Parents and students from Cold Spring School celebrate Bike to Work (and School) Day in New Haven on May 17. Click here for a story I did on bicycling with children.




Our (Elm City Cycling) 2013 Bike to Work Day breakfast was the most successful ever.

Not only did we have the biggest turnout of the past 8 years or so -- 150, give or take a few -- but Mayor John DeStefano biked in from the far west side of town; we had the heads of the Transportation, Health and Police departments present, along with four members of the Board of Aldermen, and three of the 7 mayoral hopefuls in this September's primary. Plus, ECC released our 2013 Bike and Pedestrian Plan, which outlines how to make biking and walking safe and enjoyable for everyone from 8 to 80 by reducing motor vehicle speed, making on-street bike routes continuous through the city, completing the citywide off-street greenway system, and collecting data to measure our progress.

The director of transportation announced plans to create green "bike boxes" painted on the road surface at intersections, to allow cyclists to proceed ahead of motor vehicles.

There's a wonderful story on our event in the New Haven Independent.

While still a tiny fraction of all commuters, the number of cyclists who both live and work in New Haven almost quintupled between 1990 and 2010 to 2.4 percent (1,400 riders), according to census data. And that's not counting commuters coming in from outside New Haven, like me and many others.
 
Also in the past month, Yale University rolled out a bike share program, which the city Transportation Department hopes to build on to expand city-wide. Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city, got a federal grant to start a bike share program. In the cover story I did earlier this year for E Magazine, every national expert I interviewed  told me bike-sharing is the biggest game changer of all.  Greater Boston's rolled out a year or so ago (my daughter in Somerville lives a five minute walk from not one, but two bike share stations); New York's, after a year's delay, is scheduled to start this summer, and many others are up and running around the world.

In the week leading up to Bike to Work Day, I spoke to so many people who said in order to start riding, they needed to buy a bike or get their bike tuned up. I hope BTW Day helped push people to take care of business so they can get out on two wheels. Besides all the environmental, health and social reasons to bike, it's just fun. Do it!

Environmentalists have been working with their labor allies and people of faith to drum up opposition to Connecticut Senate Bill 1138, which would allow five percent of the state's mandated 20 percent of its energy required to come from renewables by 2020 to come from "big hydro" from outside the state. They say it would be a step backward in the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard and would hurt local renewable energy companies trying to scale up by having to go head to head with an established form of energy; and while hydro is renewable and creates no greenhouse gases when consumed, dam-building has often destroyed the habitats of many species, including humans.

Dan Esty, Commissioner of the CT. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told me the hydro could come from lots of places, including Hydro Quebec in Canada. He said he'd visited the area, and implied the huge dams weren't destructive because "there's nothing there." When I mentioned that I'd done stories (alas, not on-line) more than 20 years ago about the opposition of the native Cree to the destruction of their territory and their forced move into towns, meaning they could  no longer carry on their traditional lifestyle of fishing and trapping, he said he'd spoken to some indigenous folks in the region and they were very satisfied with their current circumstances. Could well be, but maybe he didn't talk to the ones who are dissatisfied, since his host on the trip was Hydro Quebec.  Dan added that environmentalists need to join the 21st century and recognize that we're never going to deal effectively with climate change without including big hydro. He said the only other non-carbon based energy source big enough to make a difference in the time frame available before irreversible, catastrophic change occurs is nuclear.

All the opponents of S.B. 1138 like one piece of the bill  – the section that would allow DEEP to sign long-term contracts to buy current Class I renewables, such as wind and solar, which would provide stability to those industries while helping the state meet its renewable energy goals. Late last week two dozen House Democrats introduced an amendment to S.B. 1138 -- which passed the Senate last week and will be voted on in the House any day -- that would strip everything out of the bill except the long-term contracts section.

In an op-ed in the Hartford Courant on May 3, Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, raised another issue: "The power that Hydro-Quebec would sell into Connecticut would not come from specific generation facilities. Rather, it would come as a bundle that includes generation from its hydropower as well as from coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil and other conventional fuels as well as its imports."