists. What could have been a committee that liaised with activists and civilians, that allowed fervent discourse in public meetings, that fielded concerns about project statuses, ended up being yet another cryptic committee in City Hall. My attempts to contact its members were unsuccessful.
The Resource Allocation Committee’s decision-making process is not made public. While Mayor Elicker emphasized to me the committee’s role in ensuring internal collaboration and fairness in project distribution, activists questioned the committee’s fundamental role. If the milling and paving list is to be one of the city’s methods of traffic infrastructure improvement, spreading it across neighborhoods without a long-term plan leads to piecemeal development. The streets they focus on also don’t all correspond with high crash zones, Safe Streets activist Maximilian Chaoulideer pointed out. As their concerns continue to grow—SeeClickFix, the city’s online forum for noting necessary repairs, has over five thousand unresolved requests—activists and residents feel unable to see past the city’s opaque processes.
“The bureaucrats at City Hall are playing God,” Hausladen said, “By having projects in a black box, they can switch stuff around from one season to the next. Nobody’s the wiser.”
V. Jaded
Every weekday, Safe Streets activist Rob Rocke bikes from East Rock to his job as an IT support technician for Yale. He takes the Grove Street bike lane all the way down to the heart of campus, before the path ends in front of the Schwarzman Center. His work might call him to Chapel Street, where he must still weave through speeding cars. Or to Whitney Avenue, where traffic calming measures were slated to begin in 2022 but have been delayed to this year.
During his decades as an activist, Rocke has seen several bills and ordinances pass—touted as establishing more transparency or expediting progress toward active transportation—that ended up being ineffective. Like the 2010 Complete Streets manual. Or the 2008 “3 foot” biker law, which forbids drivers from getting closer than three feet to cyclists—and is hardly enforced. Or the 2020 city-led and mayor-backed Safe Routes for All plan with highly researched proposals for top-priority roads. In this roadmap, a protected bike lane runs through Chapel Street. In the most recent conversion plan—even with the eleven million dollar grant—the street is to be renovated without a bike lane entirely. Despite hopes, the Resource Allocation Committee joins this list of fruitless efforts. Passing the legislation, as it turns out, is the easy part.
“I’m realizing how naive it is to say it now, that suddenly it would just happen,” Rocke said, “If you read [Safe Routes for All], it was meant to be: if a road is touched you have to add a bike lane, you have to add a sidewalk, you have to consider all users of that road whenever the road is touched. And I realized, without activists policing that and hounding people for it, it doesn’t happen.”
Activists have felt not only let down but betrayed. Safe Streets activist Lior Trestman pointed out that, in the original 189-page grant proposal for Chapel Street, the phrase “bike lanes” was mentioned 157 times, and the city included a letter of support from him when he thought the plan would have bike lanes. After securing the grant funding, the city is now walking back on its words. “We are totally jaded to the idea that there’s anything to advocacy that is productive,” Trestman told me, “We have not worked to build the [coalition] because it feels like it’s all in vain.”
When I brought up activists’ concerns that the city was diverging from the Safe Routes for All plan, Mayor Elicker pointed out the reality of how Chapel Street has limited room to accommodate bikers, yet many small businesses there need parking spaces to thrive. Elicker admires street safety activists for their dedication and for expressing their concerns, especially as someone who walks and bikes himself. Trying to balance the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers, however, “takes a lot of hard decisions.” In the meantime, he said, New Haven is at least more proactive than neighboring cities, and in recent years, fatalities have gone down—from twenty-one in 2020 to eleven in 2023.
For the activists, though, change isn’t happening fast enough. Trestman loves New Haven. But he thinks that in the future, when he’s thinking about having children, he would not in good conscience let them bike, walk, or play on New Haven streets. If the time comes and drastic changes have yet to be made, he’ll move away. “Call a spade a spade,” he said. At a certain point, you have to let go.
