Brooklyn Spoke

I hope to see many of you at the Streetsblog and Streetfilms benefit tomorrow night. In a way it will be a sort of valedictory celebration for the Bloomberg/Sadik-Khan years, but it will also be a reminder that the livable streets movement now transcends these two leaders.  I’m more confident than ever that the gains we’ve seen on our city streets will only continue to grow.

Many thanks to my friends at Showers Pass in Portland, Oregon for donating a jacket for the benefit’s auction. 

Jim Walden is back in court, this time using his stand-up comedy talents legal acumen to fight a Citi Bike rack in SoHo:

“Funny, you have a duck, and you know it’s a duck because it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it introduced itself as a duck, and it’s wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘I am a duck,’ with a corporate logo emblazoned on it,” Walden said, extending the metaphor, “This is not a cow.”

The courtroom, packed with activists who oppose the rack’s placement in Petrosino Square, a triangular sliver of parkland between Lafayette and Centre streets just south of Spring Street, erupted in laughter.

Measuring less than a third of an acre, Petrosino Square is “a park that is too small for cycling,” Walden told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern.

The park has traditionally been used to showcase art installations.

Walden argued that the fee structure — which allows free rides for subscribers cycling for limited time periods — is geared toward commuters, not bikers out on joy rides.

How a judge may rule in this case is anyone’s guess, but I’m not concerned. Walden may win this battle, but he’s already lost the larger war. Why? In 2010 his pro bono clients argued that because few people use bikes for transportation the Prospect Park West bike lane should be moved inside Prospect Park. But fast forward to 2013: cycling has grown so much that the infamous lawyer for Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes is using the fact that bikes are for transportation as an argument against putting a bike share station in a park.

That’s progress.

Bike Snob lays into a writer who claims he honked at a cyclist to let him know that he was there.

Anyway, so what if he didn’t know you were there?  He doesn’t really have to know you’re there.  You have to know he’s there because you’re the one approaching from behind.  So wait until it’s safe to pass him and then do so.  Don’t honk at him, especially as you’re approaching a fucking stop sign.  It’s irritating enough when people honk at you for no reason, but it’s quadruply annoying when they do it at a stop sign or red light, and if you want to know why sometimes we’re inclined to roll those things then there’s your fucking answer.

If you’d like to honor Sammy Cohen-Eckstein with a donation in his memory, you may give to one of these worthy organizations, at his family’s request:

• Transportation Alternatives.
• Heifer International.

My thoughts and prayers are with Sammy’s family and friends at this difficult time.

The Watchtower buildings in DUMBO, the longtime headquarters of the Jehova’s Witnesses, have been sold to a real estate partnership in a $375 million deal. The area is set to be remade into a “hub” for tech companies. Via the Wall Street Journal:

The partners would undertake a roughly $100 million renovation of the buildings, accommodating up to 5,000 bikes, creating outdoor roof space, allowing for 150,000 square feet of retail space occupied almost entirely by Brooklyn companies and installing state-of-the-art Internet connectivity. Mr. Kushner, chief executive of Kushner Companies, said the developers would work with the city to try to convert some area streets into pedestrian plazas.

So forget about the next mayor or who will lead the DOT for a second. It turns out that the next wave of better biking and safe streets in New York City may come from the business and real estate community.

A reader, who I’ll only identify as Heather, sends in this account of a disturbing interaction she and her husband had while riding with their children in Park Slope:

My husband was biking in front of us (I had our two toddlers on my bike) on 2nd street and a Prius rode up behind him and sideswiped him. My husband was not totally innocent—he was outside of the bike lane—but the car made no effort to avoid him. The driver yelled at him and drove on. We kept going but I guess the Prius driver stopped to look at his car and was very upset to see a scratch from my husband’s pedal. As we turned onto 5th ave, we noticed the Prius was gaining on us and he chased my husband, driving in the bike lane, and yelling that he was going to run him down. My husband hopped up on the sidewalk and the Prius driver pulled over, got out of the car, and chased him. I was scared and called the police. When they showed up the driver was still there as were a number of witnesses who were waiting with us.

First, a point of clarification, which I explained to Heather in a follow-up email: it is legal to exit a bike lane “when reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, motor vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, pushcarts, animals, surface hazards) that make it unsafe to continue within such bicycle path or lane.”  The shoddy pavement on 2nd Street is probably enough to warrant staying out of the bike lane all the way from Prospect Park West to 4th Avenue.  And, besides, even if riding outside of a bike lane were strictly illegal, I’m not aware of any ethical law that entitles drivers to hit people on bikes.

Nevertheless, one would think that this particular act of vehicular violence–an attempted assault on a father in front of his wife and their two children–would be taken seriously by officers of the local precinct.  But if one thought that one would not be living in New York City, but in some utopia where human lives are worth more than the cost of repainting a car’s scratched side panel.

The police talked to both of us and then one policeman said he would be upset [by the scratch on the car] too and it is a felony to leave the scene of a crime. The witnesses were telling the police what happened too, but apparently the scratch justified trying to run down my husband in a car. The policeman told us that we are lucky that no one was hurt and to be careful.

The policeman told us that the driver could file a report because my husband scratched his car (didn’t matter that driver hit him) and we left the scene of the crime.  Police recommended that no one file a report and we go on with our day. They did not take our information or the names or numbers of the witnesses who came up to talk to them on our behalf.

Bike Snob, in his own way, makes the case for a “broken windows” approach to traffic enforcement.

