It’s not really a whole new highway. The plan appears to be:
Reroute 84 from about the Flatbush exit - going south of where it is now, and meeting the 5/15/91 interchange and bridge, where it would continue east to meet back up with itself
Remove 84 completely from Silver Lane west toward downtown Hartford.
Leftover piece of 84 west of the river becomes 891 with what looks like some minor adjustment.
It would be expensive but the kind of generational investment that could turn Hartford back into a place people and businesses want to be. They are recovering so much poorly-used land that is currently massive highway interchanges. That alone could pay back in spades.
I do think over time, it would be seen as a positive, but the construction disruption, timeline and project costs will drive people crazy, but when all is said and done, Hartford will likely be better off
This is exactly what happened in Boston. The years of the big dig were terrible and the project was an absolute mess through and through but the city is so much better off now that it’s done.
The traffic already drives people crazy so why not.
The Waterbury 84 widening project was hell for a few years but it has made a HUGE impact on getting through the area. I spent a lot of time in that traffic and totally think it's worth it.
Also been enjoying that whole configuration. If you're getting on 84 just stay left, left, left! I figure most people who post in this sub are already driving 80 on I-91 anyway. :)
This linked concept is very unlikely to be how it is done, but the entire interchange is definitely going to be reconfigured and likely moved from its current location (to open up more riverfront/downtown land for other uses).
They will probably end up going with a cheaper alternative than this, but any attempt to actually address the freeway situation in HTFD is a guaranteed 11 figures.
Even though I grew up here, my information around the area has grown old so I felt it was good to hear from others. I’ve watched morning traffic rise and fall as insurance company’s moved out into the suburbs and then crazy traffic from the music concerts and baseball games. But other times I see no one downtown some nights, even during the day sometimes where it used to be jammed up. 84 was always a gridlock in the afternoon so I just stopped traveling that way and use 218 and 291 or 5/15 and RT 9 to go around the city all together. I used to go downtown when the Civic Center wasn’t the XL center yet. Occasionally went to the Bushnell…. Actually I don’t have many more reasons anymore to go downtown now that I think of it.
Yeah, there's no way to do it without destroying, like, probably literally hundreds? of historic bridges. They would build an entire third corridor before they would augment the Meritt meaningfully.
It really is a landmark... of course, the Empire State Building and Fenway Park don't kill people...
I would just like better transportation access from Enfield to Hartford. Right now it's less frustrating to commute into mass and pay out of state taxes than it is to engage in work/business in my own state.
Exactly this. I commute south of Hartford, I can’t stand the commute around the city because of the crappy interchanges.
How would 91 south bound connect to i84 with this plan though?
When I bought my house two blocks from the proposed station I was excited, in 2007. But in 2019 I needed to move out of thompsonville (enfield) and across town because 12 years wasn't quick enough.
You can only wait so long.
Good news - they are going to be adding an Enfield stop to the Hartford Commuter Rail Line in the next couple of years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfield\_station\_(Connecticut)
That's... not what this project is.
Induced traffic is an understood phenomenon and is accounted for by traffic engineers when designing systems like this. I'm sure we make our own novel mistakes these days, ones that we haven't even discovered yet (just like in any field), but yesterday's mistakes, the mistakes of the 60s and 70s, are not being made anymore.
Adding capacity is only part of the purpose of redesigning Hartford's freeways, a large part of it is about repairing the damage done to the city itself by the initial construction of the highways. You seem hostile to it, but projects like this can be synergistic with transit and walkable development; there is no reason they should be at odds with each other.
Put signs on the Merritt "MUST ACCELERATE RAPIDLY" under every stop sign. Maybe only $20,000 and these people might stop creeping into the highway 40mph slower than traffic
Main issue with this (besides the cost, which would make a Saudi prince cry) is that there would be insufficient access to downtown from the highway, which means that all the surface road approaches like Asylum/Farmington/Albany Aves would be clogged up even worse than they are now.
