It seems like progress when City Hall hosts a “City Hall Meeting” on cycling infrastructure, especially when all seats in Council Chambers are filled.
On Monday, after introducing Cameron Douglass and Alex Perez, both representing Trinity College, City Council President Shawn Wooden stepped out of the room. Aside from the occasional councilperson who wandered in and out, few City of Hartford employees attended — Thom Deller, Director of Development Services, was the notable exception who remained for the entirety.
Later, someone called this the “first substantive bike meeting [he has] been to in Hartford,” but most of those in attendance were not Hartford residents, but from the cycling community in the region.
Alex Perez, a sophomore at Trinity College, gave a presentation on a study regarding attitudes about cycling in Hartford. Perez found that a minority of cyclists feel safe currently.
One of the issues, he said, is the lack of protected bike lanes with barriers. There is the question of why the section of Broad Street — that many consider undesirable to ride on because it is between motorists and the I-84 entrance ramp — was the first and, so far, only bike lane in Hartford to get the high visibility green paint. While the community wants high visibility bike lanes, he said the City “should implement [them] where people are actually riding their bikes.” When it is seen that few ride on the Broad Street bike lanes — still, more select the unsafe sidewalk over the unsafe road in this case — it can be argued by anyone who wishes to drag his feet on implementing cycling infrastructure, that bike lanes are a waste of money since few use them.
Safety aside, Hartford needs to think more about how it might improve, Perez suggested, saying that the City’s Capital Parks Master Plan is about connecting the parks, but not really guiding bike commuters to their jobs or school. He wants to see bike lanes connecting Hartford to the region, to Bloomfield, Wethersfield, and the “WestFarms” area.
The City of Hartford created the Capital Parks Master Plan, something that Francisco Gomes, a panelist who works for Fitzgerald & Halliday, had a hand in. Gomes defended the bike master plan as a “first” in Hartford, calling in “strategic.” With Hartford’s ongoing budget issues in mind, Gomes asked, “What’s better: the best facility or no facility?”
Christopher Brown, a panelist who is on the board of Bike Walk CT and volunteers with Transport Hartford, said there needs to be a “three-pronged approach: taking care of what we have, improving what we have, and not making it worse.”
Although transportation beyond the single-occupant vehicle is regaining legitimacy in Hartford, Brown said “it’s a gradual building of awareness” that those who ride for transportation “don’t stay home half the year.” He was referring to how the high visibility green bike lanes installed last Fall on Broad Street were impassable for much of the past several months, buried under mountains of snow.
Perez looked at Davis, California as a city doing cycling well. Davis budgets $100,000 every year for maintenance of bike paths.
“Obviously, Hartford is a city with limited resources,” added Cameron Douglass, a faculty member from Trinity College.
Perez suggested that a bike coordinator, who would act as a liaison between the City of Hartford and neighborhood residents, would help, but Gomes referenced the budget. No City of Hartford employees were on the panel Monday evening, nor did any in the room offer to confirm that there is no space in this year’s budget for the creation of a bike coordinator position.
How, then, do we make improvements that would benefit current residents and potentially attract younger adults who are more likely to question the car dominant culture?
Gomes said “we have some long range vision in the plan for pathways,” adding that if one gets on the path along the Connecticut River at Charter Oak Landing, there is only a small piece of roadway to cross to get into Keney Park, and then one will have ridden almost to the West End.
But others saw this as recreation, not what would be used on a daily commute.
Farmington Avenue is getting a section of bike lane, something that Gomes said he and Thom Deller “worked together at the eleventh hour to get” and which will force the DOT to extend in both directions. Brown said this street, one that is also the busiest bus corridor in the state, should have strong infrastructure. A bus rider, he said, is going to be more likely to try a multimodal commute.
One member of the audience, a woman who recently moved to West Hartford from Denmark, said that it took Copenhagen, a city known for its bicycle-friendly attitude, “forty years to get where they are today.” She added that financially, they were not much better off than our region is now, suggesting that Hartford’s budget woes would be only a sorry excuse for failing to make progress.
Instead, she said, it took time and political will.
