Brooklyn Spoke

There’s lots going on in the Brooklyn bicycling world on Thursday.  The borough’s first bike share planning workshop is at 6 PM:

Join Brooklyn’s Community Board 2 and local residents and business owners at a roundtable planning workshop to help decide how bike share should work and where stations should go in Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights and Clinton Hill.  In partnership with Community Board 2, NYC Council Members Letitia James and Stephen Levin, and NYS Senator Velmanette Montgomery. The Workshop will be held at St. Francis College, Callahan Center, 180 Remsen Street.

Since this workshop will cover a large majority of Brooklyn’s bike share territory, especially the areas near the bridges, it’s sure to be an exciting opportunity to contribute to the future of the system.

And, of course, there’s the monthly meeting of the Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn Committee, starting at 7 PM.  It’s held in the Cobble Hill Community Room, 250 Baltic Street, just west of Court Street.  The committee is always working on some very worthwhile campaigns to help make Brooklyn safer and new voices are always welcome.

“It’s a bike lane. It’s painted green. The city put it there so people could ride their bikes without dying. There is still plenty of room for the driving and the parking of cars. Why is this a problem? Why did the douche-wallahs sue the city to have it taken out, and why, after they failed, are they now appealing the decision and trying again? Just leave it there, you idiots! This is what’s happening–New York City is getting bike lanes now so the rest of the civilized world will stop laughing at us.” – Bike Snob NYC

Anyone who rides Jay Street regularly to get to and from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges knows how dangerous it can be for all street users, and how little any of the most common infractions are ticketed or discouraged.  If New York City streets can sometimes feel like the wild wild west, then Jay Street is Dodge City in more ways than one.

Tuesday, February 21st at 7 pm, the Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn Committee will present the NYPD’s 84th Precinct Community Council with the results of the Jay Street Traffic Monitoring study, conducted last October.  They’ll also show the short video, above.

Here’s what volunteers tracked on Jay Street between Willoughby and Johnson Streets during eight weekday rush hours:

…49 drivers parked in the bike lane every hour, 18 parked in the bus stop, and another eighteen made an illegal U-ey.

While 49 may not seem like a huge number, that figure does not account for the amount of time a driver idled on the bike lane for five minutes or more, creating what is essentially a continually blocked bike lane for cyclists.  With an average of 173 cyclists using Jay street every hour, those 49 bike lane blockers are in the minority of street users and should not be prioritized over people riding to work.

The issue isn’t just one between cyclists and motorists.  Blocked bike lanes create plenty of blind spots where pedestrians can not see or be seen as they try to cross the street.  It’s also unsafe for drivers, many of whom have to cross into oncoming traffic to pass a double-parked car, or who can not see a car pulling out from one of the parking garage driveways near Metro Tech and the Marriott hotel.

The 84th Precinct Community Council meeting will take place at the St. James Cathedral Pavilion, at 240 Jay Street, just north of Tillary in Downtown Brooklyn.  Please come and voice your support for a safer commute for everyone who uses Jay Street.  It’s right on your way home, so be there!

Mark your calendars.  On Tuesday, Feburary 28 at 7 PM, the Prospect Park Road Safety Task Force will hold a public meeting at the Picnic House in Prospect Park.  Word is that the Task Force will not be soliciting ideas from the general public, but instead will present recommendations for changes to the Prospect Park roadway.  It’s unfortunate that the only opportunity for public input was at one meeting in November, but we’ll see what happens on the 28th.

In a previous post, I outlined some of suggestions of my own, but the one that nearly 100% of the people at the November meeting also made was closing it to car traffic.  Unless and until someone invents magic paint that appears and reappears as the park shifts back and forth from a temporary rush-hour highway to, you know, a park, the confusion about who goes where when will remain.

I know that the Park Administrator doesn’t have the ultimate authority over making this decision, but I sincerely believe the Task Force would be remiss if it did not recommend a trial closing of the park drives.  It will be helpful for anyone who was at the last meeting, as well as anyone who could not make it before, to attend and remind the Task Force of the overwhelming community support for a car-free Prospect Park.