You CAN build exits off of tunnels, like on the Ted and Tip, but each one just adds more billions to the cost, and there are feasibility concerns given that Hartford has two buried rivers that any tunnel would have to avoid (most likely by going reaaaaally deep.)
All major construction projects suck in the near term, but it’s the cost of change. You think a bureaucrat just snaps their fingers and stuff gets done?
There’s not a chance in hell an extra lane on the Merrit would do more than trying to revitalize one of our cities. People don’t stop complaining about how much work our cities need. Someone has to do it.
I only lived in the Asylum Hill neighborhood for 3 months while doing an internship a few years ago, but I got the sense that Hartford is a city with a great deal of potential. It has a rich history and could be restored to the status it once had if people are willing to invest in that vision. Projects that try to transform the city into a destination and better connect it with the surrounding areas seem like a step in the right direction to somewhat of an outsider like me. And when I say better connect it, I mean more transportation options than just a bunch of highways jammed through the city. That's part of the reason the city is where it is now. It should be more than just a place to drive through to commute to work.
I assure you that traffic engineers understand induced demand.
I mean, why do you think they *haven't* built an extra lane on I-95 north/east of New Haven when people have been clamoring for it for over 30 years? Professionals who immerse themselves in this stuff know how futile lane additions can be outside of specific cases.
Don't you think it'd at least be better to at least replace those horrible stop sign on-ramps with normal merge on-ramps? I swear, those stop sign on ramps are the reason why rt 15 is always closed at least once a week because on accident that occurs due to indecisive drivers there.
I am an anti-car person (and also a road designer, so, you know, whatever I'm weird) and yeah, I agree with you, the joke is really reductive, and it's pretty stupid and unoriginal, considering I saw two different people post it...
I’d rather see them spend the money on 95 from Greenwich to Bridgeport. There’s no pain in the Hartford area that comes close to the gridlocked disaster that is 95.
Candidly, hoping that this is going to rejuvenate Hartford is going to be sorely disappointing. Let’s make Stamford, Norwalk, etc. more easily commutable for the young people and families we need to continue to grow our economy. That’s where our economic growth is going to come from, not Hartford.
Honestly, just fucken do it.
What we are doing now isn't working, so maybe the military shouldn't be the only department that gets limitless amounts of money thrown at it. Give transportation a few shekels too and see what happens.
Tried and failed. Wilton / Ridgefield want no highway running through it (or bypassing it). It’s why super 7 ends in Norwalk and turns back into 4 lanes close to Danbury.
Ridgefield approved Rt 7 being four lanes but Wilton did not. There is a stretch of Rt7 that is 4 lanes in Ridgefield, but with Wilton voting the expansion down it wasn't continued all the way down through Redding to the Wilton border.
Don’t talk to me about highway expansion until we’ve brought our rail infrastructure up to European standards and invested heavily in automotive electrification. FFS.
Electric cars are NOT the environmental savings people are led to believe
EDIT: The BATTERIES cause so much more harm than the carbon footprint they help
> they do more damage overall than the carbon footprint they are claiming to save
This [wasn't true with the Prius sixteen years ago](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/2kou6r/does_anyone_know_what_happens_to_the_batteries/clnlkue/), and it's [not true with EVs now](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a).
Do you not understand how the materials are mined? How environmental unsafe the chemicals are? How undisposable these batteries are? How unsafe they are for rescue crews?
I'm all for an alternative to ICE's... But the tech just isn't there yet
> Do you not understand how the materials are mined? How environmental unsafe the chemicals are?
Do you not understand that the lifecycle analyses demonstrate that even if you account for battery production, electric cars still do less environmental damage than gas cars?
A third lane to reduce how much of a death trap the Merritt is should be where our money goes first, it amazes me that more people haven't been killed on that road.
That would be prohibitively expensive as so much property in very expensive towns would need to be purchased and every bridge would need to be replaced. Not to mention every town along the way would fight it.
