Roundabout, better crosswalks among pitches for West Hartford Center roadways

Despite the many intricacies to each design, the major theme of safety presented itself through Stantec's presentation. Coming on the heels of three crashes involving pedestrians in December — two that resulted in pedestrian deaths and one that left a pedestrian with serious injuries — a focus was placed on how to make the town's busiest area safer for everyone.

"Some of the key ideas we're thinking about is how to make it more comfortable to walk or bike in the town center, also some concerns about safety in general, as well as traffic congestion and managing traffic speeds," said Liza Cohen, a transportation planner with Stantec.

Crash data presented by Stantec showed one of the most dangerous spots in the area: the intersection at Main Street and Farmington Avenue.

"We’re starting with vehicles because that’s sort of the thing that everyone is always worried about. It’s the number one concern," said Jason Schrieber, a senior planner with Stantec. "It’s all about making it work for all modes as safely as possible. One of the things that’s really important — you can see obviously the major intersections of Main and Farmington and along there are where you see those repeated crashes."

Schrieber presented possible redesigns for that specific intersection, with different versions of roundabouts being among those offered. It identifies and solves a major issue with the area, Schrieber said.

"In every single one of those locations, we know the problem," Schrieber said. "It’s that the intersections are too big. Even where you may have a median breaking it up ... it’s still a lot of distance. It is such a big intersection. It is where you have the worst crashes. It is where you have the longest crosswalks. And it really should be a better place. It really should be a gateway."

A roundabout, while a dramatic change from the signal-based intersection the area features today, would process cars efficiently, Schrieber said. The many configurations include one roundabout shaped more like a peanut. The proposed changes would also reduce the number of lanes on South Main Street and Farmington Avenue.

"With a roundabout, you can continue to keep cars moving, more or less, constantly," he said. "They actually do handle cars extremely well and they handle a good amount of them."

Crosswalks, in general, are playing a major part in how Stantec thinks about redeveloping the area.

"We looked at crosswalk length, but we also looked at where are there crosswalks and what do they look like, what type of crosswalk are they, what type of crossing opportunity do they afford," Cohen said. "You have some that perhaps have been better days and it’s time for an upgrade. We’re trying to look at every intersection and opportunities to create more crossings."

Cohen said they've not only looked at existing crosswalks, but also where crosswalks don't exist.

"There are places where today there’s actually no opportunity to cross," Cohen said. "If you live in the neighborhood north of Brace Road, what the built environment is telling you today is that you can’t cross the street and come down into the town center. We want to look at gaps like that and think about how we can encourage walkability not only within the town center, but from within the neighborhoods that surround it."

Cohen said that every crosswalk in the area should be considered for rehabilitation.

"What we propose for the future is that each and every one of these be considered for curb extensions, for an improved crosswalk, for narrowing down the intersection and just simply making it easy to get across," Cohen said. 

LaSalle Road: one-way, two-way or closed? 

LaSalle Road, which before the COVID-19 pandemic was a two-way street, has mainly been a one-way road for the last three years as the town utilized street space for expanded outdoor dining. The town now needs to decide on a permanent configuration for the street.

"We heard a lot of conflicting things," Cohen said about the street, adding how some want to keep it one-way, others want to return it to its two-way status, while some would like to see the street closed off entirely. 

While appealing, Schrieber said that 90 percent of pedestrianized streets have been reverted back to allowing vehicle traffic. In his study, the keys to a successful pedestrian-only street seem to be colleges, beaches, high tourism and cross streets.

"If you take a lot of cars off the street, you take a lot of eyes off the street, and you take a lot of activity off the street," Schrieber said. "It doesn’t mean everybody should be driving. We want them more to walk. But this is still America. There’s still a point where people arrive by car."

He also views closing LaSalle Road permanently as something that would push traffic onto the area's neighboring residential streets.

"We also looked at closing LaSalle," he said. "A lot of people mentioned this. To be clear, I think when you have special events, particularly on weekends, it’s an excellent street for doing that. We’ve actually made it easier and better to do it. The impact on other streets, like Woodrow, would really be significant."

Stantec is suggesting the town return the road to a two-way street while utilizing the closed-off Memorial Road, but recommends that the roadway become a "destination" street that could even be shut down to vehicles on a weekly basis for festivals or other events.

A proposed redesign of LaSalle Road would decrease the curb-to-curb distance nearly in half from today's 70 feet to 36 feet. Right now, with angled parking on both sides of the street, LaSalle Road is dedicating 48 feet of itself to parking. The redesign would implement eight feet of parallel parking on both sides of the street with two 10 foot travel lanes in both directions in the middle of that.

To make the road better for pedestrians, Stantec is proposing a wider 10 foot sidewalk as well as furniture space consisting of trees, lighting and benches to serve as a buffer from vehicles. Space would also be made for permanent outdoor dining.

The town will make a decision on which version of LaSalle Road they prefer before plans move forward.

