Brooklyn Spoke

DOT has begun striping the new bidirectional bike lane on Plaza Street.  The area between the parked cars and the new buffer will eventually be painted green and allow for contra-flow cycle traffic.

Of course, contra-flow cycle traffic was already happening in this location long before the idea of a two-way bike lane was ever proposed.  The new design will give passing cyclists a little more breathing room, provided their path isn’t blocked by double parked cars and other kinds of oncoming traffic.

Traffic was really light when I rode up to Plaza Street this morning, and I didn’t see any drivers bunching up at Union Street, as is often the case.  We’ll see how it all plays out after the installation is complete.  If you snap any pictures or have any reports, please send them my way.

Mike Bloomberg, July 2012:

“You’ve got to stop and say, ‘What are the streets for?’ They are for transportation. What is the basic first kind of transportation? It’s walking.”

Mayor Bloomberg, August 2006:

“We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here.”

We have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way.

Via the Tribeca Tribune:

“West Thames is a very dangerous road at 8 in the morning and between 2 and 4 p.m. because you’ve got all the kids,” CB1 Battery Park City Committee member Tammy Meltzer said. “My concern is that there are cars that U-turn there. It’s a very wide location and there are no crosswalks.”

Is there a quote that better represents the way people talk about dangerous driving as if it’s some weather-like uncontrollable force?  West Thames is probably a very dangerous road because you’ve got all the cars, not because you’ve got all the kids.  And it definitely won’t become more dangerous when you have all the bike share.

Spike Lee takes a moment to imagine what’s going to happen when the Barclays Center opens this September.  Via New York Magazine’s Vulture blog:

But I do know this: I just hope people take mass transit. I hope they take it when they are coming from Long Island, because you know you have the Manhattan Bridge and you have the Brooklyn Bridge. The Manhattan Bridge comes [begins drawing on a napkin] … If you come up the bridge right on Flatbush ­Avenue, you come off the Brooklyn Bridge, you make a left on Tillary, and you are on Flatbush Avenue. Flatbush and Atlantic is the Barclays Center. I predict traffic is going to be so jammed that you are going to be on Canal Street in Manhattan trying to get over the Manhattan Bridge. It is going to be crazy. People have to use public transportation.

A cyclist was hit on Vanderbilt Ave on Monday during the morning rush.  Via Patch:

For the third time in six months, a driver in struck a bicyclist in Prospect Heights and took off.

In the latest incident 28-year-old man was riding northbound on Vanderbilt Avenue when a car traveling the opposite direction hit him while turning onto Pacific Street, according to a police report.

After hitting the man, the driver drove away. The report did not say whether the rider was injured. The accident took place on Monday, June 18, at 8:25 a.m.

The intersection where the accident took place has a lot of multi-directional traffic. It is at the mouth of construction on a surface parking lot for the soon-to-open Barclays Center. It is also a block away from busy Atlantic Avenue.

On May 16, a 24-year-old biker was riding on St. Johns Place near Plaza Street East at about 3:15 p.m. when a man driving a red truck made a left turn and hit the bicyclist, causing cuts and bruises to the man’s left leg, both arms and his left side. The bicyclist was evaluated by EMS but declined to go to the hospital, according to a police report.

And on Dec. 5 at about 6 p.m., a 34-year-old woman riding a bicycle with her 2-year-old daughter onboard were hit by an SUV on Vanderbilt Avenue as they crossed Park Place, according to a police report. Neither mother or toddler were hurt.

On a not-altogether-unrelated side note, the 77th Precinct issued just one speeding ticket in May, the last month for which figures are available.

Safe streets, pedestrian plazas, and bike lanes are good for commercial real estate.  Via Crain’s:

The office market in New York is recovering fastest in districts where the city has made improvements to streets and public spaces, according to a recently released study by commercial real estate brokerage J. Liff Co.

Since the recession, the meatpacking district, between Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River, and the flatiron district along Broadway have seen the biggest upticks in rents and greatest decreases in availability rates, based on the firm’s analysis of data by CoStar Group Inc. Those areas have also experienced upgrades to streets, including new bike lanes and expanded pedestrian spaces.

Andrew Clark, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, chimes in on the helmet debate, writing that when both sides get mired in the details of helmet use, mandatory or otherwise, they obscure the real way to make cyclists safer.  “If governments are truly serious about protecting cyclists, the solution is simple,” he writes. “Create more bike lanes and infrastructure.”

But Clark is no ordinary columnist.  His “Road Sage” column appears in the paper’s “Car Life” section.  Here’s why he’s pro-bike:

You’re probably wondering why a guy who loves cars and driving, a man whose greatest fantasy is to spend the day driving around in a 1971 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible and then finish that day by having sex in it, wants to see more people on bicycles. Think of it as harm reduction. The more we can get people on bicycles, the fewer will be in cars and the fewer people there are in cars, the less traffic there will be and the easier it will be for me to drive around in my car.

Clark’s words reminded me of Ezra Klein’s “Love driving? Buy your neighbor a bike,” which appeared in the Washington Post last year:

If biking weren’t possible, perhaps I’d purchase a parking spot downtown and drive my car. But far from that solution being a victory for other drivers, it’d be an awful defeat: The worst thing for a Beltway motorist is another Beltway motorist. On the rare occasions when I do drive to work, I am grateful for every single Washingtonian who decided to make a different choice.

I snapped this picture of a Pedestrian Safety Manager standing guard on West Houston Street and Varick Street on Tuesday afternoon.  It’s actually kind of amazing that he’s all that stands between a clear intersection and total gridlock.

The intersection just one block north of here at the odd-angled confluence of traffic from 7th Avenue South, Clarkson Street and Carmine Street is completely impassable by pedestrians.

So why is there no pedestrian safety manager stationed there?  It’s because it’s just outside of the purview of the Hudson Square Connection, which admirably sponsors these superhero-like sentries to protect pedestrians from drivers bound for the Holland Tunnel.  I emailed CB2 leadership about the mess at the end of 7th Avenue South last month but have received no response.

Via the Guardian.

The Shard may be, at almost 310m, the tallest building in the EU, yet it has just 48 parking spaces – the point being that it sits right by London Bridge station, a major transport hub. “It’s another big shift – to tell people, ‘Look, stop going around in cars.’ In this city, it’s less terrible, but try to do this in Milan. Try to do this in Paris, Los Angeles.”

Try to do this in Brooklyn.

Via The Brooklyn Paper:

Road safety advocates say anti-speeding efforts obviously aren’t a priority in Brownstone Brooklyn compared to other parts of the city such as northern Queens, where cops issued 416 speeding tickets across eight police precincts in May.

This works out to just 52 tickets per precinct, or fewer than two per day in neighborhoods that are far more car-heavy than Brownstone Brooklyn.  The efforts by Queens’ precincts may make them look like CHiPs compared to Brooklyn’s but it’s not all that hard to write more than zero tickets per month.

I’ll hold my praise for the NYPD’s anti-speeding efforts when one precinct issues 416 tickets in one day, as the 78th could easily do right in front of my apartment.  Until then, heads up.