Meeting Notes: October 13, 2015

Attending: Hultgren, Palmer, Manizza, Santasiere, vanZelm (Downtown Partnership), Goodrich (Transportation Coordinator)

We convened the meeting shortly after 6:30 PM in the lobby of the Nash-Zimmer Transportation Center.

The deadline for the MCC winter program brochure is this week. We decided not to try to bang together any workshops for the winter quarter but instead will concentrate on getting some interesting topics for the spring quarter.

Hultgren said that the EHHD had recently hired a new CHART grant coordinator (Alyssa Israel) who had experience writing bicycle and pedestrian master plans. She is willing to help write Mansfield’s plan and has emailed to him a recent plan that could be used as a template. He suggested that the outline of this plan be used as a basis for discussion at the kick-off stakeholders meeting soon to be scheduled for Mansfield’s plan. Once this outline is done, he will contact Linda Painter to get the meeting set up.

Bike parking in Storrs Center was discussed. VanZelm explained how bikes parked for weeks and months in public bike racks were noticed and removed recently to make these racks available for daily use. Since the Town said they would be willing to try converting a street parking place to a bike parking area on a temporary basis, more research is needed to determine the equipment that would be needed to set this up. Hultgren gave cost estimates for round bike symbols to hang on the end of the Town Square railings, but everyone agreed they were too expensive ($400 each!) and other options are needed. Signs could be used, but most favored some type of symbol if it could be done less expensively. Sharrows were recently painted on the roads (except for Wilbur Cross Way which has to be milled and repaved) in Storrs Center … Yay!

Hultgren said he had been busy in the last month and still owed Nord Yakovleff a trip along the proposed Hollow to Hollow bike route to develop some rough cost estimates for the improvements that will be needed. He will try to connect with Nord in early November.

Hultgren relayed Kristine Nowak’s (a member of the Town’s Transportation Advisory Committee) idea of setting up some training for drivers about driving around bicyclists. Courses for drivers like this may exist in other states/areas, so some research is needed to find examples. Training Town employees or adding this to the E.O. Smith High School driver education course are possibilities. Hultgren said we already have a 2-page summary of CT regulations relating to bicycling, but it needs to be made easier to read. Santasiere will contact BikeWalk CT to see if they have any current efforts underway to add bicycling-related questions to the CT DMV’s driver’s exam. More information will be gathered to be discussed at a future meeting.

A brief discussion with Dee Goodrich (the new Transportation Coordinator) was held about the recently vacated space in the Transportation Center that was originally designed for bicycle retail or other bicycle-related activities. People with ideas for how this space could be effectively utilized should contact Dee or Hultgren.

A reduced quantity (30 instead of 50) T-shirt order has been placed, and the shirts should be printed this month. This will leave about 10 shirts of varying sizes that have not already been pre-ordered.

Since several interested parties have conflicts with the first Wednesday evening meeting schedule, it was decided to change the standing Bike Mansfield monthly meeting day to Tuesday for a while. The next meeting was therefore scheduled for Tuesday evening November 10^th, since the first Tuesday in November is an election day.

The meeting adjourned at about 7:40 PM (our longest meeting yet).

LRH
Acting Scribe