Brooklyn Spoke

Via the Prospect Heights Patch:

Tomorrow, October 28, 9:00 am

56 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, NY

The Department of Transportation has completed its redesign of Washington Avenue including new bike lanes, pedestrian islands and other changes.

The DOT’s representatives in charge of the plan will be on the avenue Friday morning at 9 a.m. to listen to what residents and merchants think works, and what still needs to be changed.

Meet outside the Capital One Bank on Washington Avenue and Lincoln Place

The walk through will take place rain or shine!!

As the old Woody Allen quote goes, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”  So if you live in the area or can swing during your commute, it would be a good idea to show up.  Because if you don’t, someone who really hates bike lanes and pedestrian islands will.

Come join the Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn Volunteer Committee at its monthly meeting, tonight at 7 PM at 250 Baltic Street.

Don’t let the weather and the darkness scare you away.  The Brooklyn Committee is working on a lot of great livable streets initiatives and is always looking for new ideas.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Via Grist.org.

…Sadik-Khan argues that the opposition toward initiatives like bike shares, while vocal, does not always speak for the majority.

“Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers support the bike share program,” she said, citing a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University. “If this was a political campaign it would be a landslide.

So who are the 28 percent who hate on bikes? Among the more high-profile opponents to the Prospect Park bike lane was Iris Weinshall, Sadik-Khan’s predecessor and the wife of Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz went so far as to call the cool and collected commissioner a “zealot” for wanting to “make it hard for those that choose to own their automobiles.”

Sadik-Khan shrugs off these criticisms. “Some people have tried to paint bike lanes as elitist, which is really hard to believe because [the bicycle] is the most affordable way to get around town other than walking, and it’s really heavily used by a wide range of social and ethnic groups.”

If you bike in New York City or simply cross the street on foot every day, I believe there’s no more important place for you to be than at One Police Plaza Wednesday, October 26 at noon.

Mathieu Lefevre’s parents will join Transportation Alternatives and Neighbors Allied for Good Growth outside Commissioner Kelly’s 1 Police Plaza office tomorrow at 12 pm to call for his police force to enforce the traffic laws and commit to zero tolerance of dangerous driving.

I know of no other area in life where one can be involved in another human being’s death and not have one’s role in that tragedy not face immeasurable scrutiny by the authorities.  A school bus driver who leaves a child on a bus accidentally after his shift is over will lose his job, face child endangerment charges, and leave his school district vulnerable to a costly lawsuit, even if the child is physically unharmed.  “I didn’t know he was there,” would be no defense.  But a truck driver who runs over a cyclist and makes the same claim is free to get behind the wheel immediately without so much as a point on his license.  Call me crazy, but not killing another person should be the minimum standard by which one gets to retain the privilege of driving.

Right now, no one can know exactly what happened last week.  But that’s exactly the point.  An organization that treated cyclists as human beings — each one someone’s son or daughter — would not act the way the NYPD does when another death occurs, conducting a spurious investigation and calling it a day so soon.  As Lefevre’s ex-wife said in a statement, “Almost all of the information we have is what we have read in the newspaper.  The fact that we have not been properly informed adds insult to injury.  The family is trying to cope with this tragedy, but it seems nearly impossible given the lack of information. We can’t bear the fact that other families have likely been given the same treatment and other families are bound to be treated this way if nothing changes.”

Please come if you can make it.

I Don’t Get It, Mathieu Lefevre

“Whichever way the next mayor goes, there is likely to remain institutional support for cycling throughout government and beyond, and that will not evaporate after an election.”- Tom Angotti, Making Bikes a Part of the Neighborhood

“I’m not against plazas, just this plaza,” Schielle Hagan

Hagan is a member of Fulton Area Coming Together, or NBBL for short.  Sounds familiar, no?

Someone is dead here, and these are the conclusions people are drawing? That victims are merely “potential accidents” with nobody to blame but themselves? Sure, cyclists should ride intelligently, but having respect for the power of a car is the driver’s job. If they lack that respect then the car should be taken from them. Cyclists are “on equal footing in regards to the road.” Saying they’re not is like saying women should have more respect for the Park Slope Groper, and that they’re wrong to think they’re on equal footing with men.

This is maybe one of the best Bike Snob posts I’ve ever read, making choosing just one part to quote a difficult task.

Ever since the Daily News first wrote its open letter to Janette Sadik-Khan, the story of bike-ped conflicts on the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, if such conflicts ever existed in the first place, has largely faded from memory.

Nevertheless, the passage of time and a lack of any concrete evidence of violent confrontations hasn’t prevented The Brooklyn Paper from picking up the Daily News’ sloppy seconds with its story, “Foot(path) solider! City brings in traffic cops to calm tensions on the Brooklyn Bridge.”  The headline is [intentionally?] misleading, as the article itself says that the “watchdogs don’t hand out tickets or chase down offenders. All they do is upbraid people to stay in their respective lanes.”

The story tells the uniformed that “clashes between cyclists and skyscraper-gawking tourists are frequent” and that ten weeks after safety monitors were stationed on the bridges, “both sides still aren’t playing nice.”  Words like “disarray” and reports of stroller-pushing moms being “nearly knocked down” pepper the piece like a tabloid-themed Mad Libs.  There’s even an ominous quote from one of the pedestrian safety managers who says that “there haven’t been any accidents…yet.”  The next piece of information that comes is the end date for the “pilot program,” as if we should expect to see an explosion in bike-on-ped conflicts and injuries the minute these noble–and highly paid–traffic cops relinquish their posts.

So, what pictures does The Brookyn Paper use to illustrate the chaotic and “nearly” violent battleground?  Here’s one, with the actual caption:

And there's always plenty of mayhem on the narrow foot- and bike path.

It’s clear that The Brooklyn Paper and editor Gersh Kuntzman are interested in page views, not reporting, and the only way to get them is by stoking conflict.  How else to explain their treatment of the tragic death of a cyclist at the hands of a flatbed truck driver?  Today the paper published “Enough already! Another cyclist killed by driver,” just ten weeks after publishing an editorial with a similar-sounding title.