Thomas MacMillan Photo
Thanks to Jim Travers, New Haven’s transit landscape now has new bike lanes, a bike corral, a “parking terrasse,” a “street smarts” campaign, and plans for the state’s first cycletrack. It won’t have Travers himself much longer.
Travers (pictured) — the city’s director of traffic, transportation, and parking since 2008 — told Mayor John DeStefano and Mayor-elect Toni Harp this week that he will step down from his post in late January.
Travers said he’s leaving to join the United Way of Greater New Haven as vice president of resource development. Amid the uncertainty of an impending change in mayoral leadership, Travers had begun looking for other job possibilities, he said. He found a good one. He’ll be working on fundraising at United Way, along with community engagement and outreach to New Haven businesses.
“I really wish he would have stayed. He’s someone I would have kept,” Harp said Wednesday. She said she does not yet have a successor in mind for the job.
Travers began his time as traffic director just as the city was reeling from two pedestrian deaths in car crashes. In the years since, he has has focused on traffic safety through education and infrastructure, oriented the department toward “place-making” and taken a data-driven approach to problems. His efforts have earned him plaudits from pedestrian and cycling advocates citywide. The last few months have seen him on a tear, rolling out long-planned initiatives to steer New Haven in a new urbanist direction.
On Tuesday in his basement office in the Hall of Records, Travers, who’s 49, looked back at his time as director, and shared his advice for the next traffic tsar, whoever that might be. Wearing a blue striped shirt and a yellow tie, he sat behind a desk piled with papers and in front of maps of city traffic signals.
Travers, whose background is in business administration, spent years working for clothier Ann Taylor’s corporate office, commuting from New Haven to Manhattan. After he was “rightsized” out of a job in 2006, he ended up doing development work for Aids Project New Haven. That position helped him realize he wanted to work for the city itself.
“I wanted to make change,” Travers said. He started angling for a City Hall job, and ended up as deputy traffic director in 2008. In 2010, he moved up to director.
In 2008, 11-year-old Gabrielle Lee was run down by a car on Whalley Avenue, and medical student Mila Rainof was struck and killed on South Frontage Street.
“Those issues really galvanized the community,” Travers said. Travers said he worked to gather people together to try to harness a movement that was already mobilizing.
“We needed an education campaign,” he said. New Haven’s roads hadn’t changed in 50 years. People’s driving habits had.
After working for six months with a variety of community and business groups — including Yale, Elm City Cycling, and the hospitals — Travers and company emerged with the Street Smarts Campaign. They hired a marketing consultant to design a logo and launched the campaign in the fall of 2008.
Travers said the campaign worked because it was “not just the city saying, ‘Hey, do this.’” The campaign emerged from a network of relationships; the community owned it.
“Street Smarts became the backbone of the department,” Travers said.
Also in 2008, the city began working on its “Complete Streets” program, overhauling the way it approaches infrastructure development and repair. The Complete Streets approach places a new priority on the safe movement of pedestrians and cyclists. It was officially adopted by the Board of Aldermen in 2010 and “further solidified the movement in New Haven,” Travers said.
In the past, when a street needed to be repaved, the city would simply mark the freshly paved street as it had always been marked. Under Complete Streets, a repaving became an opportunity to ask questions, to make changes, Travers said: “Can we fit a bike lane? What’s the pedestrian movement?”
Thus, when Elm Street was repaved this summer, it suddenly included a bike lane. All together, the city has gone from four to 40 miles of marked bike routes in the past five years, Travers said.
The Complete Streets program also included a new way for New Haveners to request traffic improvements. When people began asking for a redesign of the intersection of Audubon and Whitney, Travers’ traffic department began asking questions. The result: A plan (pictured) for a raised intersection, partially funded by Yale, branded with a thermal-injected plastic seal in the center to mark the Audubon Arts District, and featuring a new outdoor seating area outside Gourmet Heaven.
Travers said he got a vision for that intersection’s possibility when he saw a similar one Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On another trip, to Montreal, stumbled across another great idea, another way to contribute to “place-making” efforts.
Kendra Baker Photo
In Montreal he saw how the city had taken over a parking spot and converted it to an outdoor eating area. Travers pitched the idea to 116 Crown’s John Ginnetti, who this year opened a sandwich shop called Meat & Co., also on Crown Street. During the summer, Meat & Co. featured a “parking terrasse,” an outdoor seating area bounded by potted plants — in a parking spot.
Travers said the terrasse helped Meat & Co. make a splash in its debut year. Ginnetti saw 50 percent more business than he had been expecting, and had to hire five new employees, Travers said. With that kind of return on investment, Travers said, parking terrasses as the number-one thing his successor should expand on.
As he sees it, Travers said, his department’s work is not simply about making traffic flow and keeping cyclists and pedestrians safe. It’s also about making New Haven an attractive place for people to visit, to linger, to shop. He said his goal has been to contribute to New Haven economic development, not by increasing parking meter and ticket revenue, but by using his office to help New Haven businesses succeed.
Melissa Bailey Photo
Shortly after the parking terrasse, Travers took over another downtown parking spot with a “bike corral,” a place to lock up 16 bikes. Within a couple of days, after people realized what it was for, the corral was filled to overflowing. It was so popular, Travers said, that the city decided to keep it outside over the winter, not in the parking spot, but in the plaza in front of the Shubert Theater.
Meanwhile, Travers has been overhauling not just bike parking but car parking, too. He introduced pay-by-credit card meters so that people can pay to park even if they don’t have change. The goal, Travers said is to have more people paying for parking, rather than paying for parking tickets. He said meter revenue is up, and ticket revenue is down.
He said he’s trying to avoid leaving visitors to New Haven with a bad impression, when they come back to their car to find a ticket. “People don’t like to get a ticket. That’s what they remember.”
Most recently, the city has introduced pay-by-cellphone to the city’s 3,000 meters. Travers said that program has taken off, with the fastest growth of any city working with ParkMobile, the company that provides the service.
The city’s new high-tech meters have allowed the city to collect all sorts of data about parking usage in town: How long people park in different areas, where the demand is highest, how people pay. That information allows the traffic and parking department to respond to conditions as they change.
Travers has taken that same data-driven approach to other problems, like installing bus-stop shelters that people want to use. He said the city had previously assumed that people want fully enclosed bus shelters. Upon further observation, however, his department found that people were standing outside them, not inside. Travers said the city took down the front wall on an enclosed shelter at Temple and Crown streets, and found it suddenly full.
Travers is leaving the office with some ideas he hasn’t had time to try out. For instance, the city’s new fiber optic traffic signal system has a lot of free bandwidth, that could be used to create a citywide wi-fi network, Travers said.
That may be one project Travers’ successor will take up, along with all the others Travers has already set in motion.