Chris Randall Photo
Lee Osorio, at right, chatting up the Coalition for Active Transportation at the 2023 New Haven Promise Internship Fair.
A New Haven “active-transit” group is marking its fifth anniversary by getting more kids on bikes around town more safely.
The group is the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation (NCAT).
It formed out of a task force formed by Former Mayor Toni Harp’s administration to plot ways to educate cyclists as the city built out more bike lanes and cycletracks.
The group has been holding free classes for people of all ages on safe cycling, bike maintenance, and seasonal commuting.
This past fall it branched out to working directly in the schools. The group’s executive director, Leiyanie “Lee” Osorio, pedaled her all-black, white-detailed mountain hybrid Cannondale (which she named “Midnight”) to St. Martin de Porres School twice a week to teach middle-schoolers about safe riding, the “ABC Quick Check” (air, brake, chain, crank, cassette) along with hand signals, optimal attire (“Your helmet is your seat belt”), proper lighting. After parking lot drills and neighborhood rides, the class commences with a full group ride into Downtown.
Now NCAT is working on a similar program with the New Haven Public Schools. Beginning this fall the group will develop a curriculum and train and certify teachers at Metropolitan Business Academy, High School in the Community, and Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. The plan is then to co-teach science courses on the human part of cycling, Osorio said during a conversation Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program: How “your body is an engine … How it works to help crank your bank … How to take care of your body.” Then they hope to proceed to an actual biking course like the one taught at St. Martin.
The coalition has branched out to working with communities statewide on promoting policies aimed at not just cycling but walking, running, and bus travel.
The goal, according to board Chair Doug Hausladen, who joined Osorio on WNHH: “Wheels and feet on every street.”
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with Leiyanie “Lee” Osorio and Doug Hausladen of the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Click here to subscribe to “Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.
Paul Bass Photo
Lee Osorio and Doug Hausladen at WNHH FM.
I have contacted the Yale alder, and Doug Hausladen about returning the green Rent-A bikes from the stations, especially the one in Temple Plaza, across from the Omni. A lot of downtown residents of the Liberty, Taft, Cambridge Oxford, High Street Place, et al have been waiting for their return after we found out Covid is not likely to linger on surfaces outdoors. Three years later, the bikes are still missing, and we have gotten a run around. Instead of puff pieces to feed egos, city officials should get out from in front of cameras and actually do something substantive. It was folly to remove them thinking that a respiratory virus would be transmitted outdoors, from bikes.