Paul Bass Photo
Seeing a white Highlander SUV blocking an Orange Street bike lane, Stephen Saladino hit the brakes. He dismounted his city-issued Fuji and whipped out his Zebra-brand ticketing device, which caught the attention of a man on the sidewalk.
“I own the store here!” the man announced. “My customers can’t park here?”
Not in the bike lane, they can’t.
Saladino, a city parking enforcement officer, rode on Orange Street Thursday to deliver that message. Gently. He did the same on Dixwell Avenue, on Water Street. In fact, he was more interested in delivering that message than in putting tickets on windshields.
Saladino was on an experimental mission. In honor of Bike Month (a.k.a. “May”), the city’s transit department sent Saladino to bicycle traffic skills school (this course), then assigned him to spend a day or two each week checking roads with a preponderance of cyclists to clear the bike lanes and sharrows of illegally parked cars.
The department was inspired in part by this viral video, said Saladino’s supervisor, Ray Willis. (The video’s a hoot.) If Saladino’s rounds prove effective, Willis said, the assignment could become permanent.
Saladino, a 32-year-old former personal trainer who started working for the transit department three-and-a-half months ago, filled his Street Smarts water bottle, snapped on his Cannondale helmet …
… and fastened on his Zebra ticket device around 12:30 p.m. to begin his shift.
He set out on Court Street, then onto narrow Olive Street, where his boss, transit chief Doug Hausladen, hopes to bring a bike path to connect the Farmington Canal trail to the harbor. Saladino turned left onto Water Street to head to the Tomlinson Bridge, a favorite target of cyclists who post complaints on SeeClickFix (which the transit department reads religiously). Along the way, Saladino was eager to display what he learned in his bike traffic course. Although cops, not parking enforcers, enforce cycling laws, the transit department aims to guide drivers and cyclists alike to sharing the road safely. Supervisor Willis plans to become certified (along with parks department bike point man Martin Torresquintero) to teach the traffic course for free — or “almost free” — to New Haven cyclists.
Saladino hand-signaled as he approached the light at Water and Brewery and crossed from a right-turn-only lane into the through lane. “As you signal you also want to try to make eye contact to let [drivers] know what’s going on,” he remarked.
Past the light, he stopped to consider the narrow shoulder beneath the towering helix of new and old I‑95 lanes. “It’s not too bike friendly,” he noted. He cautioned against “hugging the curb” amid the loud, racing traffic. “You want to continue to own that lane and let them know that is your lane. Make them aware of you. It’s nerve-wracking with the cars flying by you. You still want to stay in that lane and own up to it.”
Past the Tomlinson Bridge, Saladino paused by the train tracks criss-crossing the road. Cyclists come flying through here, swerving, he noted — and can end up tripped up by the tracks. He demonstrated how to focus on keeping the front wheel straight to avoid having tires get stuck in the grooves.
Then he noticed a white Acura parked back on the bridge. In a traffic lane. Where people fish off the bridge. Where SeeClickFixers often note illegally parked cars.
Saladino waved over the two fishermen, Mark Johnson and Victor Kendrick. They hadn’t caught any fish, and now they could catch a $50 fine.
“I got a ticket?” asked Johnson (pictured).
“No, you don’t have a ticket,” Saladino responded. He instead warned him, and told him about an easy-to-miss parking lot right before the western entrance to the bridge.
“All right,” Johnson said before hopping into his Acura. “Thank you.”
A Yale-employed painter working on Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall caught a similar break when Saladino noticed his van in a no-standing zone right before the College/Prospect Street intersection.
Saladino called up to the man.
“Just ticket it,” the man responded.
“OK,” Saladino said, firing up the Zebra.
“What if I back it up?” the man called down again.
Saladino informed him he could simply park one space back, and avoid the ticket. Deal. Saladino said he would rather give an offender a break if he could get the message across about keeping roadways clear.
Two blocks later, on Tower Parkway near Payne-Whitney Gym, he made a similar deal with a Yale worker unloading his last four three-cubic-foot bags of bark mulch. The man was double-parked. Before he moved his vehicle into a legal spot across the street, as if on cue, a woman swerved her bicycle into a crowded lane of cars to avoid it. That’s a good reason the city needs to enforce parking laws, Saladino said.
Saladino thought he encountered a teachable moment when a driver on Dixwell Avenue excoriated him for riding with traffic. “You’re supposed to face traffic!” she called out. Saladino pulled alongside her at a red light at the Webster Street intersection. “That’s for pedestrians, when they’re walking,” he told her. Cyclists are supposed to ride with traffic. The woman wasn’t buying it.
A bike lane stretched out on Dixwell without any visible blockages beginning right past the Munson-Orchard-Shelton intersection. Still, Saladino cautioned, cyclists had to remember to ride toward the left edge of the lane to stay out of “door” range.
He stopped once where a Pontiac Super Charger was parked at a bus stop. The driver was nowhere to be found. So Saladino issued his first ticket. Meanwhile, again as if on cue, a bus pulled up all the way to the corner of Thompson Street. “See what happens? Saladino noted. “This bus is now double-parked in an intersection because this car is parked in the bus lane.”
Saladino ventured next into a harrowing zone of New Haven cycling — narrow, bustling Orange Street, where delivery trucks compete with cyclists and pedestrians and door-openers threaten every inch of putative bike lane. At the corner of Cottage, Saladino encountered that Highlander SUV. Not only was it butting into the bike lane; it sat in a clearly marked no-standing zone.
At first there was no sign of the vehicle’s owner. So Saladino began preparing a ticket. Parking enforcers choose between the two offenses in such cases of double violations, Saladino said; he planned to cite the driver for the bike-lane blocking in order to “reinforce” that point.
Then out came both the driver, Sean Donohue, along with Tom Bowery, owner of the Orange Street Liquor Shop next door.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Donohue said. He said he’d made a quick stop at Orange Street Market and hadn’t noticed the sign. He also noted that a cop had been parked in that space before him.
Bowery was less apologetic. He said the city should allow his customers to park in front of his store.
“Why give him a ticket?” Bowery pressed.
Saladino calmly noted the sign, the bike lane. He reminded Bowery of a crash that had occurred at the intersection “because there was a vehicle in a no-standing zone. The car kept creeping out” because the driver couldn’t see the oncoming traffic.
“I’m just trying to keep the corners clear,” Saladino said.
“Right in front of the store makes no sense,” Bower insisted.
But Saladino doesn’t make the rules. He just enforces them — or warns drivers that they face enforcement unless they start minding the rules.
Drivers like Donohue, who thanked Saladino for allowing him to drive away this time without a $50 ticket.
It's cool that the city pulls PR stunts like this ONCE a YEAR. It's really helpful to those of us who walk and ride EVERY DAY. GSCIA!