Changing Gears
Dr. Michael Sernyak, director of the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), leaned back in his chair, rested a bandaged hand on the table beside him, and absent-mindedly fingered the bloodied scab on his upper lip. He called these injuries — the results of a recent bicycle crash while riding with the Yale Cycling team — “the cost of doing business.” The injuries had momentarily put him out of commission, but usually, he rides at least 15 hours a week.
It’s not just for pleasure. A decade ago, Sernyak got the kind of news he usually tells his patients: he was severely overweight. “I know how this story ends,” Sernyak said. “I’m a physician.” He went on a diet, started exercising, but almost nothing he tried worked indefinitely: his weight always inched back up. Then, he started cycling — training with the Yale club team, competing in local races, and even riding to work. He credits the sport with extending his life. Cycling-related cartoons, clipped by his co-workers, cover his office door, and cycling-related souvenirs line the bookshelves.
In 2014, Sernyak had a realization. He wondered whether he could help his patients like he helped himself. CMHC provides mental health services to about 5,000 clients a year who can’t afford insurance and don’t qualify for public programs like Medicaid and Medicare. Often, Sernyak says, his clients’ problems are not limited to their neurology. On average, CMHC patients die 25 years earlier than they should, most from lifestyle illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. These illnesses could be prevented, if only Sernyak could encourage his patients to exercise. Biking had kept him healthy. Why couldn’t it help his patients do the same?
With a few thousand dollars from the CMHC’s charitable foundation, he partnered with Bradley Street Bike Co-op to set his patients up with bikes. Soon he realized the bikes promised more than a clean bill of health. In fact, he’d given many of his patients a way to make a drastic improvement in their material circumstances. He’d given them a tool to change their lives.
“Having a bike can mean the difference between having a job and being unemployed,” Sernyak told me. “For $50, we can buy someone a bike and they can hold a job. Well, talk about return on your investment! It’s just unbelievable.”
Sernyak’s program provided a solution to a problem he didn’t know his patients were having, one that affects far more than CMHC’s patients. It’s a problem that impacts huge portions of the city’s population, but that remains invisible to many Yale students. In 2014, Mayor Toni Harp called it a “civil rights issue.” If you head down to the center of New Haven Green and wait at the bus shelters lining Temple Street, you can experience it yourself.
The problem is public transportation. Much of the city’s infrastructure, like the infamous Oak Street Connector, which cuts the city in half, was built on the assumption that the people using it would own a car. But not everyone in New Haven does. Almost 30 percent of households don’t have access to an automobile and a further 30 percent are “car light,” which means they have more people commuting to work than vehicles to take them. Unsurprisingly, car ownership correlates with unemployment. Among workers who readily have access to a car, which costs about $7,000 a year to maintain, only 10 percent are unemployed. Among those who don’t, unemployment rises to 35 percent. The causation probably flows both ways. Without a job, it’s impossible to pay for a car. But without a car, obtaining and keeping a position becomes far more difficult.
Short of rides from friends or family members, residents have to take the bus. The shelters at the center of the Green are the hub of 15 fixed routes that radiate out into surrounding towns and neighborhoods and cumulatively provide 10 million rides a year. Poor reliability and inadequate management plague the system, which the New Haven Independent, in Nov. 2017, called, “inefficient, inconsistent, and incoherent.” Connecticut’s state Department of Transportation operates the buses, so there’s little New Haven’s own transportation bureaucracy can do. Most problematically, a recent study commissioned by the city revealed that CT Transit collects no data on its buses’ reliability or performance, so aside from anecdotal evidence and community surveys, there are no hard statistics on the system’s unreliability.
There is evidence of the consequences. According to DataHaven, most residents can reach only 27 percent of jobs on the bus in fewer than 90 minutes. Part of the problem is what DataHaven calls “job-sprawl”: low-wage jobs have gradually left downtown, fairly well serviced by public transportation, and moved to wealthier suburbs, veritable public transportation dead zones. Meanwhile, the proportion of residents in New Haven’s poorer neighborhoods who work outside of the city has nearly doubled in the last three decades to 55 percent. The racial makeup of these neighborhoods means the consequences of the sprawl are particularly pronounced among workers of color. Bikes are not the only, or even a major solution to these problems. But a few local programs, CMHC among them, have taken advantage of improvements in the city’s bike culture to help their clients. Their success suggests the rising tide of bike lanes and bike shares may lift all boats.
A few steps from Sernyak’s office at CMHC, a metal rack holds all different styles and sizes of bikes. Many of them belong to the patients Sernyak described, patients like José. When José first saw another client pedal up to the clinic, he thought, “wow, I need a bike.” He applied at the CMHC resource office and received one a few months ago. He uses it to get to job interviews, commute to work when he finds it, and visit his family. On a bus, it would take over an hour to get to his family’s house. His bike cut that time in half.
He said he’s felt better mentally and physically since he started riding. He especially appreciates the sense of control he now has over where he’s going. Surprisingly, José feels safer on a bike than he does on the bus. On the bike, he wears his helmet, uses hand signals, and watches for cars. On the bus, he feels he doesn’t have any control over what’s happening outside. He’s been in accidents before. Once, a car rear-ended the bus he was riding. Having the bike has been a welcome change. “It’s altered my life, for the better,” he said.
José was not the only CMHC patient I heard express this sentiment. Dylan told me having a bike has allowed him to go places in the city he never would have before. He got his bike in September, and since then, he’s ridden it five miles a day at least. Partly, that’s due to what he calls his “unusual living situation” — Dylan is homeless, currently living out of a tent. He rides his bike to soup kitchens around the city, to appointments at CMCH, and to the methadone clinic every morning.
“It’s a lot more convenient to ride a bike than to walk,” he said. Dylan had used the bus system before, but it’s expensive and can be unpleasant. “You kind of have to shut up and put up to take the buses.” He only takes them when he absolutely has to. Why would he otherwise? He’s made friends through riding. There’s even an informal social group he’s formed to ride around town. Like José, Dylan likes riding out of more than just convenience. “It sounds kind of cliché,” he said, “but I like the freedom of it. The air blowing by me, being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want.”
CMHC isn’t the only organization in New Haven that works with Bradley Street Bike Co-op. Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) has started to provide its clients with bikes as they get situated in their new homes. Mohammed Daad Serweri got to know the city from behind a pair of handlebars. Daad, the name he prefers, moved to the US seven months ago from Afghanistan on a Special Immigrant Visa, reserved for those who’d helped with the war effort. He worked as an interpreter before his position made remaining in his home country too dangerous. When he first arrived, his schedule was full: appointments at the social security office, meetings with his visa case officer, check-ins at the IRIS headquarters. Using public transportation was difficult and unreliable, sometimes running 30 minutes late. Several times, he arrived late for important appointments that had to be rescheduled. But soon, IRIS set him up with a bike. Now, he uses his bike for almost everything, he said.
“The bike really helped me a lot,” Daad told me. “Almost everywhere that I know now — the most important areas — I have learned them by biking.”
When he told me this, I was reminded of something Sernyak had mentioned, back at his office in the CMHC. He’s found there’s something about being on the bike — maybe the endorphins or the extra blood flow — that opens up his thinking. After riding to work in the morning, he arrives brimming with solutions to problems or ideas for new programs. In relation to mental health or refugee resettlement, the effects of biking are more than just psychological — they’re social and spatial, too. For those truly entrapped by their situation, biking means freedom.
