It's been like that for as long as I can remember. Hartford has been screwed by a few historic quirks. One of them is the extremely small size of the city itself. Another is I-91 screwing up the riverfront and I-84 splitting off the north-end. Next, U-Hart sits on the Bloomfield border, and Trinity on the southern border (or thereabouts). Both are too far from downtown to walk. Added to that, there is no public transit beyond buses, and people hate buses.
If given enough money and zoning power, I think the city would be best served by running quick light rail to both UHart and Trinity, connecting at Union Station. Run the line through Bushnell Park and include a stop at the Bushnell, Hartford Hospital and Trinity. Then run a line past the UConn law school and up to U Hartford. The goal needs to be to drive young people to want to live in Hartford. People drive bars, restaurants and theaters.
There are a lot of things Hartford offers, and it would be great if they can maximize it. A couple of things:
1. Your point about the highways running through the city is right on. I can't find the article I read a while back, but cities that build them
through the city often find that they cut off neighborhoods from one another, increase segregation, increase violence, and drive people
out of the city. For all of the problems and costs of the Big Dig, I'm
so glad the highways are not obtrusive, and, while I've only lived here half a dozen years, from what I gather, Boston is
significantly better (less violent, more night-life, younger crowd, more prosperous in general), and that correlates with the Big Dig (lots of factors, obviously, but BD was one).
2. The Hartford bus system is terrible. My wife and I went to Trinity (and my brother-in-law is there now), and geez, as relatively poor students with no car, it was a pain to get anywhere. It would have been nice to walk to some of the restaurants, the theatre, the Athenaeum--lets get real, I was in college--the downtown bars, some of which I remember being pretty good. The busses were inconsistent, and something like you're mentioning (a relatively simple light rail) that connected Trinity and UHart to each other, to downtown--and, hell, maybe a line that went out to the Rent, at least one weekends--could do wonders for the city. As a huge UConn fan living in Hartford, it was a pain to get to the XL center or Rent to catch games without a car. At least one of those should be remedied.
And this might keep more people
in the city, and if more people are in the city, and it is safer and more enjoyable, you'll see revitalization.
