Sarah Goodyear, Livable Streets
Network editor and community manager
(Photos: Elly Blue)

While I was in New York briefly, I met up with Sarah Goodyear, editor and community manager of the recently launched Livable Streets Blog Network. Billed as "the national blog network for sustainable transport, smart growth, and livable streets," the network is the brainchild of Aaron Naparstek, editor-in-chief of StreetsBlog.org. (Both the network and StreetsBlog are part of umbrella organizaton The Open Planning Project.)

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As the network's editor, Goodyear sifts through stories from hundreds of blogs from all over the country, twice a day. Every morning she chooses one story to reprint and several to feature, posts them on the network's home page, and writes a StreetsBlog story about the day's featured post.

The network currently has 202 member blogs, hailing from 34 states, "and it's growing every day," says Goodyear.

Of all the blogs in the network, some of Goodyear's favorite reads include:

• The Bus Bench: A public transit blog out of Los Angeles. Goodyear likes how publisher Browne Molyneux gets deep into the issues she covers. Also, Molyneux is one of the only women of color -- or women, or people of color -- in the network.
• Fort Worthology: A really well done blog focusing on smart growth and sustainable transport issues in Texas.
• Greater Greater Washington: Along with StreetsBlog and BikePortland, this is one of the few blogs doing extensive, in-depth reporting, Goodyear says.
• Milwaukee Rising and Political Environment: two blogs doing good work and providing important perspectives in Wisconsin.

Goodyear is one of about a dozen members of the TOPP team who work from home. Her background is in journalism and freelance writing (and she recently published a novel). She is working on the Livable Streets Network as a freelancer, but is optimistic that the network will prove successful enough to turn into a regular part-time job. She sees the network, she told me, as a chance to connect and strengthen the many local livable streets movements in the country.

The best part of the job? Learning about what someone's doing in a small town in Kansas, and being able to connect them with similar work in New York.

She hopes to see the network grow into an empowering tool in TOPP's growing livable streets toolchest. Obama has shown us, she said, that we can mobilize people using the internet to have real power. "I want people to feel like they are part of a growing movement that has political clout and that is going to get heard."

-- Learn more at Streetsblog.net.

It's not on the annual lists of biking hot spots, but during my recent visit to Baltimore I realized they might just become the next big bike city. They're not quite Portland (yet), but they're gaining fast.

Baltimore bike and ped planner Nate Evans
sets off for a tour of the city.
- More photos below -
(Photos by Elly Blue)

Like many cities, Baltimore's bike-friendliness begins at the top. Bikes are buoyed by the city's Bicycle Master Plan (that was adopted in 2006) that is wholly supported by their mayor Sheila Dixon. Dixon was elected in 2007 and she's an avid cyclist. Dixon leads weekly morning rides (which are open to anyone) and last year she put the city's dollars behind biking with the hire of bike and pedestrian planner Nate Evans.

Baltimore has made some major improvements to their bike network recently, including the marking of 42 miles of bikeways, installation of 70 bike racks in front of businesses (with more requests pouring in every day), experimentation with sharrows and "floating" bike lanes, and the conversion of old parking meters into bike parking.

These efforts garnered Baltimore an honorable mention from the League of American Bicyclists' Bicycle Friendly Communites program. The League was so impressed that they invited Baltimore to apply again this year (cities usually must wait three years between applications).

Bicycle wayfinding signage near
the campus of Johns Hopkins
University.

If the mayor remains in office (she was indicted on corruption charges the day I was there), Evans is confident of earning Silver status this time around.

Listening to his goals for 2009, this doesn't seem all that far-fetched. The city plans to more than double bike parking capacity and bikeway mileage, with an emphasis on connecting routes and neighborhoods; three on-street bike parking facilities are in the construction pipeline; a Sunday Streets "ciclovia"-type event is planned for four consecutive weeks this spring; and the city will also hold two bike summits this year in an effort to create a cohesive bike community.

