City of New Haven
Rendering of temporary Olive Street cycletrack.
You might have only a month to pedal on New Haven’s first-ever protected bike lane — or it may become permanent. Either way, you can help build it and then decide if it should remain.
That’s because of a novel idea the city is testing as it proceeds on the path of filling New Haven with “cycletracks” — lanes on city streets reserved for bikes and physically separated, by planters or “rubber ducky” delineators, from car traffic.
Plans are in the works for miles-long two-way cycletracks on the west side of town (costing $1.2 million) and, in chunks, on Water Street and Sargent Drive. Those cycletracks will take months or longer to be approved and/or constructed. A state law passed last summer paved the way for New Haven to start building those two-way cycletracks, which will be the first in Connecticut.
Meanwhile, the Harp Administration is testing-driving the concept with a down-and-dirty, low-budget, citizen-powered “pop-up” project.
It is inviting neighbors to help create a temporary one-way southbound bike lane on Olive Street between Grand Avenue and Water Street, a particularly perilous stretch of road where neighbors have called for traffic-calming.
On May 1, the city will close the eight-foot parking lane on the west side of Olive for 31 days. Then a city crew will work with trained citizen volunteers to turn it into a five-foot bike lane with a three-foot buffer.
Rather than use expensive, more permanent striping to mark the line, they will lay down heavy-duty traffic tape. They’ll put planters, perhaps, or else those delineators, in as buffers.
“We’ll build it in five hours,” said city transit chief Doug Hausladen, who’s spearheading the project with City Engineer Giovanni Zinn.
Then they’ll encourage the public to call in throughout the month about how they like, or don’t like, the bike lane. If the reviews are negative, the city will restore the parking lane.
“We’ll just rip the tape off,” Zinn said.
If it’s a hit, permanent striping will go in, and the city will have its first official bike lane.
The idea is to field test a protected bike lane while officials refine the larger projects planned for the rest of town.
Hausladen and Zinn plan to explain the upcoming pop-up bike-lane-building day at the next meeting of the Downtown Wooster Square Management team, planned for 6 p.m. this coming Tuesday on the second floor of City Hall.
Then, at 7 p.m., citizens volunteering to participate in the project can stick around for training. (Details about the event can be found on this Facebook page.)
“Fail First”
Aliyya Swaby Photo
“Cross-bikes” installed on Elm Street.
The pop-up test is one of several ways that the city is trying to work innovatively and involve the public as it charts new bike-lane territory, Hausladen and Zinn said during an appearance on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“Sometimes innovation is not all about text and tweet and text. Sometimes it’s about getting out of your own comfort zone but being able to, as the mayor always says to us, ‘Fail fast,’” Hausladen said. “Once you get to a point in a project when you think it can work, you can waste most of a year in government worrying that it’s going to fail. People [too often say], ‘You can’t fail in government. You have to get it right the first time.’”
“Failing fast” doesn’t necessarily mean failing, he said. It means trying a new idea without all the assurances that it will work, especially if it hasn’t been done before.
For instance, Hausladen and Zinn decided to “fail fast” last fall when they tried out bright new wide green “cross-bikes” — cross-walk-style markings to show cyclists where the Elm Street bike lane continues and remind drivers to share the road — on Elm Street downtown. They didn’t have enough city money to paint the entire route green; they had to decide how far back from each intersection to paint the stripes. They knew they needed to go farther back from the Temple and Elm intersections that from other intersections, because so many buses drop off passengers there, and drivers were getting confused about where to make right turns. (They were crossing into the bike lanes.)
Hausladen said he and his staff couldn’t find any federal or state standards for safe lengths. One night some time after 11 p.m., on a phone call (Hausladen was walking downtown; Zinn was parked in the Department of Works lot), they decided to go ahead and set their own standards rather than spend months more in meetings with consultants of state officials to try to devise new standards.
Paul Bass Photos
Giovanni, Hausladen in the WNHH studio.
They figured they’d make one more pass at contacting a transit official somewhere else with experience in the matter. It was too late tor each someone they knew in Seattle. So they tried a contact they had in Honolulu, where offices were still open for the work day. They spoke with someone who had also experimented with the green-painted lanes. They asked him what the rule is there for how far back to paint. “We don’t know,” the official responded.
So Hausladen and Zinn used the Connecticut state rule that you can’t park 25 feet from an intersection. They used that standard for the green stripes at low-conflict intersections. They went 100 feet at Temple and Elm. And they went ahead. That might sound wonky and trivial, but, Hausladen said, this is just the kind of tiny decision that can tie governments in paralysis when they try to innovate.
Citing the Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff book Why Not?, Hausladen spoke of borrowing ideas from other cities and trying them out here. For instance, the pop-up bike lane demonstration project idea came from an event in Burlington, Vermont.
Another key strategy, Zinn said, is “problem definition.” To listen to criticism from citizens when you roll out a plan, then revisit the plan to see if you can think about it in a new way.
He and his staff did that last month when some Westville neighbors complained about a stretch of the new two-way cycletrack the city had designed for Edgewood Avenue. The owner of a coffee shop and some of her neighbors complained that the track removed parking spaces in front of the establishment and would cost her too many customers who commute to New Haven from Bethany and Woodbridge.
At first, Zinn’s staff had concluded that parking lane needed to be removed to make room for the cycletrack. After hearing the complaints, they returned to the location with a measuring wheel.
They discovered that aerial measurements of the block had underestimated how wide the road was. And by redefining the problem to be solved — how to preserve the parking lane, rather than just how to fit in a cycletrack — they realized they save some space overall by extending the tree belt area between the sidewalk and the street, then move the cycletrack there for the two blocks in question. Both the cycletrack and the parking lane now fit.
“We’re pioneering this stuff in Connecticut,” Zinn said. “This is a learning curve.” Riding that curve sometimes entails checking to see if you’re asking the right questions.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full “Dateline New Haven” interview with Hausladen and Zinn, which actually covered parking-ticket advances, LED lights, solar roofs, and whether bike lanes represent the “white stripes of gentrification,” as alleged by New Haven Independent commenter Three-fifths.
WNHH
I actually am all for protected bike lanes, because most drivers in New Haven have no caution or care for anyone else on the road.
But my question is: Why is this being tested on Olive Street? Wouldn't this work better to "pop-up" on Edgewood Ave where the actual protected bike lane is planning to go?
I'd be interested to know why anyone is trying to put a bike lane on Olive Street. The fact that this may be permanent is so odd... Are people biking from Grand to Water Street? If anything, they are biking past Olive Street into downtown.
Try it out on State Street, it could run from the train station into East Rock.