Bike Activist Maps To Ride

For Brian Tang, the process of designing a new bike map of New Haven was simple: he hopped on his bike and started pedaling.

The result: a special edition bike-and-bus map of Greater New Haven, just in time for the city’s current GoNHGo campaign encouraging people to walk, bike and use public transit instead of driving cars.

Tang (pictured), a local cycling activist, joined me in the studio for the second episode of WNHH radio’s ​“In Transit,” a show about transportation and its intersections, to talk about how to use the map and the ​“weak links” in the city’s cycling infrastructure.

“Mapping is in a lot of ways an act of civic planning, an act of seeking to understand your environment. I think that drawing maps has been a big part of how I’ve come to understand the physical layout of New Haven and the different neighborhoods,” he said.

Tang’s interview starts at around 11:27 in the above sound file of the program.

Tang finished his first map ​“to completion” at the end of 2012 after graduating from Yale, which became the first edition of the Elm City Cycling map, distributed in bike shops around the city. The new edition incorporates much more of the city.

“At that time, if you went to the city of New Haven to ask for a bike map, what you would get would be either a bike map that was designed in 2004 that was the official city bike map, or there was the New Haven Green map. The most recent edition was completed in 2006,” Tang said.

He said city officials assumed mapping would go digital, that people would begin using apps and Google Maps to figure out the best bike routes. Eventually, he said, ​“people will develop the software to do all of that,” but in the meantime, he has also been adding routes to Google Maps since 2011.

Tang also highlighted certain ​“known weak links within the bike network” on the map in striped orange. Often these links are state-owned roads with heavy traffic, unsafe for people walking or biking. For example, people getting off a bus at Route 1 or Boston Post Road would likely have trouble crossing to the other side.

“The city of New Haven has come an incredibly long way but there are still these roads that are these key state routes…that are managed by the state DOT that continue to have a long way to go before they are able to serve as the key connections that they could be for people on foot, people on bicycle and people riding transit,” he said.

The special edition map incorporates bus routes, to encourage ​“multimodal” or ​“intermodal” transportation, using multiple forms of transit to complete a trip.

When a trip isn’t directly on a bus route, ​“you can use your bicycle to help complete that, they call it, the last mile of your trip,” Tang said.

At the beginning of the show, I interviewed Independent reporter Markeshia Ricks, who had what she called a ​“multimodal fail” trying to get from downtown to Westville at 9 p.m. by bus last Friday. She had biked to work that morning, but was tired after a work happy hour event. She planned to put her bike on one of the two bike racks attached to the front of the bus.

But when the bus came after a half hour wait, both bike racks were full, leaving Ricks sore out of luck. ​“I ultimately biked home in the dark at 10 o’clock at night,” she said.

The city is encouraging individuals and businesses to sign up for a contest through GoNHGo to reduce their car usage and increase their use of alternative transit. The Independent and WNHH Community Radio staff is throwing its collective hat into the ring, less because we expect to win a prize and more so we can document our journey. Keep listening to In Transit for updates.