Melissa Bailey Photo
The city has converted one car parking spot into a “corral” of 16 parking spots for bicycles, in the latest effort to rethink on-street parking downtown.
City traffic chief Jim Travers (pictured) gathered with cycling activists Thursday to unveil the city’s first ever “bike corral,” a mega-sized bike rack that sits in the street in the place of an on-street parking spot.
“This is not about creating a bike rack, but about creating a sense of place,” said Travers.
The rack occupies a spot on College Street near Chapel, right outside Anchor bar and Claire’s Corner Copia restaurant.
It represents the latest city effort to make downtown more friendly to two-wheeled denizens. Less than a month ago, the city unveiled a vegetable-themed bike rack sculpture at the same intersection.
The vegetable rack filled up instantly, proving a high demand for more bike parking downtown, Travers said.
The idea for the bike corral came from Zack Beatty of SeeClickFix. Beatty launched a campaign on the map-based neighborhood problem-solving website to raise money to bring one to city streets. He started crowd-funding donations to pay for the bike rack. Elm City Cycling, which has long advocated for more bike infrastructure around town, got behind the effort.
To Beatty’s pleasant surprise, the city didn’t block the idea — it ran with it. The city bought the rack for $4,000, according to Travers.
Travers announced that the first 50 people to park their bikes in the rack get a free “I Bike New Haven” mug from the nearby Info New Haven booth, as well as a bike taillight.
In other recent experiments, Travers has let restaurants rent parking meters for an entire day to lure in customers, and even let people dine in on-street parking spots. More experiments are planned for Friday, to celebrate International Park(ing) Day, an effort to reclaim parking spots for creative uses such as theater productions.
The new bike corral will stay until the winter. As soon as the skies threaten snow, Travers said, the city will remove the rack in the winter to accommodate snow plows. He said winter is a lower-volume time for bike traffic anyway. The rack will be back in the spring, he pledged.
Win Davis, head of the Town Green Special Services District, applauded the development.
“One parking spot” for a car, “16 spots for 16 bikes. This is building our density,” he said.
Downtown Alderman Doug Hausladen rolled up on a black Miyata bicycle and added his approval.
“Let’s keep New Haven moving forward,” he said, “on two wheels.”