And there's nowhere to go but up: In the 2000 census, just .034% of Baltimore residents said that biking is their main way to get to work. Evans projects that number will jump to 2% in 2010 if he is able to reach his goals (for comparison, that percentage is 5-8% (depending on where you look) in Portland).

Evans' long term goals for the city are even more ambitious -- and inspiring. He wants the city to have 350 bikeway miles (lanes and sharrows), 2000 bike racks, 30 on-street bike corrals, 10 annual ciclovia events, multi-use paths connecting the region, several carfree plazas in the central city, 15% bike mode share, a bike sharing service, and more.

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Here are some photos I took of bike infrastructure on various rides around the city:

Baltimore's contribution to the cycletrack revolution. This two way path for bikes only lies in between a major one-way arterial and a harborside pedestrian path. Also seen on the cycletrack during my visit: two city trucks, a taxi, a police car, and a family piling into a minivan.

Growing pains: the city has been installing sharrows at a fast pace, but a number have ended up in the door zone during the non-peak hours when parking is permitted on many major streets.

This sharrow functions more as it ought to. These markings send a powerful message in a city where bikes are often invisible.

Trying to access the bike parking in a corner of one of Baltimore's many overfull parking garages. The city is working with local businesses and gyms to find creative ways to ensure access to covered parking and shower facilities for downtown bike commuters.

As the city installs smart meters similar to Portland's, they are converting many of the old coin meter posts into bike parking.

Baltimore is an inspiring example of how a city which has been experiencing extremely rough times since the 1950s is trying to rebuild itself with new parameters for a new era. I'm sure we'll hear much more about Baltimore in the years to come.

-- Read more of Elly Blue's travel dispatches -- including a visit to Washington D.C. and New York City -- on her East Coast Tour page.

This is my favorite moment on the 9th Ave cycle track -- this didn't make it into my other post about the track and its many uses. (Photos: Elly Blue)

The Hudson River Greenway is an all-too-rare example of separated bike and pedestrian paths. The white sign in the center left reads "No Pedestrians on Bike Path." There's a nice wide walkway right by the water, well separated by landscaping.

The new Gansevoort Plaza with its suggestive bollards redesigns a huge traffic free for all in the Meatpacking District into a more manageable, usable public space. Streetsblog tells more of the story, with more enticing pictures.

New York already has good bones as a city built around walking. And a new wave of livable streets activists, advocates, and public officials -- including Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner -- have been making a major impact in the last year alone with infrastructure investments like these. And there are no signs of this progress slowing down any time soon.

John La Verdure (Photo by Elly Blue)

Taking a break in the lobby of the Marriott during the TRB conference, I noticed a man nearby with Portland on his nametag. He turned out to be John La Verdure, an engineer who lives in Troutdale and advises the The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on technical issues with building roads on Native American reservations.

I asked what conference sessions he was attending, and he launched into an enthusiastic description of a flaw that has lately become apparent in the 12 inch concrete slabs used to build many highways. The slabs shift slightly, over a long period, so that 20 years after they're installed, one end will be 1/16 inch lower than perfectly flush. That's why, when you're driving across North Dakota, the road feels bumpy.

This is not a topic I generally get excited about, but La Verdure's interest was contagious. I asked what in his opinion are the major transportation issues for Indian communities. "Funding," he said.

Indian reservations often have depressed economies, La Verdure explained, and are not able to raise money from increasing property or income taxes or imposing greater fees the way that city and states are able to. Thus their entire transportation budgets come from an allotment of the US federal gas tax, which does not sufficiently fund all projects.

I asked about non-car transportation, and La Verdure said that bicycle and walking paths are not prioritized on reservations. Moving goods and services to and from the reservation, particularly the natural resources such as minerals, sand, and gravel are, he said, "the basic elements of the economy." So roads for cars and trucks are necessarily prioritized.

Bike and walking paths are often planned when roadways are being designed, and then dropped because of lack of funds. "But for the social fabric of the community," he pointed out, "there needs to be walking and biking."

