"Downgrading" The Oak Street Connector
During Connecticut's budget crisis of 2002, the State of Connecticut sold off land acquired for numerous planned expressways throughout the state, including land set aside for extending the Oak Street Connector. Pfizer Pharmaceuticals purchased a portion of the Oak Street Connector right-of-way, and built a US$35 million research facility. The Pfizer deal ensured the Oak Street Connector could not be extended beyond its current terminus at the Air Rights Parking Garage near Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Following the completion of the Pfizer research facility in 2005, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. and several leaders of local civic groups began pushing the Connecticut Department of Transportation to study removing the existing Oak Street Connector and replace it with a four-lane landscaped boulevard with access to local streets and businesses. The boulevard would encompass the existing Oak Street Connector from the I-95/I-91 interchange to its present terminus, and continue west along a widened Legion Avenue (South Frontage Road). After the completion of the boulevard, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, which carries the westbound lanes of Route 34, would be returned to the City of New Haven. While this would be a separate project from the reconstruction of the nearby I-91/I-95 interchange, it has been gaining increasing popular support among residents, business-owners and city officials in New Haven.
CONNDOT and the City of New Haven began preparing the environmental impact statement for removing the Oak Street Connector in 2011, and officials plan to start demolishing the freeway by 2016.
One factor which would argue against demolition of the expressway is that it serves as the primary access route for ambulances to reach Yale-New Haven Hospital and the Hospital of St. Raphael from the interstate highways, thus removal would degrade service available to suburban patients and victims of motor vehicle accidents.
Currently, the Connecticut Department of Transportation is engaged in a redesign of the entire Interstate 95/91/Oak Street Connector interchange. It is estimated that the Connector handles 73,900 vehicles each day.
Read more about this topic: Oak Street Connector
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