Recknagel: Where will cars go?
City of New Haven
Rendering of proposed Olive Street cycletrack.
As transit officials prepare to test a “pop-up” temporary protected bike lane on Olive Street, some neighbors organized against them— while others signed up to help build it.
Transit and parking czar Doug Hausladen and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn first formally announced their plan to build the lane on the parking side of Olive Street at Tuesday night’s Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting. They fielded a flood of questions and concerns about how the lane would change traffic and parking on the busy street.
More than a dozen neighbors joined officials to hear about the project and volunteer their time to help build the lane, one of numerous projects on tap to bring to New Haven streets a new generation of “cycletracks” physically separated from car traffic.
Starting May 1 through the rest of the month, the city will close the parking lane on the west side of Olive Street. On May 1 they will work with volunteers to turn it into a five-foot bike lane separated from the street by a three-foot buffer. The lane will stretch from Water Street to just before the fire station on Grand Avenue.
The bike lane will be a “light, quick cheap pilot” to test the idea before deciding whether to spend more money to make it permanent, Hausladen said.
The city is changing the way it looks at engineering and design projects, getting community input to implement quick designs instead of spending a lot of money on design before bringing the idea to management teams, Zinn said.
The plan has generated passionate public debate since this Independent article about it appeared last week. That debate surfaced at Tuesday’s management team meeting.
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Zinn and Hausladen: Easy, cheap bike lane pilot will hopefully stay put.
“Where are the cars going to go?” Wooster Square neighbor Renate Recknagel asked.
The owners of the average of 16 cars that park along Olive between Grand Avenue and Water Street will need to find spaces on side streets, Hausladen said. He said the city also might open up the lots on State and Audubon Streets or State and Grove Streets to cars with residential permits in the neighborhood, he said.
The lane will be one-way on just the western side of Olive Street, he said. “My dream is that on May 31, enough folks say, ‘Keep it.’”
Ideally, 25 to 30 people would volunteer to get the job done in about six hours, said Mike Lydon, who heads the New York office of urban research firm Street Plans. Lydon and his firm have installed temporary traffic markings on streets across the country, and he is consulting on New Haven’s first attempt at its own.
Coby Zeifman, Lydon.
Volunteers will put down white traffic tape on the asphalt to mark the lane and create a striped buffer. They will figure out what to use to create barriers between the traffic and bike lanes, Lydon said. Ideally, the barriers would “beautify” the street in some way, for example, planter boxes with flowers. They need to be reflective so drivers can see them at night.
The team should also consider “stewardship” and may find the planters get stolen over time, Lyon said.
Volunteers will also mark bike stencils onto intersections where cyclists are “most vulnerable,” he said, to notify cars that the lane continues.
Some people will serve as supervisors. Others will be the “ground crew” in ratios of about 1:4 or 1:5, Hausladen said.
After the month is up, city officials will decide whether to keep the lane down or to take it up, depending on calls neighbors have made to Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg in support or against the project. This weekend Hausladen plans to go door to door along Olive to explain the process.
Neighbors delivered fliers to Olive Street homes Monday.
Some Olive Street neighbors are organizing against the bike lane’s installation by delivering a flyer to homes along the street encouraging people to oppose the plan. “Stop the bike track!!! We are at risk for losing Olive Street parking forever!” the flier reads. “Beginning Monday May 1, through May 31, parking will not be permitted on Olive Street to try out a protected bike lane. We can prevent this.”
The flyer urges neighbors to call the mayor, city engineer’s office and Alder Greenberg to stop the bike lane project.
Not all Olive Street neighbors are against the lane. Nick Demorest and Brooke Grosenick live on Olive between Greene and Chapel Streets; each has a car. Neither has trouble finding parking daily.
“I park around on Greene” or around Wooster Square Park, Grosenick said. She suggested city officials put out signs explaining the project before May 1, since most neighbors have seen the critical fliers.
“There’s flexibility within the parking allotment,” Demorest added.
Grosenick and Demorest.
Demorest and Grosenick do not cycle at all in New Haven. But they said the new lane would add a community feel to that part of the neighborhood. “It will make the neighborhood feel nicer,” Grosenick said. “I don’t ever really see bikers there. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s an increase” in cyclists during the month of May.
Olive Street has been a target for traffic-calming measures for years, with a number of accidents caused by traffic zooming down the narrow two-way on their way to either interstate. Neighbors’ calls for new fixes have intensified in the last couple of years, after neighbor Dolores Dogolo was struck by a car and killed Oct. 30, 2014, at the intersection of Olive and Greene Streets.
After an investigation, police found the driver was not at fault, a report Dogolo’s family members criticized at a public meeting last March.
Dogolo: Don’t use my mother’s death to advocate for a bike lane.
Dolores’ daughter, Georgiann Dogolo, said Tuesday after hearing officials’ presentation of the pop-up bike lane that she was concerned about people “using my mother’s death to advocate for the bike lane.”
Last November, the city put in “rectangular rapid flash beacons” at three locations on Olive Street, allowing pedestrians to press a button and activate flashing yellow lights indicating cars should yield.
That helped traffic calming, Georgiann Dogolo said. The bike lane is a separate issue, not directly related to her mother’s death, she argued.
She lives on Olive Street and works downtown at City Hall, and said she enjoys being able to walk to work. But people still need to be able to access cars, she said. “To think we can do away with cars is an ideal that will be hard to achieve,” Georgiann Dogolo said.
Neighbors, officials and transit advocates have long considered the idea that creating an even narrower street and facilitating cycling on Olive could force four-wheeled traffic to slow down.
City officials plan to survey the number of bikes and cars using Olive Street during the month of May, as well as parking on Olive and side streets.
Those who want to volunteer or know more can click here.
Click on the above sound file to hear Hausladen and Zinn describe various bike-lane and traffic-calming projects around town on WNHH Community Radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Kind of surprised the NHI story omits the fact that this "pop-up" bike lane isn't just popping-up for no reason.
The City envisions connecting the Farmington Canal trail to the waterfront, -- via Olive Street.
Why this ultimate goal isn't being shared is anyone's guess.
My personal belief is that along as Olive-to-Wooster-to-I-95 remains open to through traffics, Olive Street will always be a dangerous place to ride a bicycle.