Options other than driving are much needed on reservations. Safety is a major concern -- there are a lot of white crosses along roadsides, La Verdure said. Also, on reservations, not everyone can afford to buy a car, and those who do buy cars aren't always able to afford gas and maintenance. As a result, walking is how many people get around -- often for trips of many miles, and often along major roads. But there is no funding for anything but vehicular infrastructure.

La Verdure knows of one planned multi-use path, on the southern edge of the Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho. The path will connect the two communities of Tensed and de Smet. De Smet has a school and a number of other resources that Tensed lacks, and currently anyone who wants to travel between them without driving a car must walk along US Highway 95.

The State of Idaho is helping the tribe pay for the path, as part of its requirement to use a certain amount of its transportation budget for nonmotorized transportation.

La Verdure thinks the path will particularly be a boon for schoolkids. He hopes that bicycling to school can become a feasible option once the route opens: "Once we get them on a bicycle, they're going to stay on a bicycle."

Even though we're from the same place, I doubt I would have run into John La Verdure in Portland. I'm glad I did here.

Occupying a bright storefront in the young and hip Charles Village neighborhood, Velocipede is a collectively run community bike shop. Since July of 2006, the all-volunteer shop has welcomed members of the community to come volunteer time (or, as a downplayed alternative, pay a fee) in exchange for access to bike tools, parts, and expertise.

Their logo

Anyone who volunteers at least three hours a month is allowed to choose a frame and build up a bike for themselves for free from the shop's store of donated parts. Want nicer parts? Volunteer more hours. Collective members are always available to help, and weekly classes focus in-depth on various parts of the bike.

The shop, which is a business, has been open since July 2006. They pay $100 per month for their space to local community-minded developer Mike Shecter. The collective is currently looking to expand service to people who are just out of jail and drug rehab programs, and are partnering with another community bike shop in town to serve more youth.

From the moment I rolled up to the shop, I was surrounded by curious, excited bike enthusiasts. It was the most overwhelming welcome the Brompton and I have had on this trip. Once I'd unfolded and refolded it a couple times, the tumult dispersed -- but the entire time I was in the shop the scene was one of constant, cheerful motion and activity. The atmosphere was exciting -- everyone there loved what they were doing, and what they are a part of.

--VelocipedeBikeProject.org.
Read more dispatches from my East Coast Tour.

Washington, DC is the final stop on my East Coast Tour. I am here for the week-long Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual meeting.

TRB is the big transportation conference in North America, hosted by the country's pre-eminent transportation research organization. Hundreds of sessions fill three huge hotels on Connecticut Avenue, and 11,000 attendees walk briskly from room to room, talking shop about everything from bituminous pavement to international shipping to pedestrian signalization.

The theme of the conference this year is Transportation, Energy, and Climate Change. The fact that this is the theme is a big deal in its own right, as it signals a shift in focus in transportation research and policy nationally.

The Transportation and Climate Change session was standing room only, even after more chairs were brought in. (Photos by Elly Blue)

This afternoon, I sat in on a featured session on Transportation and Climate Change. The first speakers were members of the TRB's special committee on climate change, and they were presenting the results of a study they have recently completed. The report's focus is less on prevention, which the authors pointed out is a well covered topic, and more on managing what are by now inevitable outcomes of climate change on our transportation infrastructure and behavior.

And it's looking grim.

The first speaker, Emil Frankel, the chair of the committee, spoke about the urgent need for across the board reform of how we design, build, and maintain transportation networks. For that reform, he said, we will need a national consensus. And the last time we had a clear national consensus on transportation was on the building of the interstate highway system. More accurately known as the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways," our nation's highways were built so that troops and supplies could be moved quickly from coast to coast in the event of enemy attack. "I would redefine defense today as defense against climate change," Frankel said. It is as serious an issue for us now as the Cold War was in Eisenhower's time.