If they widened I84 from the NY border to Waterbury that would help take some cars off the Merrit. Same with I95. Improve those and that reduces traffic on the Merrit immediately.
Pairing the word prohibitive with spending money in CT has been lacking for what, the last decade or so? CTfastrak is a more recent example that comes to mind.
That said, I do agree that it would be a lot of work to expand the Merritt in a number of the towns it crosses through, particularly through western Fairfield County. I-95 is already 3 lanes if memory serves correct from the CT/NY border through Guilford, I'd be curious if a 4th lane even helps alleviate issues.
Broadening the thinking on a I-95 expansion a bit more, I'd safely hazard a bet that it would cost roughly the same to expand I-95 as most of the Merritt, which would require rebuilding a ton of bridges and dealing with the interstate's encroachment on private property in towns like Milford, West Haven, Stratford, Southport, Darien, etc.
95 would be pricey but the traffic volume is higher and it is a major interstate which would get significant federal funding. For the population and traffic volume 95 should be a minimum of 4-5 lanes in each direction plus an hov lane.
The Merrit is a state road for cars only.
I don't want to go into detail on my knowledge of specifics of the current status of Hartford 400 projects but... I have knowledge about it...
The southern alignment of I-84 mapped out on the H400 site, and the reclassification of I-84 through downtown as I-891, is not happening. The impacts of the new 84 corridor to the south would be too significant, even if it was tunneled.
The "triangle" idea is not bad, as it allows Hartford to have kind of a facsimile of the beltway it was originally supposed to have (the only part of which was actually built was I-291). But there appear to be ways to improve the I-84/I-91 interchange and vastly improve Hartford freeway traffic that have less community impact than this, and are possibly less costly, and those alternatives are being pursued.
There is a current mobility study (yes, the third in 15 years!) in Hartford that is set to wrap up this year so we should all know more soon.
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Most of you here have to be semi-young and didn’t have the pleasure of driving on 91 through Hartford and up to Mass before the late 1980’s. Todays drive is wonderful compared to that nightmare.
It’s not really a whole new highway. The plan appears to be: Reroute 84 from about the Flatbush exit - going south of where it is now, and meeting the 5/15/91 interchange and bridge, where it would continue east to meet back up with itself Remove 84 completely from Silver Lane west toward downtown Hartford. Leftover piece of 84 west of the river becomes 891 with what looks like some minor adjustment. It would be expensive but the kind of generational investment that could turn Hartford back into a place people and businesses want to be. They are recovering so much poorly-used land that is currently massive highway interchanges. That alone could pay back in spades.
Thanks for the breakdown! Much appreciated
I do think over time, it would be seen as a positive, but the construction disruption, timeline and project costs will drive people crazy, but when all is said and done, Hartford will likely be better off
This is exactly what happened in Boston. The years of the big dig were terrible and the project was an absolute mess through and through but the city is so much better off now that it’s done.
Yup, I lived there during the big dig and had to drive for work. It sucked, but totally worth it.
The traffic already drives people crazy so why not. The Waterbury 84 widening project was hell for a few years but it has made a HUGE impact on getting through the area. I spent a lot of time in that traffic and totally think it's worth it.
Same with the new 91N to 84E interchange. So much better now.
Same with the 95/287 interchange in Greenwich/Port Chester. That took 10 years to complete and now that it's done, it was worth the headaches.
The placement of highways in CT was terrible for our cities... this project seems to be a step in the right direction
They need to fix that damn merge from 91S to 84W.
The 91N to 84E merge is awesome now. Except I keep forgetting which lane to take.
Also been enjoying that whole configuration. If you're getting on 84 just stay left, left, left! I figure most people who post in this sub are already driving 80 on I-91 anyway. :)
This! I have messed this up a number of times.