I’d love to see a mayor with the balls and/or vulva to admit that if you cracked down on all the assholes with expired inspections, no insurance, suspended licenses, out of state registration to save money when they actually live in New York, and so forth, you’d take a shitload of dangerous drivers off the road.  Three tickets for no inspection?  Tow that shit!  “Oh, boo hoo, it’s hard having a car in New York City.”  No shit, asshole.  It should be hard, and if you can’t hack it then don’t drive.  You’re asking a lot of the city and its residents to accommodate your car.  You should be creeping around town at 20mph with your valid paperwork on hand at all times, petrified at the idea of making contact with anything.

His whole post is brilliant. He’s arguably the city’s best advocate for safer streets.

One small detail from the report of yet another case of a driver killing a child on a New York City street:

“Witnesses said Shao was walking with her older sister and following their father when a white Cadillac Escalade playing loud music hit the younger girl as her older sister dodged the oncoming car.”

Emphasis mine.

When five kids in Maspeth, Queens were mowed down on the sidewalk by a driver, the DOE responded with a letter telling parents not to let their children walk to school with headphones on.  Cyclists are are often ticketed for having two earbuds in while riding, which is against the law.  But seal yourself inside a metal and glass box and pump up the volume so loud that its audible to people outside your vehicle?  The NYPD will not consider it a factor if you crush a 5-year-old with your 7,000-pound truck.

Is it too much to ask drivers to turn it down and pay attention, especially when driving through a crowded neighborhood in the hour after school lets out?

“Ride” poster by Jeremiah Britton

Tonight, head down to Bicycle Habitat in SoHo for the opening of ARTCRANK, an exhbition of “hand-made, bike-inspired posters created by New York area artists.”  Limited edition, signed and numbered copies of the posters on display are available for $40.  Raffle tickets and beer will be on sale, with proceeds benefiting Streetsblog and Streetfilms.  Admission to the exhibition is free.

ARTCRANK posters will be on display and on sale through tomorrow night.

First, the obvious: Sam Schwartz is a great friend to cyclists and pedestrians.  He was an early fan of bike sharing, has long been a cheerleader for Janette Sadik-Khan, and envisions a future in which New York’s rivers are crisscrossed with new bridges exclusively for people on two wheels or two feet.  So when he and former DOT Deputy Commissioner Gerard Soffian claim that they “ride bikes in the city regularly, are card-carrying Citi Bike members, and have engineered many of the city’s bike lanes” as they do in today’s Daily News, they aren’t trying to use the old “Some of my best friends are bike lanes” excuse.  They mean it.

Despite the clichéd “bike war” language of the headline and the reference to “peace in the Middle East” in the kicker, a close reading of Schwartz and Soffian’s piece reveals something extraordinary: a city that’s moved beyond the bikelash.  Indeed, it isn’t until three paragraphs from the end that the writers present this rather sensible proposal:

…start to accept that bike riders shouldn’t have to follow all of the rules established for car drivers, since cyclists navigate the road more like pedestrians than cars. Allow for turns on red after stops and when there are no pedestrians. In lower-volume outer borough communities, consider allowing bikes to ride straight through on red after a stop, again when safe to do so.

It’s a sign of New York’s maturing relationship with bicycles that we are moving away from the outdated notion that cyclists and drivers must be subject to the same rules no matter the circumstance, and Schwartz and Soffian should be applauded for presenting this idea seriously.  While I have some minor quibbles–there are plenty of lower-volume inner borough intersections where allowing cyclists to proceed straight on red would be reasonable–the very fact that this proposal has made its way into one of the city’s major dailies is an encouraging step on the road to rationalizing traffic laws for people who travel by bicycle.

Schwartz and Soffian offer other smart, if somewhat obvious suggestions, such as keeping drivers out of bike lanes and cracking down on cyclists who violate the law, hopefully in a manner that actively targets the most dangerous behavior.  Changing the penalty structure so that fines for cyclists and drivers are commensurate with the threat posed by each mode is also a worthy effort and would send a powerful message that not all offenses are created equal.

What Schwartz and Soffian suggest doing with the money from such a crackdown, however, leaves something to be desired:

Lastly, use some of the revenue collected from bikers to launch a public education program.

While much is made of the “Three E’s” of traffic calming–engineering, enforcement, and education–numerous attempts to teach the public about the rules of the road have shown that education is typically the shortest leg of the stool.  That may be because education relies on an impossibility in a city as big and diverse as New York: that the people being educated today will always be the same people using the street tomorrow.

The DOT can tell cyclists to stop being jerks, but it isn’t until separated bike lanes are installed that sidewalk riding goes down significantly… and permanently.  So perhaps a better place to steer the money would be into cycling infrastructure projects that make compliance with the law not just obligatory, but safe and attractive.

Schwartz and Soffian are not wrong to suggest that a little more respect for the rules of the road would be helpful.  That no cyclist has killed a pedestrian in years is cold comfort to those who cling to their increasingly futile opposition to bike lanes and other provisions for cycling, and no advocate can afford to discount a person’s perception of their own safety.  But fear and anecdotes, including Schwartz and Soffian’s unscientific observation of busy Manhattan intersections, should not rule the day.  As the two men remind readers, despite the perceived dangers posed by red-light-running cyclists or pedestrians who blindly step into bike lanes, it remains a fact that drivers still kill around 150 people each year.

If the next mayor is to continue the dramatic increase in cycling New York has experienced since 2007, then managing the “tensions between drivers, bikers, and walkers” will only get him so far.   As Schwartz and Soffian eventually conclude, it will take a serious re-evaluation of the legal and physical space in which cycling currently exists in our city.