Allan Appel photo
All aboard, on the Green.
A North Haven man visits a beloved aunt out on Whalley Avenue.
A Gateway College student returns to her apartment far out on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.
A Howard Avenue resident travels east to shop at Walmart on Route 80.
A gaggle of teenagers returns from a manufacturing training program in Fair Haven to classes at James Hillhouse High School.
On Tuesday afternoon, all these bus commuters found themselves, among scores of others, at the city’s central transit hub, the busy bus-clogged dog leg of Chapel and Temple streets on the southeastern edge of the New Haven Green.
Snapshots of their commutes reveal what’s working, and what could be a lot better, about New Haven’s state-run public transit system at a time when the hub of the city’s hub-and-spoke bus network is on the verge of some major changes.
Four out of five of these interlocutors actually felt quite positive about their bus-taking experiences, if less so about the atmosphere of smoke, noise, and negative behaviors that often surrounds the hub.
That was the Independent’s take-away from a brief survey undertaken as the city contemplates substantial changes to the storied New Haven Green, including some, such as reconfiguring Temple Street, that may have large implications that require rethinking of the hubs and routes of the entire system.
Devernon Alvarez: The bus system works.
That rather surprisingly positive (at least to this reporter) finding emerged during a brief spate of interviews Tuesday between 1 and 2 p.m.
Devernon Alvarez, who lives in North Haven, really loves his aunt who lives out on Whalley Avenue near Norton Street, and he visits her regularly. On Tuesday, his day off, he had caught the 215 bus in North Haven and that brought him to the Green, where he was waiting to connect to the 243 that would run him out to her on Whalley Avenue.
He had tracked the bus on Transit and had about a ten-minute wait before the 243 angled in to pick up passengers. Alvarez said he is generally a happy customer with CT Transit in New Haven.
Especially compared to bus service he’s experienced in North Haven (bad) and Waterbury (“it sucks”) where he previously lived. Compared to the service in those cities, New Haven’s bus system, he said, is at least very good in terms of frequency and timeliness.
He gave lower marks for cleanliness, citing occasional trash on seats and on the floor of the buses.
Alvarez’s job is with LAZ Parking near Union Station and on working days he usually doesn’t wait for a shuttle or bus connection; instead he walks over from the Green.
Another waiting rider wearing a colorful sweater was standing off to the side of the main information kiosk waiting for the 255 bus out towards Seymour and Derby to arrive. She’s a Gateway College student in her early thirties, who preferred not to be identified. She’s trying to finish an initial degree at Gateway and is supporting herself doing cleaning jobs downtown.
The bus service for her purposes, she reported, is adequate, even good, in part because her line, she said, is not as crowded and busy as others.
Student Arrianna Jones, with concerns, boards her bus back to school.
“Mine only comes every hour,” she reported, but for her commute, generally in the morning and early afternoon, that service is adequate. The bus is there when it’s supposed to be, she said, although she did say that Google Maps is not dependable in tracking the bus and she has a hard time reading the schedule.
She never has had a problem about getting a seat, although in summer, she added, sometimes “it’s three to a seat.”
Further down Chapel Street waiting closer towards the Church Street intersection was Arrianna Jones, an 11th grader standing among a group of animated peers, all students from James Hillhouse High School.
They were waiting for the 241 bus to take them back to the high school out on Sherman Avenue. This leg was going to be the last leg of the students’ four-bus commute. They had begun in the morning with a school-provided shuttle that took them from Hillhouse to the Green.
Here they caught the 212 bus running along Grand Avenue out to Mill Street near Criscuolo Park where Jones and her friends are enrolled in a manufacturing enrichment program. When the day’s activities there were done, the students hopped back on the 212 to the Green where now they were waiting for the 241 to transport them back out to Hillhouse.
“The service is okay,” Jones reported, but she did call attention to undesirable behaviors of fellow riders. “It’s a problem for a woman,” said one of her friends, a young man, as the students caught sight of their bus pulling in along Chapel Street and lined up to board.
“I’ve been sworn at, cat-called, and once followed,” she reported. “That’s not great.”
The young woman in the colorful sweater who did not give her name said she wanted the anonymity for similar concerns with people whom she had met or had come up to her during her wait for the buses at the hub.
Lillian Germosen and daughter Solange: satisfied commuters.
Around the corner on Temple Street, where the concentration of people is less because the arriving-and-departing buses are less frequent, Lillian Germosen and her daughter Solange were sitting patiently on a bench in front of Trinity Church.
That morning they had taken the 212 and 223 buses out to Walmart on Route 80 and done their shopping. Now returned to the hub, they were checking the app and waiting to connect to the 271 bus to take them to Howard Avenue, where they live.
Often, said Germosen, she’s been able to call her sister to pick her up at Walmart and bring her home, but not today.
Today, as she has for the past two years, Germosen has been generally relying on New Haven’s bus service and she was uncomplaining. “It runs when I need it,” she said. Then she regaled this reporter about the demise of her car on Valentine’s Day two years ago.
“I don’t like Valentine’s Day now,” she said. She’s very much working hard as a CNA, a certified nursing assistant, to be able to have a new vehicle … maybe before next Valentine’s Day.
“In the meantime it’s the only transportation I have.” She finds the “777” taxi service unreliable when, on occasion, she uses it, and it costs more than she is able to pay. And “Uber breaks my pocket book.”
There’s another regular bus commute for this family. Germosen has two daughters, and Solange, who was with her, commutes regularly to art school in Bridgeport. For that the mother-daughter team grab the 271 bus, which she said she can easily walk to near Kimberly Square off of Howard Avenue, and that bus takes her downtown right to Union Station where they catch the train to Bridgeport.
Having to rely on the bus alone, Germosen said, cuts down on the number of patients she can see — usually two a day, given the transportation time factored in. When she had her car, it was four patients a day, so that makes a real economic difference.
When buses are late, which occasionally happens, and her patients complain, “‘What can I do,’ I tell them. I’m taking the bus. I don’t have wings.”
That said, Germosen offered praise for the improvements she has seen over the past 30 years in the transit system. “Back in the day, in the 1980s and 1990s it was so bad,” she averred. “Now they [the buses] are so much better to ride and and to sit in. I’m satisfied with DOT.”
But she still wants a car by Valentine’s Day.
Click here for an Independent story from five years ago (!) about, even at that time, the slew of studies, proposals, and programs, dating back to at least 2008, for city bus system short-term fixes (like fewer stops along routes) and longer term improvements (like a BRT, or bus rapid transit system that might include dedicated lanes, specialized signaling to permit buses to go through lights, and new equipment like the longer articulated vehicles), which had already been proposed.
A number of officials interviewed in the Independent’s ongoing series on the upcoming evolution of the Green have said a priority — especially if Temple Street is reconfigured or even partially closed — is that the bus service around the Green and throughout the system not only be maintained, but rise to be the best municipal system in the state.
See below for other recent articles about the Green.
• The Once & Future Green: A Timeline
• Green Conservancy Debuts
• Town Green: Make That Doughnut A Danish
• Green Proprietor: “We Are Not The Committee Od‘No’”
• City Historian: The Green’s Constant Is Change, &“Public Good”
• Prof/Filmmaker: The Green’s Not Just About Fun
• Green Remakers Face Grave Question
• Big Changes Eyed For The Green