Brooklyn Spoke

“I don’t mean to condemn efforts made to support urban cycling. I just have a hard time understanding why the rewards for cyclists are not greater in traffic heavy cities like New York.” – Rachel James, “Worldwide Cycle Superhighways raise the bar,” SmartPlanet

“I really enjoy biking a lot, but there is a bike lane that goes right down by the river; so it’s kind of redundant to have two like that,” added Racheal Kimmy, who lives in the area.

This never gets old.  Pittsburgh’s Racheal Kimmy enjoys biking, but not enough to know that transportational cyclists often need more than just one bike lane down by the river, just as we Brooklyn riders sometimes need more than a bike lane inside a park.

NPR Cities, a new initiative from public radio, underwhelms with its nothing-to-see-here take on the “war on cars.”

Political consultant and Washington resident Chuck Thies, who has written about what he calls the “war on automobiles” for the Huffington Post, says, ultimately, that war is over resources.

“Transportation dollars are few and far between,” he explains. “If you’re a bicyclist, perhaps you want it for a bike lane or more bike racks. If you’re a motorist, perhaps you want it for more highways or the roads to be improved.”

Some cyclists, and other nonmotorists, may have a negative attitude toward cars. But Thies, a cyclist who for years didn’t own a car, says critics need to face the reality: We can’t get rid of cars. They’re essential to the economy, he says.

“[Cars are] the predominant form of transportation in America. In fact, it’s something that we can’t live without,” Thies says. “When you get a refrigerator delivered … they don’t bring it on a bicycle. … They bring it in an automobile. It’s easy to vilify the automobile, but it’s not productive.”

I was recently in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.  In each city I stayed in an apartment.  Each apartment had a refrigerator.  Our traffic problems, of course, aren’t caused by too many refrigerator deliveries, but by a built environment that requires people to drive motorized machines in order to get food to put in those refrigerators.

But that’s not really the point.  The real problem here is the opportunity NPR missed with a story that’s long on opinion and short on facts and details.  Do they really want to rehash the same tired cyclist-versus-driver/he-said-she-said routines?   I’m a cyclist, nonmotorist, and motorist wrapped in one, so where’s the nuance that I’ve come to expect as the hallmark of an NPR report?

Imagine instead a Radiolab-style show, but for urban planning, transportation, and livable streets.*  It could focus on the science, sociology, and economics of this brave new world that we’re only now starting to understand outside of the halls of academia and government.  Why does removing a lane of traffic sometimes lead to better traffic flow while widening a highway leads to more traffic?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of BRT as compared to rail?  How can bikes be better integrated with transit?  How does the Safety In Numbers effect of bicycling work?  What are the economics and technology driving car sharing programs and bike sharing systems?  How did closing Times Square to traffic lead to some of the biggest rent increases in the country at a time of a recession?  How does queue theory affect everything from how you wait for an open tollbooth on I-95 to how you wait for an open register at Duane Reade?  The topics would be endless, endlessly fascinating, and would serve a real purpose of sating curious listeners instead of stoking the dying embers of a battle between cyclists and motorists.

*My wife has alerted me that Human Trafficking would be a terrible name for this program.

“It’s fascinating.  The people who did not want bicycle lanes at all are now screaming, ‘Well, where are they? Where are they? I want them quickly.’”- Mike Bloomberg

This may be the quote of the summer, if not the quote of the century.  Someone put this on a T-shirt, please.

The new design on the Prospect Park loop has been in effect for a little while, and now it’s time for the education campaign to kick into high gear.  From the PPA:

The Prospect Park Alliance is seeking volunteers this Sunday, July 22nd from 10am – 12pm to stand at key traffic lights around the Park Drive and inform pedestrians to push the newly installed pedestrian activated button to cross, while also letting cyclists know that they need to “stop on red” after a pedestrian has pushed the button.

