Bike West Hartford just wrapped up its #BikesMeanBusiness campaign, a four-day effort to teach local business owners that customers bike, walk, and use the bus to reach their establishments. It became clear that the awareness needed raising when several West Hartford Center business owners worked to block safety improvements that would have directly benefited their customers. One went as far as saying, on the record, that he didn’t really think cyclists were that big of customers at his store.
This is windshield bias. It’s an assumption that the private automobile is the default for everyone, to the extent that someone does not even know what they don’t know.
People who take the bus or walk or bike to the Center (or anywhere else) do not have glowing signs over our heads indicating how we got there, and for businesses that don’t have bike racks directly in front of them — that’s most of West Hartford — employees may have no way of knowing by looks alone who biked. Most cyclists leave their helmets locked up with the bicycle, and unless someone is in full lycra regalia, which is not mandatory for all who bike, there is nothing at a glance that will tell a barista, for example, how one arrived.
Besides taking photos with their purchases or with bikes outside of stores and using the hashtag, some chose to be obvious as cyclists in ways they normally wouldn’t — for instance, carrying or wearing their helmet inside. It’s annoying to have to go out of one’s way to announce their mode, but you’ll find that people who walk, bike, or take the bus aren’t constantly kvetching about traffic or asking how to use the parking meter.
Since my primary way of getting about is either on foot or by bus, I took pics of the bus fare card that I used in order to reach the store. Cyclists don’t get to have all the fun — you can’t spell business without b-u-s.
The beauty of this campaign is that it is inclusive of the range of responses cyclists and others have had upon hearing that they are not recognized or valued. Some, having already decided to stop buying from the offending businesses, can carry on with that while spending elsewhere and letting the former know that they have made a big mistake. (I am firmly in this group, with the willingness to return to those problematic stores when they fully, publicly, and wholeheartedly backpedal)
Those who aren’t personally boycotting can give the offending business owners an education and opportunity to rethink their perspective. In any case, it makes more visible a portion of the population who are both completely invisible and mysteriously visible, as in “I keep seeing cyclists wearing dark colors and not using lights.” Somehow, this segment of the population is both nowhere and making itself increasingly impossible to ignore by politicians/decision-makers and business owners.
It’s this spirit of mystery that offers an entry into this week’s reason(s) for participating in the CTrides Drive Less CT Climate Challenge: freedom, adventure, whimsy.
Last week, with an assist from the driver of a sports car, the oil industry shut down I-95 for days. While the governor urged people to work from home or take the train, Norwalk’s mayor did not push for people to switch to public transit. Friends in the area talked about the traffic jams and related low-grade chaos involving those who would not use something besides their private vehicle, as if they had expected everyone else to ride transit opening up space on the roads for them personally. It’s in moments like this when we see that private automobiles do not deliver on the freedom they promise.
People actually choose extended solo commutes rather than put themselves on a bus or train; using public transit is an act that helps everyone. It’s perplexing when those along the I-95 corridor west of New Haven who could take the train wouldn’t, considering that there’s really good service on the New Haven Line.
Choosing to drive less means unlearning rigid behaviors that do not actually serve.
While West Hartford’s Trout Brook Trail needs to be finished and given better crossings at intersections, it has opened up a passage for those whose access outside of a car was restricted before. This is the freedom that I’m interested in.
A few years ago a friend wrote about how the claim “walking distance to West Hartford Center” was being tossed here and there; now, more places actually fulfill the claim because their short 15-minute walk no longer gets stunted by sidewalk that disappears on Trout Brook Drive.
What do I see? It’s not rare to encounter others on the trail who are biking or walking with grocery bags . . . and they look happy. It’s satisfying to carry one’s own groceries. If we picked at that, it’s probably because the act is setting off something in the brain that recalls our hunting and gathering years, before doomscrolling and daily planners. At minimum, it’s safer than driving and quieter than walking/cycling ride next to a road.
Unless business owners sat around reviewing their video footage or paid several employees to monitor where customers go after exiting the store, it’s unlikely there’s any awareness as to how many people aren’t driving. This is how the invisibility of non-driving customers plays out: someone wearing absolutely normal clothing carries two tote bags out of the store, and instead of sticking them in a car trunk in a busy parking lot, simply vanishes into the ether . . . or, rather, just continues down the sidewalk, then down a multi-use path for a half mile or mile. It’s a pleasant walk. There are benches. If the bags get too heavy, folks can just rest for a moment. Right now there’s a fresh batch of ducklings to watch swim around. Friends have seen eagles along the Trout Brook Trail. Another spotted a bear.
I’m not exaggerating about people appearing happier on separated multi-use paths. I can think of two exceptions that I encountered on the Trout Brook Trail, ever. One was a toddler who was pissed because he was told the family was leaving the trail to go home, and he just wanted to keep walking. The other was a young child with an upsetting expression on their face while they drove one of those battery-powered ride-on cars for kids that I’m not sure was even supposed to be on the trail. Their face looked like the one made by at least half the drivers I pass on any given weekday morning: tense and angry.