Bicycles fall under the prevention category, which would explain why there was no mention of them. But I couldn't help thinking that we will experience the effects of increased flooding, excessive heat, and "intense precipitation events" on our road networks just as fully on bicycles as in cars. Land use kept coming up as a big part of any solution, and I suspect that proximity and access issues will be just as important for maintaining bicycle infrastructure as for any other kind.

I left this session to catch the tail end of a series of talks on social justice issues in land use and transportation. One speaker, Marc Brenman from the Washington State Human Rights Commission pointed out that since African American households are the least likely to own a car, every public dollar spent on car transportation is inherently biased against a sizable part of the population.

Another speaker, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, discussed the oft-neglected economics of happiness. Apparently people's happiness goes way up when they move from true poverty to middle income, but after middle income happiness depends much more on relationships, friendships, and stress (including commute stress) than on money. "We [proponents of density and sustainable transportation] deliver more happiness than the competition," he said. "We just have to figure out how to communicate that."

Amanda Thompson, a planner with the city of Decatur, Georgia, which has recently had successes with smart growth development and a new planning policy that prioritizes bicycle over car infrastructure, had a partial answer to that: Dense developments lower the local government's costs. Getting utilities out to suburban areas are a huge drain on town coffers. Health care is harder to quantify, but she pointed out that if the infrastructure is there as well as the density, we would not have to spend so much money at all levels of society treating preventable diseases.

This week I'll attend many more sessions, take a bike tour of DC, sit in on a luncheon talk by a Vice President of GM, have drinks with a group of young transportation professionals, chat with folks I meet in the lobbies, and tell you all about it from the free wifi hotspot here in the Omni Hotel lobby.

I am also still working on writing up stories from three cities I visited in the past week, so keep an eye out for those on my travel page. Not everything I'm writing on this trip ends up on the front page -- so you may have missed my dispatches about a groundbreaking Complete Streets law in New Haven, a sad memorial in DC, and a few more.

Parker and Sturgis-Pascale catch up with their former intern, Reed College student (and New Haven native) Rose Vickery. (Photos by Elly Blue)

New Haven, Connecticut is the birthplace of pizza, hamburgers, and the lollipop. It has the highest rate of public housing per capita in the United States. But it has always been better known for being home to the wealthy, prestigious Yale University. Yale is a major player in New Haven -- the university is the city's largest employer, owns a huge percentage of downtown property (including several streets), and is incredibly influential in the social and economic life of the city.

And Yale has begun to embrace sustainability in a big way, particularly sustainable transportation.

One afternoon in New Haven I headed over to Yale University's new Transportation Options office. There I met with the program's Director, Holly Parker, and her assistant, Erin Sturgis-Pascale. (Sturgis-Pascale is also on New Haven's Board of Alders, and was instrumental in passing their recent Complete Streets bill which I wrote about yesterday.)

Parker was hired away from a similar job at Harvard by Yale's new director of sustainability after she gave a presentation here about her work in Cambridge. She has a key role in some of the major changes that office is bringing to the city.

"I keep telling people, in five years you won't recognize New Haven," Parker told me at the beginning of our interview.

We start out by talking about the bigger picture in which she is operating.

Signs of hope are beginning to show for sustainable transportation in Connecticut. Former Governor John Rowland, who left office in disgrace in 2004 during a corruption investigation for which he pled guilty, had been actively hostile to any kind of non-highway transportation.

His replacement, M. Jodi Rell, is an improvement. Her transportation decisions have not always been on the mark, but she did recently hire a Department of Transportation commissioner who is "not a highway person" -- in fact, he worked on building light rail in Arizona. Connecticut's DOT apparently has trouble hiring young, progressive engineers, but has been working with contractors on new projects, including a north-south commuter rail line.

In terms of bicycling, Connecticut has had a three foot passing law since October. This was primarily the work of a citizen activist whose day job is in traffic engineering.

On a city level, New Haven is also moving forward with a new Director of Transportation, Traffic, and Parking. Mike Piscitelli is extraordinarily supportive of non-car projects and has been writing grants and working closely with advocacy group Elm City Cycling. "He works really, really hard" to improve cycling and walking conditions, Parker said.