VI. Blueprint
Rocke had imagined the Safe Routes for All roadmap as a binder on an important shelf in City Hall, and each time a road is slated to be repaved, officials would simply flip to the right page and see what’s already been researched and signed off on by the alders. It should be that easy, activists tell me; it should be “cookie-cutter.”
Even when he was Director of Transportation, Hausladen felt his progressive vision frustratingly curbed. He needed alders to approve his proposals, and his attempts at collaboration were often petty and futile: “‘Hey, can we talk about this bike lane?’ They’re like, ‘Sure, but I got a parking ticket last week and I’m pissed at you, so I’m going to not call you back for two months.’”
To begin with, the city needs to dedicate more effort to outreach, Hausladen said. This could look like a database with project statuses—which the city promised activists in the past but did not come to fruition. For the Resource Allocation Committee, this would mean releasing a milling and paving list years in advance. Activists would then have time to properly engage with the community and compile fleshed-out, supported plans for change.
Secondly, in New Haven, the public works and transportation departments reside in two different cabinets and operate separately. The engineers and designers on the transportation team must plan lane striping changes depending on the public works team’s progress. Uniting them, as Mayor Michelle Wu did in Boston when she took office in 2021, would synchronize the departments and reduce communication hiccups.
Most of all, though, New Haven needs a visionary. Activists believe that the current transportation director is too embroiled in day-to-day minutiae to have time for big-picture ideas. Chaoulideer wants to see a dedicated transportation coordinator. Someone with gumption, who will stake political capital to advocate within the government for cohesive, radically safe streets. This idea isn’t unpopular in New Haven—Elicker himself proposed such a role last year—but, due to a limited budget, the alders cut it.
Change isn’t impossible. Recently, Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith of East Rock and Fair Haven, with several other alders, secured a two million dollar federal grant to redesign streets and neighborhoods rendered treacherous and half-constructed by the Oak Street Connector.
As they wait, activists and residents grow tired. Often, as we spoke, Rocke would put on a faux-hurt air and joke, “I’m not saying anyone has an obligation to tell Rob Rocke what’s going on.” But that’s the reality. As they track down changes and push the city to fulfill their promises, they’re often left in the dark. Activists have shifted their energy toward a more tangible effort: erecting memorials for those killed on New Haven streets.
VII. Phantom
On a windy December evening, Safe Streets leaders met to discuss the implementation of red light cameras. But Chaoulideer is bitterly hesitant to even call it a coalition anymore. In the past, they were a band of activist groups across the city, spurred by a shared vision and memories of loved ones lost on the streets, with their meetings attracting up to fifty attendees. Now, only the core group remains: Rocke, Addae, Chaoulideer, Trestman, and less than a dozen others.
Optimists and idealists at heart, they’re still driven by the urban planning studies and reports they originally circulated among each other. Addae dreams of a day when basic traffic safety is ensured and she can push for radical and experimental street plans. Trestman sees the flourishing state of some cities across the world and remains hopeful that the tenets of active transportation are indeed simple and attainable.
New Haven has good bones to work with, Hausladen believes. It has a gridded and geometrically straightforward system of short, narrow streets and over three hundred miles of sidewalk. The city is, in many ways, ideal for comprehensive street change. Now serving as director of the Parking Authority, Hausladen advocates and testifies for proposed traffic safety improvements—recently, red light cameras, which were finally allowed last year after the “Vision Zero” bill was passed.
In the meantime, the Complete Streets and Safe Routes for All manuals, political victories of decades past, collect dust. The black box remains impenetrable.
In November 2020, the Safe Streets Coalition memorialized Lim’s death on South Frontage and York with a ghost bike. The activists had picked up a junk bike from the bike co-op, carefully coated it with durable bone-white paint, and chained it to a street pole—then repeated that for the other dozen deaths just in that year. Small and somber, it stood firm in its reminder; drivers couldn’t miss its stark whiteness even if they sped through the intersection.
The bike was stolen or taken down sometime a few months later. Before that, though, it stood upright, as if Lim could jump back on at any moment and ride home.
-Tina Li is a sophomore in Pierson College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal