Thomas MacMillan Photo
Pull up on your two-wheeled steed soon outside Au Bon Pain and you might not have to hitch it to a street sign — you might stand it up in a “corral” with its pals instead.
That’s the vision offered by an effort to “crowd-fund” a new bike parking option for downtown New Haven.
Zack Beatty this week posted a fundraising appeal on SeeClickFix’s brand new “projects” page seeking donations to convert a downtown parking spot into a dedicated rack (or “corral”) for up to 10 bikes.
Click the play arrow to watch a video made by Park a Bike, the company from which Beatty hopes to buy a bike “corral.” Converting a space would mean installing a bike rack in the street and surrounding it with curbs or bollards to keep cars out.
Converting on-street car parking into bike parking would de-clutter sidewalks, Beatty said. Locking bikes to sign posts and parking meters can block walking areas and crowd business entrances and outdoor seating areas, he said.
Beatty aims to raise $4,200 to buy the rack, which comes with bollards to mark the boundaries of the parking space. The money would also go toward renting the chosen parking space for a month by paying the city to put a bag over the meter.
Beatty said the effort is an attempt to short-circuit a sometimes slow-moving process for changing infrastructure, to quickly prove the bike corral concept with the hope that the city will get behind it and put in more around town. He said he thinks the new corral should be installed near the Au Bon Pain at the corner of Temple and Elm, where people have long been looking for more bike parking, but he’s open to working with the city to place it in the best location.
Beatty said he hadn’t yet called Jim Travers, the city’s head of traffic and parking, to talk over the plan, but that he was planning to do so.
“It’s unfortunate that no one called me,” Travers said. He said he’s open to the concept in theory but would like to talk about the details before anything happens. The best way to created long-term change is through partnerships, not through acting alone, he said.
Fruit
Bikes crowd pedestrians on York Street.
Beatty, an off-and-on member of Elm City Cycling, said the bike advocacy group has been discussing the idea of a bike corral for some time, along with other bike infrastructure improvements. He said the group has endorsed the idea. He’s working to earn the support of aldermen and businesses next.
Bike parking is the “low-hanging fruit in terms of improving the lives of cyclists,” he said. “Bike parking could be done by the community as a proof-of-concept … without having it get bogged down with some long study.”
“In a downtown retail area, I think it’s a win for businesses and win for the city,” Beatty said. Cyclists currently park bikes “all over the place” downtown, locking them to things that were never intended to accommodate bikes, like street signs and handrails, he said.
Beatty predicted his plan to take over a car-parking spot might face some blowback. “Whenever you take anything away from the previous use, there’s always some resistance, but we have to have our first one of these,” he said. “We need 25 of these in the city of New Haven.”
Portland, Oregon, which is “held up as the crown jewel of bike advocacy.” has 87 on-street bike corrals, Beatty said. In Portland, the corrals are built by the public works department.
“If this is successful, I’d love to see the city of New Haven come up with an official plan and start doing that,” Beatty said.
The worst-case scenario is that the project doesn’t raise enough money, Beatty said. “That would just be a buzz-kill.”
If the bike corral doesn’t take off and win the city’s favor after a month, Beatty plans to donate the bike rack to Elm City Cycling, he said. “Elm City Cycling has a good enough relationship with the city that I have no doubt that they would find a use for it.”
Another “risk point” would be the use of a parking meter bag to reserve a parking spot for a month-long experiment in bike parking, Beatty said.
“We definitely need the city to, I guess you could say, play along,” he said. “I will be calling Jim Travers.”
Location, Location, Location
Parking meter bags are usually used by contractors who want to reserve parking during a nearby building project, Travers said. He said the process of getting a bag starts with a conversation about what it will be used for.
Travers said it was unfortunate no one had called him about the bike corral plan. “I think that I have been more than a partner and to be kind of caught off-guard is a little disappointing to say the least,” he said.
If the city were to consider a bike corral, “location would be key,” Travers said. He said he’s often amazed by how many bikes are parked at the corner of York and Chapel streets.
The city allows cyclists to lock bikes to any parking meter, and has been considering ways to make meters more suited for bike parking, perhaps through some kind of add-on. The city is also looking at the possibility of making “mini bike-service stations,” like a “bike rack with a pump on it or set up to help riders change flats, for example. Travers said he’s also interested in setting up “bike lockers” somewhere, for people who want a more secure option for locking their bikes.
Travers said he’d like to work with people on bike parking solutions, rather than have people experiment on their own.
“Anything that is on city streets requires a conversation with the city,” Travers said. “Particularly when you look at winter.”
If this winter is anything like winter two years ago, the city could have a lot of plowing to do, and an on-street bike rack could be a significant obstacle, Travers said.
Projects
Beatty’s bike corral fundraiser marks the debut of a new feature for SeeClickFix, the New Haven-based citizen problem-solving website. The site is diving into the world of online crowd-source fundraising, a realm dominated by Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It’s a natural outgrowth of a way that people have been using SeeClickFix and PayPal to raise money for local projects like a cardboard bus-stop bench on Chapel Street and Inside-Out, the community art project that targeted underpasses in East Rock.
Jeff Blasius, SeeClickFix’s chief technical officer, explained how the new platform — called simply “Projects” — works.
First, an “organizer” decides she wants to raise money to, say, set up a community garden. She would set an amount she needs to raise and write a description of the project. She can add images and video to help make her case. She then submits it to SeeClickFix, which reviews it to see that it’s suitable for the site, then posts it.
Blasius said SeeClickFix will be evaluating proposals to make sure they are intended for public improvements. “There are other platforms to help people raise money. We’re geared toward specifically public projects,” he said.
Projects start off with an “insiders round,” during which the organizer can try to build momentum by tapping her friends and family to pledge money by credit card. Then it goes public and she has 30 days to reach her fundraising goal.
If she reaches her goal, SeeClickFix sends her the money. But if the organizer doesn’t reach the goal, nobody gets charged.
SeeClickFix takes a fee of about 7 percent for running the platform. Amazon, which handles the payments, takes another fee of about 3 percent.
SeeClickFix Projects is debuting with a soft launch in New Haven only, but the plan is to release it nationwide once it’s running well, Blasius said. “We want to make sure it’s really tuned in in New Haven.”