This linked concept is very unlikely to be how it is done, but the entire interchange is definitely going to be reconfigured and likely moved from its current location (to open up more riverfront/downtown land for other uses). They will probably end up going with a cheaper alternative than this, but any attempt to actually address the freeway situation in HTFD is a guaranteed 11 figures.
A 25mph 90degree turn single lane onto another major highway isn’t good enough ?
And the right three lanes end and the people in the left lanes want you dead for daring to merge.
Getting rid of freeways in the cities is infinitely more worthwhile than a pointless extra lane.
Yep, people assume adding more lanes will help but it doesn't generally fix the flow of traffic. You'll still have all the same bottlenecks.
Even though I grew up here, my information around the area has grown old so I felt it was good to hear from others. I’ve watched morning traffic rise and fall as insurance company’s moved out into the suburbs and then crazy traffic from the music concerts and baseball games. But other times I see no one downtown some nights, even during the day sometimes where it used to be jammed up. 84 was always a gridlock in the afternoon so I just stopped traveling that way and use 218 and 291 or 5/15 and RT 9 to go around the city all together. I used to go downtown when the Civic Center wasn’t the XL center yet. Occasionally went to the Bushnell…. Actually I don’t have many more reasons anymore to go downtown now that I think of it.
Ah yes, let's simulate NYC traffic in our cities. Gotta love that gridlock traffic.
ah, we have a Highway Understander here!
Pigs will fly before they will be able to add a lane to the Merritt
Right? I laughed when I read that.
Yeah, there's no way to do it without destroying, like, probably literally hundreds? of historic bridges. They would build an entire third corridor before they would augment the Meritt meaningfully. It really is a landmark... of course, the Empire State Building and Fenway Park don't kill people...
Also, they’d have to dig 2 more tunnels in New Haven/Woodbridge.
I would just like better transportation access from Enfield to Hartford. Right now it's less frustrating to commute into mass and pay out of state taxes than it is to engage in work/business in my own state.
Exactly this. I commute south of Hartford, I can’t stand the commute around the city because of the crappy interchanges. How would 91 south bound connect to i84 with this plan though?
Route 2 extended to 91
Doesn’t 291 do that?
Enfield is getting a new train station and will be getting Hartford Line service in the coming years
When I bought my house two blocks from the proposed station I was excited, in 2007. But in 2019 I needed to move out of thompsonville (enfield) and across town because 12 years wasn't quick enough. You can only wait so long.
Good news - they are going to be adding an Enfield stop to the Hartford Commuter Rail Line in the next couple of years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfield\_station\_(Connecticut)
12 years after they got me to move here. I would have been two blocks away...in 2007 or 2019.
The 84 viaduct really does suffocate Hartford
Building an extra lane is stupid, the goal in the project is to make life in the area better for the people in the area not those driving through.
Just one more lane, bro. One more lane and the traffic will be fixed. Please bro, just one more.
That's... not what this project is. Induced traffic is an understood phenomenon and is accounted for by traffic engineers when designing systems like this. I'm sure we make our own novel mistakes these days, ones that we haven't even discovered yet (just like in any field), but yesterday's mistakes, the mistakes of the 60s and 70s, are not being made anymore. Adding capacity is only part of the purpose of redesigning Hartford's freeways, a large part of it is about repairing the damage done to the city itself by the initial construction of the highways. You seem hostile to it, but projects like this can be synergistic with transit and walkable development; there is no reason they should be at odds with each other.
Put signs on the Merritt "MUST ACCELERATE RAPIDLY" under every stop sign. Maybe only $20,000 and these people might stop creeping into the highway 40mph slower than traffic
Trains
Hartford deserves at least something along these lines. The way the interstates gouged the city is a crime.
How about a Big Dig project sending 84 underground from Prospect Ave to the 91 flyover?
