Shaw's Plaza Downtown: Street Design Worse than a No-Man's Land Target?

The above photo shows the Shaw's supermarket, which is located at the outskirts of Downtown New Haven in the city's Dwight neighborhood. The Shaw's Plaza, built in the mid-1990s, is home to the only major supermarket in Downtown New Haven, and attracts many local residents and Yale students. Click to enlarge the aerial photograph.

Despite the supermarket's popularity and the incredibly high density of the surrounding neighborhood (according to the Census, the Dwight neighborhood just west of Downtown has a population density close to those of many of the central boroughs of London, 50-60% higher than that of Chicago or Downtown New Haven, and about 3X higher than that of the East Rock neighborhood), there are no crosswalks or traffic calming measures anywhere near the store. In addition to the lack of any pedestrian plaza right at the store's entrance, DNH readers regularly observe families of all ages, even people in wheelchairs, trying to cross Whalley Avenue near the Shaw's plaza. Usually, they dart across under great stress. To make things worse, vehicles regularly speed in excess of 50MPH down the 4-lane, median-less highway (ConnDOT and the City of New Haven hope to make other sections of Whalley Avenue look like this in the near future); two-car collisions caused by this excessive speeding are not unheard of.

In fact, according to reporting by the City, this section of Whalley Avenue regularly competes with a few high-speed regional highways on the city's edges for the title of the worst safety record in the city. The windowless building wall fronting the street is not a place where residents socialize, enjoy cups of coffee or get their daily exercise, and the plaza has suffered in recent years from retail vacancies (even as more pedestrian-oriented sections of the Avenue, just a block or two to the west, are doing quite well).

In contrast, here is an aerial photo of the Target Department Store in North Haven, Connecticut. The store opened about five years ago as part of a National Realty project, and is located in an industrial zone near the city's old landfill (known as "Mount Trashmore"). Other than its location off of I-91, Target has no physical relationship with any surrounding residential or commercial areas.

The store is the epitome of "dumb growth." But wait! Look at the beautiful Dutch-inspired, textured, shared space plaza at the front of the store. Chicanes, vehicle bollards, traffic calming, medians, brightly-striped ladder crosswalks, and pedestrian walkways can be spotted throughout.

Those who frequent this Target report feeling exceptionally comfortable and safe walking to it. Families with children are regularly spotted walking, skipping, or hobbling into the store's entrance with ease. The Starbucks located at the store's entrance does quite well, with people spilling out to enjoy their coffees in the nice weather. This despite that the area often smells like industrial emissions or manure processing, and has views of abandoned rail tracks and one of the largest parking lots in New Haven County.

Of course, this is not an attack on Shaw's or the Shaw's Plaza itself: access to supermarkets is a critical issue for urban areas like New Haven, and attracting the store to Downtown New Haven in the 1990s required an enormous amount of effort and the creation of a PDD (Planned Development District). Even though many neighborhood groups, organizations and elected officials along Whalley Avenue, including the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB), Dixwell, and Dwight Community Management Teams, Whalley Avenue Revitalization Committee, residents of Fellowship Place, and the Whalley Avenue Special Service District have been major supporters of Shaw's, the presence of so much local grassroots community support and the use of a PDD was not enough to ensure a harmonious balance between pedestrians and traffic flow, not to mention good architecture.

These community groups were also all signers of the New Haven Petition for Safe Streets; although the safe streets movement has resulted in some new enforcement activity in the area, until the street is redesigned (plans have been on the table for decades), pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in this area will continue to be at risk. The Safe Streets Coalition has been pushing for over a year for city-wide, neighborhood level reporting on specific enforcement and collision data; if that is made more widely available, residents will be better able to advocate for the improvement of their own neighborhoods like this one.

Taking a page from Target, perhaps the city would consider installing temporary bollards, as they did on River Street, or as ConnDOT did on Route 34 near Ella Grasso Boulevard after the dozens of serious and fatal collisions that took place near there? Could a road diet help control traffic on the chasm-like road? Or perhaps even an uncontrolled crosswalk leading to the store (of course, combined with necessary traffic calming measures, medians, and flashers at the least), now that studies have debunked the "false sense of security" myth?

This comparison begs a number of questions, including: Why are residents living in sections of one of the densest downtown areas in the United States -- a very large proportion of whom are unable to own or operate a vehicle -- treated like second class citizens? And if the Target vs. Shaw's comparison is a sign of how far planners have come in the past 10 years, how much might things change in the next 10?