Connecticut

Pratt Street is a narrow, one-way block-long street in the heart of downtown Hartford, Connecticut, lined with red brick pavers and historic storefronts. It's also the latest street in the United States to go car-free, at least some of the time, as part of the city's first agreement to spend parking meter revenue on local streetscape improvements.

Yesterday's elections returned some of the nation's most anti-urban, anti-transit governors to power in races where they were supposed to be vulnerable. Pro-transit candidates were unexpectedly routed in some states, though a few did manage to hang on.

Hartford, Connecticut, has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. The urban renaissance that has visited so many cities hasn’t arrived there. Housing is still cheaper in the city than in the suburbs, and although suburban poverty is growing alarmingly fast, it’s nowhere near the levels seen in the city.

Streetsblog's Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city's downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014's Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on America's downtowns.

Central Connecticut and its biggest cities, New Haven and Hartford, have never been known for strong transit, at least not compared with the parts of the state closer to New York.

Some New Haven residents were fed up with a dangerous intersection near Yale University, where repeated requests for a crosswalk had gone ignored. So one night last May, they painted a zebra-striped crosswalk on Whitney Avenue near Audubon Street.

Looks like Connecticut still has't extricated itself from the "growth ponzi scheme" -- you know, gambling on a few road widenings while the bulk of its existing assets slide into disrepair.

Tearing down highways, as New Haven, Connecticut is planning to do to a short section of Route 34, is a rare (though increasingly sought after) outcome in American transportation policy. Some highway removals are unintended consequences of neglect or disaster, like the collapse of New York's Miller Highway and the damage caused to San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Others are planned interventions, like Milwaukee's removal of the Park East Freeway. But the New Haven project is the first planned highway teardown to receive funding from the federal government, which awarded the project a TIGER grant in 2010.