The city also has a new police chief, who has been working hard on taming traffic of all kinds. Until he was hired, New Haven had only has 6 traffic enforcement officers, in part because ticket money goes to the state rather than the city. None had radar guns. Connecticut law does not allow red light cameras (New Haven has installed some already, against the day they'll be able to use them), contributing to enforcement woes. The new police chief has said publicly that New Haven has the worst traffic he's ever seen -- and he moved here from LA.

Parker and Sturgis-Pascale are strongly connected personally and professionally with the bicycle scene in town. The Elm City Cycling group draws in a lot of community members -- their meetings are packed and you can't always find a seat. There are a ton of rides happening, whether to community events, or weekly ice cream rides in the summer, or Sunday road rides. There's also Critical Mass, which Parker attends to regularly. The police usually show up to cork, she said, though they skipped the big Halloween ride this year for some reason.

A designated bike route
on the downtown section of Prospect St.

They agree: cycling is really booming here.

Sturgis-Pascale chimes in excitedly. She has printouts of 2006 census data which she just discovered.
New Haven's pedestrian share in 2006 census (which counts the primary mode of work commute trips) is 14%. That's 4th highest in nation for cities with over 100,000 people. I flipped the page and found Portland at #36 with 5.4% walking to work, which made Parker and Sturgis-Pascale smile proudly. "If we can do better than Portland on anything..." Parker said.

By the same count, for transit commute trips, New Haven is #38 at 10%. Parker and Sturgis-Pascale wondered how many of those trips might be made by members of the Yale community, particularly undergraduates, the majority of whom live on campus, and are able to live without a car.

As a partial answer to that question, Yale just finished its own internal survey; in last year, 9% of Yale community biked to campus (dramatically up from 5% the previous year). They are still crunching the numbers on other modes.

The Transportation Options office at Yale is primarily focused on outreach and transportation demand management. Their main target is commute trips for staff, faculty, and graduate students.

Their main outreach tool is the excellent Getting Around Yale website. The site lists options including the Yale Shuttle, Zipcar, bicycling, walking, and "Car Free in New Haven." Information and encouragement are provided for all these modes, as is a "proximity map" showing areas from which you should be able to walk and bike downtown.

"The real coup," Parker told me, is that nowhere on the site are private cars mentioned as an option.

Other outreach activities include the annual BABY (Bicyclist Appreciation Breakfast: Yale) event, an outdoor coffee and doughnuts affair for bike commuters. The office also has a Y-Bike program which provides a fleet of bikes, one for each department. The bikes come equipped with panniers, rack, generator lights, helmets, and cyclometers -- the department that racked up the highest mileage on their bike by the end of the first year will get a prize.

They also promote bicycles at events, and are working on having a stop by Transportation Options become a fixture in new employee orientation ("Right now, they just hand you a parking permit application, and that's basically how it's been for the past 300 years").

----

Snow creates an ad hoc bike lane
on the usually bike-unfriendly Prospect St
in Downtown New Haven.

The conversation up to this point was entirely positive. Parker and Sturgis-Pascale are excited, rightly, about the energy and progress with sustainable transportation in general and bikes in particular. Then I asked if there is any opposition to it all.

Oh yes. "Bikes are persona non grata around here," Sturgis-Pascale said. Parker added, "New Haven was designed to move cars. Through it." Everything about the infrastructure tells people who are driving that the road is theirs, and there's a lot of anger at anyone who encroaches on that, they explained. And road rage is only fed by infrastructure that doesn't work well. Lights aren't timed well for walking, biking, or driving. Intersections are bad and waits are long. People get angry, break the rules, and make each other even angrier. It can be a scary place to get around no matter how you go about it.

But the biggest problem, Sturgis-Pascale told me, is that the downtown grid is made up almost entirely of one-way streets. "We can't move forward until we convert back to two way streets" she said emphatically. It's a frustrating situation for driving, especially with frequent construction projects.