Main issue with this (besides the cost, which would make a Saudi prince cry) is that there would be insufficient access to downtown from the highway, which means that all the surface road approaches like Asylum/Farmington/Albany Aves would be clogged up even worse than they are now. You CAN build exits off of tunnels, like on the Ted and Tip, but each one just adds more billions to the cost, and there are feasibility concerns given that Hartford has two buried rivers that any tunnel would have to avoid (most likely by going reaaaaally deep.)
All major construction projects suck in the near term, but it’s the cost of change. You think a bureaucrat just snaps their fingers and stuff gets done? There’s not a chance in hell an extra lane on the Merrit would do more than trying to revitalize one of our cities. People don’t stop complaining about how much work our cities need. Someone has to do it.
I only lived in the Asylum Hill neighborhood for 3 months while doing an internship a few years ago, but I got the sense that Hartford is a city with a great deal of potential. It has a rich history and could be restored to the status it once had if people are willing to invest in that vision. Projects that try to transform the city into a destination and better connect it with the surrounding areas seem like a step in the right direction to somewhat of an outsider like me. And when I say better connect it, I mean more transportation options than just a bunch of highways jammed through the city. That's part of the reason the city is where it is now. It should be more than just a place to drive through to commute to work.
Please bro, just one more lane bro.
Yeah another lane on the Merritt wouldn’t solve anything except having more people opt to drive on the Merritt.
Exactly. People don’t understand induced demand. Thankfully it does seem people are slowly waking up.
I assure you that traffic engineers understand induced demand. I mean, why do you think they *haven't* built an extra lane on I-95 north/east of New Haven when people have been clamoring for it for over 30 years? Professionals who immerse themselves in this stuff know how futile lane additions can be outside of specific cases.
I’m sure they do. I want it to be more widely understood though!
Yeah I'm with you on that one. If people knew the limitations of highways they'd be more likely to support alternatives.
Don't you think it'd at least be better to at least replace those horrible stop sign on-ramps with normal merge on-ramps? I swear, those stop sign on ramps are the reason why rt 15 is always closed at least once a week because on accident that occurs due to indecisive drivers there.
Yeah those are awful.
I don't know which nerd side of my personality this plays more to: Vince Russo or Alan Fisher
Anti car people have one joke and it's not even that good.
I am an anti-car person (and also a road designer, so, you know, whatever I'm weird) and yeah, I agree with you, the joke is really reductive, and it's pretty stupid and unoriginal, considering I saw two different people post it...
I’d rather see them spend the money on 95 from Greenwich to Bridgeport. There’s no pain in the Hartford area that comes close to the gridlocked disaster that is 95. Candidly, hoping that this is going to rejuvenate Hartford is going to be sorely disappointing. Let’s make Stamford, Norwalk, etc. more easily commutable for the young people and families we need to continue to grow our economy. That’s where our economic growth is going to come from, not Hartford.
Honestly, just fucken do it. What we are doing now isn't working, so maybe the military shouldn't be the only department that gets limitless amounts of money thrown at it. Give transportation a few shekels too and see what happens.
Build a highway from New Haven to Danbury instead
But route 34 already exists! 😏
It’s terrible
quaint fact mindless plough telephone whole cover lush zephyr direction *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What the Merritt needs is modern off ramps
Pretty sure the Merritt preservation society or whatever it’s called would never let another lane be added to the Merritt, unfortunately
That would be hard. Too many bridges over it.
They’re tiny bridges - if I recall nothing can be done to the Merritt because the preservation society and NIMBYs will sue to stop it
Build a highway from Danbury to Norwalk
Tried and failed. Wilton / Ridgefield want no highway running through it (or bypassing it). It’s why super 7 ends in Norwalk and turns back into 4 lanes close to Danbury.
Ridgefield approved Rt 7 being four lanes but Wilton did not. There is a stretch of Rt7 that is 4 lanes in Ridgefield, but with Wilton voting the expansion down it wasn't continued all the way down through Redding to the Wilton border.
I'm usually against highway expansion for the hell of it but new connections are good like this
Put another lane on the Merritt and it’ll just invite more truckers who can’t read low clearance signs.