Via a commenter to the Brooklyn Heights Blog:

i was starting to cross pineapple, as was a blind man. a woman “driving” a gray audi q7 was rolling toward the intersection looking down. she literally rolled right into the blind man without noticing as i started yelling “Woah, stop!” she didn’t look up. i grabbed the man (did i mention that i will be 10 months pregnant next week?) and pulled him away. she still didn’t look up. i banged on her car twice to get her attention and she finally looked up. i was so fired up i didn’t know what to do, as i definitely should’ve gotten her license plate number and called the police. it’s hard to assume what would’ve happened if no one was crossing with the man…it appeared that he would’ve gotten hit, and she would’ve rolled over him, without even noticing.

I’m usually loath to give much credence to “near misses” in any discussion of traffic safety, especially because they tend to be the only kind of danger people can discuss when describing the menace of bicycles.  But too many driving-related “near-misses” sadly turn into actual deaths and injuries in a way that bicycle accidents do not.  If New York is “too New York” for blind people and expectant mothers to get around safely, there is something drastically wrong with New York.

Via Transportation Nation.

Photo: Brooklyn Historical Society

Like any street in Brooklyn, South Elliot Place between Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street has undergone tremendous changes in the intervening century or so since this photo was taken.  As I often noted with Prospect Park West, only a through a selective view of history can one claim that a new design will change the character of a street.  Yesterday’s authentic was once someone’s new.

The planned pedestrian plaza at what is now Fowler Square is ruffling the typical feathers and provoking the same tired arguments we see time and time again whenever this kind change comes to a neighborhood.  According to critics of the plan, closing one tiny stretch of street, about the length of two store fronts, could cause massive amounts of congestion.  Drivers are upset that they might have to go an entire extra block before making a turn.  (Never mind that to be a pedestrian in New York City is to constantly have to go out of one’s way just to cross a street safely.)  Others argue that creating more pedestrian space is somehow more dangerous than leaving them with a tiny sliver of a cement island on which to wait for the walk signal.

One neighborhood resident went so far as to say, “This isn’t Amsterdam — we need our street,” as if reading from the NIMBY playbook.  I’ve even read people say that there’s a “perfectly good” park just a few blocks away that people can use if they want to enjoy some fresh air.

Ultimately, these aren’t really arguments against a pedestrian plaza so much as they are displays of a reflexive and unthinking resistance to change.  Of course, much of this conflict is stoked by a media which likes to frame everything as a battle between different street users on Brooklyn’s “Mean Streets.”  But if there is a “war here between bikers, drivers and people who never even go near a car,” then based on the body count and the amount of territory they’ve seized for their exclusive use, I’d say that drivers won a long time ago.

Fowler Square is worth far more to the community as a pedestrian plaza than as a shortcut for a small minority of drivers.  To bring a safe and pleasant new space to a great neighborhood, please attend the Fowler Square Planning Workshop on Thursday, Feburary 16th at 6 pm.  The workshop will be held at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, 85 South Oxford Street, between Fulton and Lafayette.

Photo: LA Eco-Village Blog

A new bike lane on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is making it difficult to use the street as a backdrop for movies:

That mile and a half of Spring Street turns out to be the most filmed stretch of street in town. Or rather, it was until about last November, when the green lane spoiled the shots that made Spring the perfect stand-in for Anytown, USA. It was the perfect street for car commercials, the perfect backdrop of stolid bank buildings, the perfect mix of marble columns and Art Deco spandrels, the perfect modern or 1920s downtown — until the wide green stripe appeared.

Apparently it’s not something even the imaginative minds of Hollywood can fix: “Bike lane green…is not digitally erasable Hollywood green.”

I was watching 30 Rock the other night and noticed a bike lane in the background of one exterior scene.  It crossed this TV writer’s mind that New York’s new street designs could cause headaches for producers and directors; imagine shooting a movie set in Times Square in the 1970s or on — gasp! — Prospect Park West in 2009.

Does Gibson Dunn do entertainment law?

If it’s winter, it must be another Neighbors for Bike Lane attempt to sue the bike lane off their street.

