Nora Grace-Flood photo
Bikes for sale — not for sharing — at New Haven's current micro mobility hot spot: Devil's Gear.
More New Haveners may get the chance to ditch their cars, miss the bus, or pass on Uber — as the city’s parking authority looks to pedal a new path towards micromobility.
The authority has put out a request for proposals seeking operators to bring back bike sharing in New Haven, after the last effort to get more residents on wheels crashed and burned in a collision with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The city already has 300 bikes with which to kickstart such a program, the abandoned leftovers of now-defunct company Bike New Haven, which was established and run by private New York City-based company P3 Global Management (P3GM) in tandem with the city until the company suspended services indefinitely in 2020, citing financial strain and a dwindling number of users at the onset of the pandemic. Read more about that here.
Markeshia Ricks file photo
Doug Hausladen: “The system has to grow organically."
Former city transit chief Doug Hausladen was one of the officials who oversaw the introduction of that fledgling project — and is now working to re-engineer a similar initiative under his title of executive director of the New Haven Parking Authority.
“We want to capture the negative externalities of parking and use it to power better mobility for all,” Hausladen told the Independent.
“We talk a lot about parking avoidance and garage avoidant strategies. We want better walkability and bikeability, so maybe a customer can park once and use a bike during the day, or train station customers without a car can get downtown without waiting for the 20-minute bus service.”
Hausladen’s hope is that a variety of prospective plans will be submitted for review by the authority by Aug. 21, the deadline for companies to present ideas for how they’d get New Haveners biking around town. “We’re hoping it’s a model that can prove sustainable and financially viable — we can subsidize as needed, but we’re excited to see what the proposals put forth,” he said. Interested parties can submit their proposals here.
Hausladen said that “what the parking authority is attempting to do is similar but different from prior efforts.”
The city’s soon-to-expire but now irrelevant five-year contract with P3GM allowed the company to raise revenue from subscribers, sponsors and advertisers through access to free ad-space around the city; in exchange, 300 bicycles were brought to 30 stations established by the private group without directly draining taxpayer-funded dollars.
“One thing is for certain. People hated the ad panels. And another thing’s for certain. Our next program will be ad panel-free,” Hausladen promised. Read here about how some members of the public protested the spread of ads for fast food chains like McDonald’s as conflicting with the public health impetus behind bike share.
Beyond that, funding prospects for an incoming bike-share program remain unclear. The Parking Authority has budgeted some dollars for a potential program, but it remains up to wanna-be operators to pitch financially solvent ways — without relying on ads — to power a bike-share program that could stick around longer than the last.
Ultimately, Hausladen said he imagines a system quadrupled in size from the old, with both manual and electric bicycles available in every ward and neighborhood.
But, he said, “the system has to grow organically; flexibility is good so you can be responsive to demand and not stuck on the numbers.”
The authority will technically “own” the program, he said, but once operators and managers of the hardware and software needed to restart bike sharing are selected, more organizations will be invited in to form a governing board for the broader project.
Ledovsky balances business phone calls and fixing a racing bike during a typical day at Devil's Gear.
In advance of all that planning, Greg Ledovsky, the co-owner of Devil’s Gear bike shop on Chapel, offered some considerations regarding how New Haven might approach a new bike-share program.
Before P3GM broke their contract with the city, they had subcontracted Ledovsky and his coworkers from Devil’s Gear to run New Haven Bike Share Mechanics, the crew that assembled all 300 bicycles, made repairs to those bikes, assured that bikes were relocated to their appropriate stations each day — and distributed the ad panels procured by the company around the city.
Around the pandemic, when Bike New Haven first started recognizing mounting financial loss, Ledovsky said their first cost-cutting measure was to stop subcontracting New Haven Bike Share Mechanics and opt to perform those services in-house. But after making that move, the bike share ended up folding altogether, anyhow.
Repair tools inside the workshop at Devil's Gear.
“It’s not super common that a bike share is expected to make money,” Ledovsky told the Independent. “If you look across the country, most bike shares are actually run at a loss. They’re run by nonprofits or as transportation systems funded by local government.”
“You need to have a certain amount of money put into the system that is not expecting cash return,” he asserted.
Still, Ledovsky said the most obvious example New Haven should look towards is Citi Bike. “They have a massive corporate sponsor — so if there was an organization in New Haven that had a lot of money to sponsor such a program, that would help defer the costs and allow riders to pay a relatively lower fee.”
Beyond funding, Ledovsky said an overhauled bike share should aim for better integration across the city. “The old system largely started in downtown, with some stations in Fair Haven, East Rock, the Hill and Dixwell, but it wasn’t citywide.
“New Haven is a small enough place where you could ride from one end to the other — if you had a bike, and had enough stations to pick up a bike at one and drop it off at another.”
One way to enact that, he said, would be to create a governing board with representation from each neighborhood throughout the city.
“A lot of times bike shares are also seen as harbingers of gentrification,” he noted. “And the best way to combat that is to bring in stakeholders who live in New Haven and ensure any system like this is rolled out and maintained in a way that’s of great benefit to the people who already live here. It’s less about which organizations are involved and more about making sure it’s a diverse choir.”
Ledovsky expressed hope that this latest bike share momentum will continue to build and propel a new project forward to fruition: “I think riding a bicycle is the best way to experience New Haven. And the bike share system can make it possible for everyone to have that experience in this city.”
Yale should fund this rehashed idea, since it will include many affiliates of the university and the hospital. Did COVID make people steal the bikes? Is that an unknown side effect of the vaccine? Actually, this joke might explain a lot of our current chaos (if it were true!)