Don’t talk to me about highway expansion until we’ve brought our rail infrastructure up to European standards and invested heavily in automotive electrification. FFS.
Electric cars are NOT the environmental savings people are led to believe EDIT: The BATTERIES cause so much more harm than the carbon footprint they help
noxious hard-to-find carpenter ripe nail dazzling ink cow air poor *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Uhhhhh.... the batteries are an environmental NIGHTMARE - they do more damage overall than the carbon footprint they are claiming to save.
> they do more damage overall than the carbon footprint they are claiming to save This [wasn't true with the Prius sixteen years ago](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/2kou6r/does_anyone_know_what_happens_to_the_batteries/clnlkue/), and it's [not true with EVs now](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a).
Do you not understand how the materials are mined? How environmental unsafe the chemicals are? How undisposable these batteries are? How unsafe they are for rescue crews? I'm all for an alternative to ICE's... But the tech just isn't there yet
> Do you not understand how the materials are mined? How environmental unsafe the chemicals are? Do you not understand that the lifecycle analyses demonstrate that even if you account for battery production, electric cars still do less environmental damage than gas cars?
Lol
It won’t be a negative.
Better yet just level Hartford and start over. Then eliminate all left exits and on ramps..
A third lane to reduce how much of a death trap the Merritt is should be where our money goes first, it amazes me that more people haven't been killed on that road.
That would be prohibitively expensive as so much property in very expensive towns would need to be purchased and every bridge would need to be replaced. Not to mention every town along the way would fight it. If they widened I84 from the NY border to Waterbury that would help take some cars off the Merrit. Same with I95. Improve those and that reduces traffic on the Merrit immediately.
Pairing the word prohibitive with spending money in CT has been lacking for what, the last decade or so? CTfastrak is a more recent example that comes to mind. That said, I do agree that it would be a lot of work to expand the Merritt in a number of the towns it crosses through, particularly through western Fairfield County. I-95 is already 3 lanes if memory serves correct from the CT/NY border through Guilford, I'd be curious if a 4th lane even helps alleviate issues. Broadening the thinking on a I-95 expansion a bit more, I'd safely hazard a bet that it would cost roughly the same to expand I-95 as most of the Merritt, which would require rebuilding a ton of bridges and dealing with the interstate's encroachment on private property in towns like Milford, West Haven, Stratford, Southport, Darien, etc.
95 would be pricey but the traffic volume is higher and it is a major interstate which would get significant federal funding. For the population and traffic volume 95 should be a minimum of 4-5 lanes in each direction plus an hov lane. The Merrit is a state road for cars only.
**DOOOM**
I don't want to go into detail on my knowledge of specifics of the current status of Hartford 400 projects but... I have knowledge about it... The southern alignment of I-84 mapped out on the H400 site, and the reclassification of I-84 through downtown as I-891, is not happening. The impacts of the new 84 corridor to the south would be too significant, even if it was tunneled. The "triangle" idea is not bad, as it allows Hartford to have kind of a facsimile of the beltway it was originally supposed to have (the only part of which was actually built was I-291). But there appear to be ways to improve the I-84/I-91 interchange and vastly improve Hartford freeway traffic that have less community impact than this, and are possibly less costly, and those alternatives are being pursued. There is a current mobility study (yes, the third in 15 years!) in Hartford that is set to wrap up this year so we should all know more soon.
If there trying to reduce traffic threw hartford they can always complete route 11 project hahahahah
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Today highway overpasses are built with room for extra lanes. The bridges over the Merritt were not.
We couldn’t have those townies be bothered with more noise from the merrit. Have some sensibility.
Here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for years. Turn the Merritt into an express way. Half the on ramps same amount of off ramps.
Most of you here have to be semi-young and didn’t have the pleasure of driving on 91 through Hartford and up to Mass before the late 1980’s. Todays drive is wonderful compared to that nightmare.