It's even worse for biking, though. Sturgis-Pascale, who doesn't strike me as a scofflaw, says she regularly goes the wrong way down one particular street on her commute. She knows it's illegal and dangerous but her alternative is to go three blocks out of her way through two major intersections that terrify her.

I pointed out that converting one-way streets back to a regular grid is a huge endeavor -- so what is the low hanging fruit? They looked at each other and laughed. "There is no low-hanging fruit," they agreed. There are a lot of problems in New Haven and the way to tackle them is head-on, at the source.

For the same reasons, they are frustrated by people who say that transportation isn't as big an issue as, say, youth violence. What if, for instance, the city was a better environment for businesses which could create jobs for those same youth? And if there were a good way to get to those jobs? Wouldn't that be better than creating dozens of social service programs to patch up a broken system? I don't know the answer.

I told them that going first for the low hanging fruit is a big doctrine in Portland sustainable transportation, and they shake their heads in disbelief. They want to go for the biggest things first. "It's the one way streets," Erin says. "We can't move forward until we save our grid. We have to convert back to two-way streets."

The logistics of actually bringing solutions are not immediately obvious. I ask whose job it is -- Yale's? The city's? Both? "This is always a sensitive area," Parker said. You have a university that has so much money, and a town that has so little, and Yale is naturally very wary of expensive collaborations. She firmly believes that building infrastructure should be the government's job. Sturgis-Pascale nods agreement. Still, town and gown are on the same page on sustainable transportation goals.

I asked about Yale Transit. CT Transit, the state's transportation agency which provides bus service in all several Connecticut cities including New Haven, has long had funding issues and threatens every few years to cut back service. Yale has long had a shuttle for students, faculty, and staff. Parker volunteers that Yale Transit in the last few years has started running fixed route shuttles into some commuter neighborhoods, such as East Rock where many, many grad students live -- and that this has driven up housing prices in that neighborhood. The shuttle runs along routes already served by CT Transit. "It's a full duplication of service."

One big project Yale has taken on in collaboration with the city involves burying all the power lines in parts of downtown. When they tear up and rebuild the roads for this, they plan to do streetscape redesigns in some areas to make them more walking and biking friendly. This is a few years out, and may, like all of this, be affected by economy.

So there is a better prospect for collaboration on building walking and biking facilities. There isn't a way for Yale to create its own separate walking and biking infrastructure, right? I asked. Not usually, though often in the past, "Yale's just bought the street." There is a pedestrian-only block of High Street, and a section of Wall Street, both in the heart of Yale's campus, which they have bought and designed for very low car traffic, and on which most users walk and bike.

Yale is clearly hoping to be a nationwide model for university-level transportation demand management, and it looks like they're well on the way. "There's a lot of work to do," Parker said. But they're excited, they're onto something, and it does seem to be working. She is inspired by Portland, and there was some eager talk about catching up with, and exceeding our accomplishments. I hope they do, and wish them the best.

"Over the few blocks that I rode, I saw it used in a number of ways, including actual cycling."

While I was in New York City for a few hours on Wednesday on my way from New Haven to Baltimore, I took the Brompton for a rainy ride down the new 9th Avenue cycletrack. The cycletrack, common in Copenhagen and Amsterdam but still relatively rare in the US, is a bike lane that is physically separated from motor vehicle traffic.

Portland is building a cycle track in the Northeast Cully neighborhood, and new mayor Sam Adams has pledged to build a higher-profile one in his first 100 days in office.

StreetFilms captured some New Yorkers' first reactions to this cycletrack, the city's first.

Since then, New Yorkers have incorporated the cycletrack into their daily life. Over the few blocks that I rode, I saw it used in a number of ways, including actual cycling. Below are some photos and more of my thoughts:

The black sign on the left says "Bike Path" and below it is a car in a red circle with a slash through it. Note the deconstructed sharrows. (Photos by Elly Blue)

This section of cycle track is separated by paint and plastic bollards. You bike between the parked cars and the curb, with a nice buffer between yourself and the door zone.

