Talk to some other F1s in town, they'll give you better advice. Thats all I'll say. Good luck!

I don't own a car myself and bicycle around town. Get good lights and know when to turn on red your own safety - basic urban bicycling stuff. The town is slowly improving its bicycle infrastructure. Be sure to check out college street cycles, Devil's gear, and Bradley st co-op for gear/maintenance, we've got an excellent bicycling community.

You keep on saying "its not so easy if youre a tourist", like a mantra as if tourists are all brainless shambling zombies. Then again OP was unable to find Yale despite being within clear line of sight to a couple tall Yale buildings and presumably around plenty of townies who could point them in the right direction, yet failed to find it, so who knows maybe youre right.

My apologies I didnt mean to put words in your mouth. However, your premise is flawed, the health of cities doesnt hing on "attracting suburbanites". Plenty of studies have shown tax revenues generated in the urban center are what subsidize suburban life and infrastructure, not the other way around. Suburbs are by and large financially insolvent, dependent on debt financing and continuous expansion to pay for their own infrastructure.

Downtown businesses also routinely overestimate how much out of town car-travel custom they get, they're mostly running on foot traffic and local demand.

Also, the notion that suburbanites have to take cars to use urban amenities is just wrong, plenty of cities around the world in Asia and Europe do fine with high quality frequent rail service. Its not a pipe dream at all, it is in fact exactly the kind of infrastructure we had in the US for the first half of the 20th century.

Edited to add - saw something on another subreddit that nicely sums up my argument in re: infrastructure. We dont need to bulldoze more of our cities for the sake of the car: https://www.reddit.com/r/bikecommuting/comments/11ncpvp/a_city_designed_around_driving_doesnt_work_for/

You don't even need google, you can just walk towards the largest buildings lol

You can hate on the town its pretty normal but you don't need to go out of your way to apologize for OP lol

I disagree, you can absolutely spontaneously stop by and have a nice time for an afternoon or evening. If you're expecting hours of urban wandering you're gonna be disappointed but you could've saved yourself the trouble by just looking at a map.

Thank you, I've been in and out of the city for a decade. It's fun and lively but the people who complain about not having anything to do and move to NYC are typically not interesting people to begin with. Living in the city isnt a substitute for having your own hobbies and interests.

Not hating on the city at all, i love it, rent is criminally overpriced though.

My god you're a dedicated hater

They said they were in the Berkshires, thats at least an hour away.

Again, college town. Yale has museums that are better than most university's. Other than that most colleges are just nice famous buildings and old architecture. They're the ones who wanted to see Yale.

No one said it was a tourist hotspot, but if you want to stop by, walk around a pleasant campus, and experience a dense, walkable colonial era downtown you could do a lot worse than New Haven.

If they drove an hour to see Yale and New Haven they could have easily walked another 100yds to wall and york st, walked down it to see the libraries, law building, beineke, a couple secret societies tombs, a lively quad, then continued on to the green and onto crown street. I have no sympathy.

It's a town of 150k, of course it does not have the cultural amenities of NYC or Boston, and it's not loaded with old money like Newport. You don't go to what is essentially a small college town and expect the world.

just take the L bro

THIS. Its so infuriating. Doubly so for Chapel St. through downtown. I've had so many near misses from dooring or getting hit in that painted bike gutter between the travel lane and "parking lane".

I don't see why your convenience is more important than the quality of life and safety of the people walking and using these streets every day and living in the city. A lane of parking can easily be converted to a dedicated bus or bike lane which would move far more people than just you in your car.

Absolutely goofy to give these restuarants a hard time about this, we need less not more street parking, especially on a narrow street like Wooster where the Zeneli's spot is. People zip down it in oversized trucks and SUVs like theyre to hoping to hit someone, not to mention the through-traffic and GPS followers that blindly take it thinking its the best way to get to the I-95 on ramp.

Lol was this written by an SUV

Because the cost or because the buses wont run close to schedule anymore?

Yessss

One of the Devil's Gear guys mentioned a local bicycling advocacy non-profit, I think I'm gonna get involved. We need some pro-bicycling pro-pedestrian attack Karens on our side

Literally though. Its a shame, New Haven should be a fantastic city for walking and bicycling. I cant believe we're still painting death trap cycle lanes squeezed between parking and traffic in 2023

That or the bike infrastructure is just not good enough for the casual bicyclist i.e. people who would otherwise choose an uber to get from union station to downtown or Yale.

just go easy on the naan lol

Oh no, i guess we'll just have to demolish I-95 and start from scratch using its right of way :P

There's also a free shuttle bus from Windsor Locks to BDL.