Pedestrian bridge is a wasteful, terrible idea

The pedestrian bridge planned to move people from the Water Street parking garage directly into the museum and back again would be a gross failure of urban planning.

B ad ideas don’t die. They just try to relocate to New London. For decades, the city has failed to leverage its downtown core, and its position as a transportation hub, despite the fact that Amtrak, ferries to Long Island, Fishers and Block Islands, and I-95 are all located near the city center.

With vast swaths of underutilized downtown land, New London officials facilitated the construction — first by Pfizer and now utilized by Electric Boat — of a mammoth, and jarringly out of character office complex on waterfront property, without convenient access to major arterial roadways.

Meanwhile, Water Street has served since the time of urban renewal as a sadly effective, and dangerous, barrier to connecting the train station, the ferries, the piers and the waterfront to downtown and the rest of the city.

Now, when EB lets out every day from that waterfront complex, thousands of employees in single-occupant cars drain out of its parking garage, driving through downtown New London onto Water Street and out of town. This is hardly a recipe for successful revitalization.

Leaving aside the question of whether the location proposed for the U.S. Coast Guard Museum is the right one (what’s done is done), the pedestrian bridge planned to move people from the Water Street parking garage directly into the museum and back again would be a gross failure of urban planning.

Pedestrian bridges are a terrible idea. They are expensive to build and difficult to maintain. Due to financial limitations, cities often fail to maintain them at all. At that point they become public toilets and invite crime. They signal that a community prioritizes vehicular travel over pedestrians, street life, the health of the local economy, and the quality of life.

There are better ways to move pedestrians from one side of a street to the other. They involve sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic signals. Of course, that typically means a slower, less highway-like experience for people in cars. It’s a choice.

I lived in New London in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s — essentially, during the time that the city began to fail. It embraced urban renewal and wasn’t renewed by it. It’s easy to criticize decisions made during that time and, in fairness, it wasn’t all bad.

Still, mistakes were made. But instead of trying to reclaim, and redevelop, some of its dense urban core, which is the main asset that distinguishes the city from almost every other community in southeastern Connecticut, the city too often doubles down on mistakes made half a century ago.

At some point, if New London is committed to its downtown, it will need to fix Water Street, a mistake that impedes progress to this day.

Massachusetts traffic planners use a design program called “Complete Streets,” which is what it sounds like. This approach views a city street as a place where different types of users are accommodated. Under this approach, Water Street would become more than a conduit for vehicular traffic trying to get out of New London. It would be transformed into a place that also welcomes pedestrians and cyclists, while re-establishing long-lost connections between what happens on either side of the street, creating the interactions that make a city sing.

If the museum must go where proposed, then at least it should present an opportunity for New London to turn a page on the failed approaches of the past. For a fraction of the cost of building a pedestrian bridge, which will end up being demolished before the bonds issued to finance it are paid off, the city can fix one of the most egregious mistakes of the urban renewal era. Trains travel through the area twice an hour on average — hardly an inconvenience or danger to pedestrians justifying a $20 million pedestrian bridge.

When I worked at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, then Mayor Tom Menino pressed hard for a similar sort of pedestrian bridge across Congress Street, to connect City Hall Plaza to Quincy Market. Urban planners managed to kick that can down the road until he retired.

Similarly, while I served as a deputy secretary of Transportation in Massachusetts, we refused every request for pedestrian bridges involving state roads, and for funding of them anywhere else. It forced developers and planners to devise better, “complete streets,” plans.

Pedestrian bridges are a terrible idea. They have been abandoned everywhere that city planning has moved beyond the 20th century. New London should reject this one, fix Water Street, and begin to take back some of what once made it a real city.