This cycletrack is on the left of a multi-lane one-way street, and at many intersections users have separate signals to protect against left hooks. The person in the car here had a left turn arrow; the cycletrack user in the electric wheelchair had a red light (which he may not have seen, as he was going the wrong way).

Especially contested parts of the cycletrack are painted green, as in Portland. I watched as boxes of liquor were unloaded from this truck for at least ten minutes. Only two people biked by -- this was during a downpour.

This lady stepped off the curb and the taxi driver pulled into the green bike lane with one fluid motion.

This part of the 9th Avenue lane isn't separated, and it feels a lot different. You're squeezed between parked cars and regular traffic, and are competing for space with taxi customers, among others.

See the Streetswiki entry on Physically Separated Bicycle Lanes for more on the difference between separated and unseparated bike lanes.

New Haven, Connecticut, which has never been known for progressive transportation initiatives, is now home to a Complete Streets law -- one of only a handful in the country, and one of the most comprehensive.

When I arrived at a Yale University office last week to meet with their Transportation Options team (more on that soon), I learned that the program's assistant director, Erin Sturgis-Pascale, also serves on New Haven's Board of Alders (their city council).

This October, Sturgis-Pascale and another board member introduced and passed a Complete Streets bill, making New Haven one of the few communities in the country to have such a law. For this accomplishment, she has been called "the preeminent “livable streets” elected official in Connecticut."

Grassroots activists began to seriously organize for safer streets in the wake of the traffic deaths of a Yale medicine student and a young girl several months apart in 2008. The Alders passed the bill unanimously, and Mayor John DeStefano wrote a strongly supportive editorial for the local newspaper.

The New York Times has an interesting article about the new law, including an interview with Sturgis-Pascale.

Matt Feiner of the Devil's Gear bike shop
showing off the new "Street Smarts"
safety flyer.

I didn't get a chance to talk with Sturgis-Pascale at length about the new law, but we did go over the basics.

The law doesn't make specific changes but rather forms a steering committee, charged with:

- Creating a complete streets policy for the Board of Alders to pass, including a strong statement in their belief in "fair and equal access".

- Producing a technical design manual for the city that is compatible with national street design standards.

- Launching a process for public participation and community meetings about how to redesign particular streets.

- Educating the public about sharing the road, through the Street Smarts campaign, including a flyer giving tips on safe and courteous driving, walking, and biking.

- Developing compliance and reporting data to determine progress.

New Haven's traffic challenges can't all be solved through design and education -- issues exist with enforcement, transit, and state level policy -- but it's great to see this vision going strong on a local level. I am excited to see what the next year brings to New Haven.

After a warm, dry week, New Year's Eve brought us another big snowstorm here in Hamden, Connecticut (my hometown, just north of New Haven). At around noon it was snowing hard, the wind was blowing, visibility was low, and the streets were covered with increasingly packed and rutted snow. I decided to take the bus downtown.

The bus was delayed because of the snow, so I had plenty of time to stand there and think about my experiences on the J bus over the years. This was an old familiar feeling -- this was my bus line for years, and service was always infrequent and unpunctual.

Close-up of pole on right. The same pencilled
graffiti has directed walkers to "Press your
middle finger on the button!"
since I was a young kid.

Something which I'd never really noticed before, but which now strikes me as crazy is that on CT Transit's the J line here in Hamden, there are no signs. Instead, you have to look sharp for a faded band of white paint on a telephone or streetlight pole every few blocks.

What's more, in the 20 years since those markings were last painted, CT Transit has eliminated some of the stops, but without removing the markings. My friend Mike, whose primary mode of transportation for decades has been the bus, was chewed out by a bus driver last month for waiting at a stop with a white band where service had been recently discontinued.

I definitely get the sense that the bus system has never been a priority in this region. Hopefully that will change in the future -- they're at least going to have to repaint the white sections on those poles at some point.