When a member of the audience who moved to Hartford from Seattle several months ago shared how that city made some residential-only streets running parallel to main thoroughfares closed off to motorists, except to those who actually live on those streets, Gomes said he did not know what kind of “appetite” the City has for “something like that.”
Everyone seemed to have a different idea about what would make for an improved city, whether that meant adding paint and signs, or educating youth about bike safety. The “Hartford school system is really strapped for cash,” Brown said, suggesting that this type of education would either have to be prioritized, or that the money would have to come from another source.
Another audience member said that New York City has made “amazing changes” in recent years, such as with the separated bike lanes. This individual asked if Hartford could change some of its roads to one-way and do the same.
Gomes said that Hartford and New York are very different, with New York on a grid and Hartford “on a cow path system” that we stuck with, meaning, we do not have many parallel streets. Additionally, he said, New York has “tremendous budget and staff.”
Cities in Europe are not on a grid, said the Denmark native, but as we have seen, better cycling infrastructure there has been done.
Some members of the audience, many donning neon garments and other bits of cycling gear, were negative about the potential for major change happening until more demand is created. One said that “we don’t really have a super strong bike culture in Hartford.”
Brown countered this, saying that cyclists are “out there, they’re just not necessarily being represented.” He alluded to the type of cyclists who are not wearing spandex or working as bike messengers, but are instead riding because that is what they can afford for transportation.
Brown suggested that Hartford embrace its history. The Pope Manufacturing Co., where bicycles were mass produced in the United States for the first time, is essentially the reason why our roads are paved at all. Cyclists, he said, are the ones sharing the roads with motorists.
The City of Hartford collected names from those in attendance, but it was unclear as to how this meeting fit into the bigger picture for those who were not privy to the press release sent less than two hours before the start of the meeting. That invite from the Mayor’s Office began: “Please consider stopping by this event at City Hall tonight at 6pm if there isn’t much going on.”
The City of Hartford is participating in the Safer People, Safer Streets challenge.
Justin
Big, big kudos to Alex Perez and Cameron Douglass for putting this meeting together.
What surprises me about the report from the meeting is the degree to which some of the folks here emphasize going slow, that we can’t really do much, that everything is long range. Of course Hartford isn’t New York in terms of budget, but we’re also not NY in terms of culture, and that might be the real problem. Take the cyclists in the room who show up to claim that there aren’t enough people using bikes to make changes…where does this kind of thing come from? They point to a lack of ‘bike culture,’ but their negativity and emphasis on the paucity of cyclists itself is the bad bike culture that we have. It’s the neon-clad cyclist who shows up to only call for stalling new projects and infrastructure becuase there aren’t enough cyclists. That’s a bad bike culture. In the past several months we’ve seen this bad bike culture exemplified by a member of the P&Z board with the issue of bike parking in DONO.
Along these lines, why would we poo poo Alex Perez’s call for a bike-ped coordinator? Hartford had such a person before when Jonas Macunias held the job. It seems like the antagonism to having such a staffer has more to do with just the budget. Cities like Pittsburgh and New Haven are doing exciting things and getting basic projects implemented because they have a bike-ped coordinator.
The emphasis on maintaining the status quo in Hartford’s alternative transportation scene is very odd. We seem to have a planning economy here–parks plan after plan, street plan after street plan, but implementation is always too challenging, too expensive, or needs to be put on the back burner for whatever reason. Meanwhile in other cities, large and small, the bike movement has worked with city governments to try out new infrastructure (like the parallel streets idea suggested by the person from Seattle) on a temporary, trial basis and see if it works. Even the would-be cyclists here seem to be wary to try anything for fear of offending sensibilities and steady habits. And that’s the real ‘bad bike culture.’
Christopher Brown
For officials and others who missed this event, some valuable longer-form presentations and discussions will take place at Bike Walk Connecticut’s 2015 Bike Walk Summit on April 23 and 24 in Wethersfield. Both days will feature presentations by Roger Geller, Bicycle Coordinator for the city of Portland, Oregon. More info here:
http://www.bikewalkct.org/summit-2015.html?utm_source=Mar+2015+No+1&utm_campaign=summit+2015&utm_medium=email