Farmington Avenue: a biking link 

On Farmington Avenue, respondents to a Stantec survey seemed to value the idea of protected bike lanes serving as an link to the east and west.

"It’s relatively disjointed today," Cohen said about bike lanes in West Hartford Center. "As far as trying to connect to anywhere, there aren’t a lot of options. There’s not a lot of really safe feeling east-west connections. Farmington becomes that east-west link. LaSalle can become a slow street where people biking, people driving, people walking can all kind of share the road together and feel safe."

One recommended option for Farmington Avenue — which is slated for reconstruction in 2024 — is what Cohen called a raised cycle track.

"It’s at sidewalk level," Cohen said. "You’re biking at the same level as people walking, so it takes people on bikes out of the street and away from fast-moving giant vehicles and it’s integrated into the sidewalk infrastructure."

The goal on Farmington Avenue, Ewen said, is to repurpose some roadway space into space that can be used by pedestrians and bicyclists. Their plan is to reduce the curb-to-curb vehicle space from 59 feet to 38 feet.

Similar to their suggested design on LaSalle Road, parking would become exclusively parallel parking on both sides of the road, reducing the amount of space taken up by pull-in angled parking. Their proposal would also feature expanded sidewalk space, furniture space and a buffer between the cycle track and parking spaces.

In their plans, drivers would also no longer enter the surface lot behind South Main Street and Farmington Avenue. Instead, drivers would enter from South Main Street and exit at a signal on Farmington Avenue.

Through traffic and the hunt for parking

According to Stantec, the main reason drivers use the roadways that go through West Hartford Center are to pass through the area. The second greatest usage is from employees of the area businesses. 

"While it’s nice to have through traffic for customers, literally most of them are just driving through," Schrieber said. "How much should we care about letting people from out of town go through? In the town center, is it appropriate that we have roadways that are focused heavily on this movement, or should we be thinking about them a little bit more as a place."

The third greatest usage, and perhaps most problematic, is what Schrieber described as the hunt for parking. Though in an area that features over 5,000 parking spaces, that really shouldn't be a problem.

"The parking hunt in particular is interesting," he said. "We all know that’s important for businesses and important for the vitality and it’s important for residents to be able to get downtown. But there’s actually a lot of parking. They’re hunting for something. They’re usually hunting for a convenient on street space.”

Schrieber said that on a typical weekday that there are no less than 1,500 available parking space throughout the area's surface lots and parking garages. But yet, the hunt continues.

"There’s a lot of parking," Schrieber said. "Everyone is running around, driving on the streets, because they want the front door space."

A way to solve that, he suggested, is to move to a tiered pricing system, making those front door spaces a bit more expensive than surface lots of parking garages.

"It creates the availability that folks want and actually encourages more people to come into your downtown," he said.

Other roadway and intersection improvements

Stantec suggested multiple options for South Main Street, which currently runs in two lanes in each direction and is in part separated by Unity Green. A redesign of that area similar to the road diet on North Main Street could expand Unity Green and provide more green space, whether that be closer to the Noah Webster Library or closer to the businesses across the street from it.

"What this space could become in terms of a real substantial common is quite notable," Schrieber said of Unity Green, which they added is hard to access today.

At the Trout Brook Drive and Farmington Avenue intersection, Schrieber pitched intersection improvements that could make the area safer to cross.

"You can imagine this intersection being even easier to cross, because Farmington doesn't need all that width," Schrieber said. "You can get nice crosswalks and put in that continued bicycle facility."

He also said the intersection at Memorial Road and South Main Street could be improved with a reduction in lanes.

"This is another location, where if you really look at what’s happening from a traffic circulation perspective there’s a lot of lanes," Schrieber said. "You can actually really, really reduce the size of this intersection and handle all of that volume. When I have a small intersection box like that, I can process many cars on every signal, almost as many as you would with a large intersection because it doesn’t take you that long to get across the intersection."

A shorter crosswalk there, too, would make the area more friendly to pedestrians.

"More importantly, the pedestrian crossing become demonstrably shorter," he said. "You can get across more quickly. The whole intersection can operate more efficiently. It becomes a really great gateway point."

Additional enhancements 

Aside from roadway redesigns, Stantec also envisions a number of other enhancements coming to the area, including trees and other amenities like pocket parks, electric vehicle chargers, modernized bus stop shelters with real-time technology, wayfinding signage, dedicated rideshare drop off zones and bike racks.

"The trees…are experiencing some decline based on the amount of soil volume that’s in their tree pits," Ewen said. 

Ewen said that 83 of the 98 trees are honey locusts and that 90 percent of the trees are in fair to poor condition due to an older way of planting urban trees. Their goal, he said, would be to plant trees native to Connecticut that would promote bird life and tolerate urban conditions. At the ground level, Ewen said they could choose plants that would encourage pollinators. 

Stylistically, Ewen said there's a lot of decisions to be made in the kinds of benches, trash cans and pavement types that will be selected.

“There are a lot of potential upgrades to happen," Ewen said.