Here’s Gibson Dunn attorney Georgia Winston, quoted in the New York Observer yesterday:

The lawsuit clock started running only after the Department of Transportation made a final decision to permanently install the lane, in January 2011.  Before that—throughout the summer and fall of 2011—the lane was repeatedly described as a ‘trial,’ including by the lane’s most fervent supporters.

(Either Winston is quoted incorrectly or she meant to say that the Prospect Park West bike lane was described as a “trial” during the fall and winter of 2010, not 2011.  NBBL filed their lawsuit in March 2011.)

Here’s Louise Hainline, in an August 25, 2010 email [PDF] to Marty Markowitz’ chief of staff Carlo Scissura:

Can you fill me in on what was said or not said by DOT about the matter of this installation being a trial? I’ve look at everything I can find Sadik-Khan or her people have said about this bike lane and can’t find anything that indicates they publically said the installation was only a trial.

In the same email Hainline goes on to say, “At this point, all we have is second or third hand accounts of the existence of some kind of trial.”  In a sworn affidavit DOT’s Josh Benson states that when he heard a representative from a local legislator’s office claim that PPW was a “trial project,” he “immediately corrected this publicly by stating that the PPW Project was not a trial project, but that after its installation it would be monitored with adjustments made as deemed appropriate.”

With the Prospect Park West Bike lane quickly approaching its two-year anniversary as a permanent and popular fixture of the neighborhood, and with none of the doom-and-gloom scenarios predicted by NBBL having come to pass, who knows what will happen with NBBL’s appeal and their new PR push.  The biggest difference between the winter of 2011 and the winter of 2012 is that today the public–and NYC’s law department–has access to emails which poke more than a few holes in NBBL’s bombastic claims.

I’ve joked before that NBBL’s complaints and PR maneuverings amount to little more than claiming, “I’m rubber and you’re glue” but Transportation Alternative’s Michael Murphy does me one better in describing this recent shot across the bow from Iris Weinshall and company “the legal equivalent of ‘Nuh uh!’”

UPDATE: Mark Muschenheim of the NYC Law Department issued this statement: “We are confident that he trial court’s decision in our favor will be upheld on appeal.  The popular bike path continues to enhance the safety of all who use Prospect Park West.”

From 2001 through 2011, seven pedestrians were killed in bike-ped accidents.  For some perspective on just how miniscule that statistic is, Gothamist is reporting that in a twelve-hour period beginning on Saturday night, five people were killed in car accidents.  Two of them were pedestrians hit by drivers who fled the scene.

Police say a 42-year-old woman was fatally struck by a tan Mazda around 9:45 p.m by a hit-and-run driver who fled the scene.

Then just before 3 a.m., two people were killed in an accident on the FDR involving a wrong-way driver. According to police, a 26-year-old man was driving a Nissan Maxima northbound in the southbound lanes of the FDR when he slammed into a Dodge Caravan near the Houston Street exit. Both the 26-year-old and 52-year-old Dodge driver were killed; another car was involved in the accident, and its two passengers were taken to the hospital.

A Queens driver was killed when he was ejected from his 2006 Lincoln Town Car after hitting a utility pole while going eastbound on South Conduit Boulevard around 4 a.m. Then just before 8 a.m., a 75-year-old man was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in Harlem while crossing the street at the intersection of Broadway and West 138th Street in Hamilton Heights. The victim was identified as Luis Rosado by the Daily News.

There’s a hearing on traffic safety at the City Council on Wedensday, headed by Council Member Peter Vallone and co-chaired by James Vacca.  Given Vacca’s year-end media blitz promising to introduce more bike-focused legislation, based on “stories from pedestrians about the scourge of the rogue commercial cyclist,” as well as his newfound interest in the “civil rights” of those who have difficulty navigating pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, someone ought to tell him the stories of real people killed by reckless drivers on his watch as the Transportation Committee chair.

Drivers got their parking relief last month.  It’s time for New York City’s pedestrians to get some relief from deadly drivers, and it’s time for leadership from the City Council, not pandering.