Compare the leisurely and sometimes nature-filled walk with a half week’s groceries to this other alternative: walking through the supermarket parking lot. In the last week I watched as someone in a massive SUV almost backed into an elderly couple who were crossing behind it, because that’s how you have to walk in a poorly designed lot that barely acknowledges the need for people to walk between their cars and the store. The man literally jumped out of the way. I’ve read all the stats and I’ve had the experience of physically dodging poorly driven cars, but it’s not the same as watching this happen to others and being powerless in that moment to do anything.
Powerlessness in the moment is not the same as having no power to change a culture or change policy, and that’s overtly what I am trying to do every single day. Telling you that there are options outside of the privately owned vehicle is an attempt to erode our broken car-centered culture and replace it with something more gratifying and healthy.
If you can move about using another mode, why wouldn’t you?
With automobiles, mostly, out of sight, it can feel like being on a network of secret passages once on a fully separated path. Let’s call them multi-use instead of bike paths, since at least half of those using them are on foot instead of bike. When you have the experience of walking to the grocery store, a restaurant, a synaogogue, a bookstore via multi-use path, you’ll find yourself looking for more of these calmer alternatives to what we’d been asked to settle for over the last century — the scraps.
If we agree that these trails — at least while on them and not at road crossings — are pleasant, safe, and functional, why is it always so much work to get more of them?
The Trout Brook Trail almost can connect pedestrians and cyclists from Asylum Avenue (near former UConn campus) to New Park Avenue (near GastroPark), but there is a gap from Jackson Avenue to Park Road; there’s still sidewalk, but it’s narrow, in poor condition, and often blocked by residents’ monster trucks that are too large to properly park in driveways which were built wide enough to accommodate multiple modest sedans.
With more political will and the use of creativity, this could be finished . . . and then . . .
We can talk about more regional connection.
The Trout Brook Trail ends in Elmwood, but should hook up to the CTfastrak Multi-Use Trail.
If they can find a way to re-open I-95 Norwalk in mere days after drivers shut it down with a fiery — and thankfully, not fatal — crash, surely they can figure out how to make room for a multi-use path between the CTfastrak Elmwood Station and Newington Junction — even if it means the path becomes single file for a short distance. Even if it means taking a few feet from some of the industrial sites abutting the busway; considering the amount of polluting many have been doing for years, that seems like a very small step toward making things right.
Imagine if you could, once on the path, take an exit halfway between those stations and actually have a safe route for biking to yoga? Wouldn’t that be in better alignment?
Now, returning to Elmwood Station, what if we did the same and insist that the space is there if we want it to be, connecting to Union Station? What if we told the engineers and planners to put down their rulers, forget their straight lines, and actually think for a minute? I know a few who are imaginative and capable of doing this. Imagine if we started to take more space away from uses that are not the best?
Walking along the busway recently, a turkey crossed the path. A worker nearby said they’ve had everything, bobcats and bears, using the busway. I’ve seen deer many times there, whether walking, riding the bus, or while on the train.
Imagine expanding this outdoor access?
We see no hesitation when it comes to installing trendy pickleball courts or countless sportsball fields, no matter how redundant they might seem. At least the multi-use path serves numerous functions: exercise, commuter path, safe access to outdoors, space for safe socializing. The design encourages more activity, as a person could walk or bike for a ways and then easily board a bus to either finish the route or make the trip back. Plus, the terrain is more-or-less flat, making it more accessible to people of all fitness levels.
One of the most limiting ideas is that these are “recreational paths,” as if their only possible purpose is providing a place for leisurely activity. These routes should not be designed by those who never bike, or possibly worse, by those who put their bikes on the car rack and then drive to a lot so they can only experience a portion of the trail without having to think about what happens when a trail crosses or street or simply ends.
Some will tell you that the Route 3 Putnam Bridge multi-use path opened after two years, but actually its opening came after decades and decades of advocacy. One early piece about this fight for respect, from the days when the Hartford Courant was print only, explained how a cyclist had to go many miles out of his way to complete a work commute because there was no legal access for bicycles on the Putnam Bridge. While fun to move around, mostly unnoticed, it takes these kinds of stories again and again to make it possible so that our mobility is safer, more efficient, more comfortable, and more dignified. It requires bursts of awareness/visibility campaigns so that decision-makers will prioritize giving space for people/workers/consumers who are moving around outside of privately-owned motor vehicles — whether that’s by choice or not.
We already have a stretch of pedestrian/cyclist-only space between Union Station and the Connecticut State Armory — how do we hook that up to the Trout Brook Trail and directly to the CTfastrak Multi-Use Trail?
This will be my last offering for this piece: there’s a lot of talk about “cycling confidence” and I’d like us to rethink how we’re using confidence. Instead of equating it with some willingness to adopt vehicular cycling as any kind of standard, we should be asking if cyclists and pedestrians are confident in their own self-worth to ask for more space, for more practical space, for safer space. If they can build roads everywhere for cars, we shouldn’t act like we’re asking for too much by insisting on a functional network of fully separated multi-use paths.
