Brooklyn Spoke

Another spin on NIMBY claim that “This isn’t Amsterdam,” from the Soho Alliance’s Sean Sweeney. Via The Villager:

…in a press release slamming D.O.T. for threatening to “desecrate a memorial site” at the square, Sean Sweeney, director of the Soho Alliance, said the department aims to turn the streets of New York into “Ho Chi Minh City.” We assume that means encourage a lot of biking in the Big Apple — which is something we wholeheartedly support. Safe, responsible cycling, that is.

It’s always amazing to me that these “real” New Yorkers are unwilling to sacrifice an inch to any form of non-motorized transportation or space for people.  They’re okay with their city staying the way it is, so long as it stays like Houston.

The Brooklyn Paper is starting to bang the drum about the complete lack of speeding enforcement by some of Brooklyn’s police precincts:

Officers in Park Slope’s 78th Precinct did not issue a single speeding ticket in June — echoing their approach to speeding enforcement in May, records indicate. Cops at the 77th Precinct in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights followed suit, giving out no speeding tickets last month after issuing just one over the previous 30 days, while police at Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s 88th Precinct ticketed two speeding motorists — up from one in May.

These precincts have, however, issued hundreds of tickets to drivers for tinted windows, making me wonder if tinted windows tickets are the stop-and-frisk of moving violations.

We’ll see how the precincts do for July.

I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition of this Allstate ad and yesterday’s lead story in the Brooklyn Paper.

After running some errands today, I rode down Bergen Street to get home.  As I approached Flatbush Avenue I realized I was nearing the site of the infamous “Guerrilla Bike Lane” and was curious to see if it would still be there.  It was:

These aren’t going to stop an out-of-control motorist from crashing into the bike lane–or the sidewalk–but they do prevent the most basic dangers.  While I stopped to take these pictures a driver who had been honking at the traffic ahead of him for not moving one tenth of a nanosecond after the light at Flatbush Avenue turned green attempted to use the bike lane as a passing lane.  A perfectly placed plastic pole stopped him cold:

It’s amazing that drivers seem more concerned about scratching their vehicles against plastic than possibly hitting flesh and blood human beings.  Plastic delineators or raised bike lanes should be standard design on streets like this.

Via Metro Focus:

Senior citizens are doing their part to keep the streets safe in New York City. In Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, more than 50 seniors have joined forces to identify safety issues in the neighborhood. “Light is turning red quickly and the cars are not always giving the right away to the people…people get stood in the middle of the street,” Veronica Daniel, 63,  wrote on a street safety inspection form, addressing the busy three-road intersection of Eastern Parkway, Rockaway and St. Marks avenues, where her church stands right on the northwest corner.

That reminds me. We haven’t heard from “Seniors for Parking” “Seniors for Safety” in quite some time.

From Speedway, Indiana, comes a classic “battle of young versus old.”

Speedway’s Cunningham Street is getting a facelift that will include a new bike lane. For more than six weeks the fiery town council discussion seemed to be a battle of young versus old.

During Monday’s town council meeting, older residents argued against bike lanes and parking restrictions. They feared the bike lanes would slow traffic and pose a safety hazard.

Jane Wilson, who has lived on Cunningham Street for more than 50 years, said that the parking restrictions would affect everything from parking to UPS drop offs.

“Most of the people I speak to don’t want a change, they just want the four lanes left the way they are and parking available on Cunningham and 16th Street,” Wilson said.

Supporters of the plan countered that the bike lanes would attract more young people to Speedway and make the road safer by reducing speeds.

In the end, the town council voted 3-2 in favor for the ordinance to change the four-lane street into a three-lane street. One lane would be reserved expressly for bikes.

Emphasis mine.  You can blame it on scofflaw cyclists all you want, but I’ll never be convinced that the opposition to bike lanes is about anything else other than lost parking, not being able to speed, and a general fear of change.  The rest is noise.

Spotted at Gorilla Coffee on Tuesday morning.

If there’s an award for the Streetsblog comment that should be featured as its own opinion piece, this one from Jesse Greene is it:

We need to get bikes out of this legal squeeze where they’re treated like cars when it’s convenient for pedestrians, but they’re treated like pedestrians when it’s convenient for motorists.  The law should reflect what we all know, which is that bikes are sui generis.  They can be operated at car speeds but they need separate infrastructure because motorists can’t help but be pigs around them.  But they’re not so big, fast, and hard to maneuver that they need to be regulated exactly like cars.  Basically, we need to codify what all responsible cyclists are already doing.

When people say that cyclists have “all the same rights and responsibilities as motorists,” watch out.  What they really mean is that cyclists ought to have all the same inconveniences and annoyances as motorists.  If drivers have to stop for every red light, so do cyclists.  (So no Idaho stop laws.)  If drivers have to take an indirect route every now and then, so do cyclists. (So no contra-flow or two-way bike lanes.)  If drivers have to be licensed and get their vehicles insured, so do cyclists. (So no more “free” bike lanes.)  And if drivers have to follow seat belt laws, cities also need to require cyclists to wear helmets. (So, you know…)

A bicycle is not a car.  In discussing the behavior of cyclists, the allocation of street space, and where the NYPD should be directing its enforcement efforts, we ought to start with this fact before reflexively chastising cyclists whose behavior, while technically illegal, is more annoying than deadly.

Cyclists who have been cited for traffic violations are being sent to a “class to learn about bicycles and traffic.”  Via the New York Times:

It comes amid broad agreement among bike advocates and the Transportation Department that compelling riders to obey traffic signals, go with traffic and stay off the sidewalk is critical to improving the image of cycling and ensuring the long-term health of New York City’s expanding bicycle network. That mission will become even more important once the city’s bike-share program rolls out in the next month or so.

Can we please do our best to dispense with the notion that the maintenance and extension of New York’s bike lane network is dependent on the behavior of all cyclists?  Or even any cyclists?  Or that bike-share is some gift we children will have put into time out if we don’t do our chores and homework first?  Because if that’s the standard, it’s time to mothball all the taxis.

I would never argue that “rogue” riding is not an annoying problem, and lord knows I’ve scolded my fair share of cyclists for zipping through pedestrian-filled crosswalks.  But such behavior is not the source of the most significant antipathy toward bicycles in New York right now.  In fact, if there are any people who believe that Marty Markowitz would have been okay with converting a lane of car traffic into a lane for bicycles if only every last cyclist was an Eagle Scout, I have a bike lane in Brooklyn I’d like to sell them.

So please, bike advocates and Transportation Department officials, let’s keep the issues of “scofflaw” cyclists and “the long-term health of New York City’s bicycle network” completely separate, as car advocates seem so able to do for car drivers and their roadway network.  Because if there’s any way to ensure the long-term stagnation of New York City’s bicycle network, it’s to buy into the notion that its health depends on a certain class of people exhibiting a certain type of behavior.

Better bike lanes breed better bike riders.  Remove every bike lane from Copenhagen or Amsterdam today and do you know what you’ll have tomorrow?  New York.

“Now everyone here knows that I am a friend to bicyclists (even if they don’t know it). I am also in favor of bike lanes.  But some roads are too busy and too dangerous for bicycles. There. I said it.” – Nafari Vanaski, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

These “Some of my best friends are bike lanes” statements are so predictable, you just have to laugh.