As of now, we hope to have volunteers at the following traffic lights in the Park:

– 3rd street
– 9th street
– 13th street
– Vanderbilt Playground
– Grecian Shelter
– Parkside/Ocean Avenue
– Lincoln Road

Volunteers should plan to meet in front of the Litchfield Villa at 10am on Sunday, July 22nd.  Contact Eric Landau at elandau (at) prospectpark.org if you have questions.

The New York Times asks, “Who Made the Olympic Rings?”

In fact, the design simply burst forth from the imagination of a baron with effulgent facial hair. Baron Coubertin believed in sport as a kind of religion “with its own church, dogmas and ritual.” And when he cast about for a logo, he may have been inspired by — of all things — an advertisement for Dunlop tires. The baron had been perusing a magazine illustrated with five bicycle tires at around the same time that he invented his design, according to the historian Karl Lennantz.

Good to know that “effulgent facial hair” and bicycles have been linked, however tangentially, for a long time.

Via Gotham Gazette:

Between October and December 2011, 26 pedestrians were injured in crashes with bicyclists; six bicyclists were injured in those incidents, according to DOT data from June obtained by Transportation Alternatives. In the same period of time, 4,336 bicyclists and pedestrians were injured by drivers. That means that, for every 356 injuries caused by car crashes, one pedestrian or bicyclist was injured in a bicycle-pedestrian crash.

But the DOT statistics also show the number of New York cyclists quadrupled over the last decade. During that time, the rate of risk to cyclists was down by 75 percent.

Taken on Sunday on Butler Street between 3rd Avenue and 4th Avenue.  In case it’s hard to read, the sign says: “Attention all drivers!!! Please park your cars legally at all times. Do not block the sidewalks in front of the neighbors.”

I was one of about fifteen other cyclists forced out of the bike lane and into Chrystie Street when I snapped this picture this morning.

Via the New York Post:

Some of Central Park’s long-suffering non-cyclists said they can understand the motivation for the attack.

“Cyclists are very self-entitled. They come cruising by and almost hit you, and if you say something they say something back.”

This is why the racing-cyclists-versus-runners narrative in the tabloids is so distracting and damaging.  New York magazine framed their take on the sabotage-by-tack story that way (an “uneasy peace between cyclists and runners…was shattered”), and I’m sure CBS2 will do the same when Tony Aiello runs some sort of “Bike Bedlam” report tonight.  If we had a more responsible and honest media, reporters might challenge the NYPD’s tacit tolerance for vigilantism or explain that disproportionate violence is not how we deal with problems in a civilized society.  But why bother when you can go with the bike wars angle and generate page views?

There’s another reason why this narrative is so vital to the tabloids: they can’t preserve the motoring status quo and marginalize cyclists as some sort of fringe minority without pitting spandex-clad road warriors, hipsters, and yuppie transplants against non-cyclists.  (Which I guess is everyone else.)  They can not force people to recognize and deal with the carnage happening every day on the streets outside the park if they keep all eyes fixated on shiny tacks inside the park.

There’s no question that a lot of cyclists in the park are inconsiderate louts.  As a rabbi I know says, “A mensch is a mensch and a jerk is a jerk.”  But kids ride bikes in Central Park.  Parents.  Old people.  Tourists.  These are hardly the kind of people who “almost hit” non-cyclists and scream at joggers to get out of the bike lane.  Any one of these riders could get seriously injured as a result of this kind of deliberate sabotage, which is distressing enough.  But it’s even more distressing to know that there’s an officer working for the Central Park Precinct who Does Not Care.  What are the odds that the officer quoted in the Post as valuing a cyclist’s health as less than a squirrel’s feeds himself with a steady diet of stories about 1st Avenue bike lane terrorists and reports about aggressive “Lance Armstrong wannabes” running over helpless pedestrians on a daily basis?  And the head eats the tail.

Change will only come when NYPD officers, tabloid writers–seven of them on the Post story alone–and “Bike Bedlam” reporters like Tony Aiello start asking themselves, “If it was my kid, wife, or friend who got injured, how would I want people to respond?”