Based on my scientific research at last weekend’s bike share demonstration at Grand Army Plaza, I can confirm that every single person who took a test ride had an ear-to-ear grin as soon as they started pedaling.
There are more demos coming to Brooklyn next week, but get thee to Bed-Stuy this Saturday for your chance to go for a ride.
Restoration Rocks Music Festival: October 8th, 2011, 12:00 PM–4:00 PM
Party at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration’s annual Restoration Rocks music festival and then take a break to test ride the bikes and provide feedback to our staff. Bikes will be on the south sidewalk on Fulton Street between New York Avenue and Marcy Avenue. In cooperation with Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration.
In addition to a list of upcoming demonstrations, DOT has smartly posted a schedule of bike share presentations to Community Boards through the beginning of November.
Inspired by BicyclesOnly, I’ve started a Flickr set of Brooklyn bike commuters. In less than an hour’s time I snapped 79 pictures of over 90 people starting the day on their bikes. Whether it’s to get to the office, drop the kids off at school, or run a few errands, bikes are a very practical way for people to move.
Three kids, riding on the bike lane from soccer practice, stopping at a crosswalk for a pedestrian and one motions for other riders to do the same. Cue the Whitney Houston song.
As long as the designated pedestrian-only spaces along Prospect Park West remain level with the car lanes and are protected only by flimsy plastic bollards, these areas will be vulnerable to abuse much in the same way a real island at sea level would be flooded over with each small tidal surge.
As you can see, even an eco-conscious Prius owner can value his own convenience over other people’s safety. Only street design protects against people driving blindly through a cloud of smug:
This temporary loading and unloading was the least of the abuses I saw on Saturday. One example began with a driver who double-parked his car and ran over to the greenmarket to do some shopping, ignoring the open spot right behind him. I don’t know what it says that this guy also drove a Prius:
A driver in a grey pick-up pulled up behind the empty Prius and tried to access the parking spot. He couldn’t nose in, so he backed up about three car lengths, pulled alongside the tan gravel of the pedestrian island, and drove across it onto the bike lane:
I have no idea what the driver would have done had the blocked spot been further down. Would he have driven an entire block to access it, or would he have cut through the next pedestrian island and backed up through the bike lane?
Here’s the driver pulling alongside the open spot. Out of frame, a few cyclists had stopped to avoid this guy. By this point, the Prius driver had come back and moved his double-parked car. Note the rumble strips that are meant to warn cyclists to slow down at pedestrian crossings. They’re not as good at telling drivers not to drive on the bike lane:
The driver then backed into the spot. Thank goodness no other driver had pulled up on the correct side and tried to snag it:
The obvious irony here is that the same NBBL members who complain endlessly about the historic and aesthetic desecration of the once-grand boulevard and warn of the potential dangers of an “experimental” two-way bike lane are now largely responsible for preventing historically appropriate design and safety enhancements from being implemented.
This is precisely why this PPW foolishness needs to end. If it doesn’t, the next time a driver decides to do something reckless, he might hit a senator.
Getting a picture of Chuck Schumer riding on the Prospect Park West bike lane is almost the Holy Grail of livable streets activism, and for a while it’s seemed like it would be an impossible quest. The Chuck Schumer who can’t bring himself to comment on his wife’s lawsuit against the popular and successful traffic calming project makes the Chuck Schumer who professes to love cycling through New York feel like a little like this:
Alas, the pictures I snapped this weekend aren’t exactly what a lot of people have been hoping to see, but they’re close. Maybe it was more convenient for the senator to push his bike across the street and down the block to his home. Maybe he knows better than to be seen enjoying the safety benefits a protected bike lane affords, lest it undermine Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes’ already undermined lawsuit. Who knows?
Senator Schumer happened to roll his bike through the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket on Saturday while I was there volunteering with Park Slope Neighbors at a bike share demonstration, snapping pictures of happy people going on test rides. The senator stopped to admire a bright red bike share bike. With an apple in his hand that he had just picked up from one of the market stands and his helmet on his handlebars, he told us that he had just gotten back from a great ride through Queens and asked us about the bike. When my fellow volunteer told him a little about the program Schumer replied, “I can’t wait for it to start here.” (Perhaps he’s used Capital Bikeshare to get around D.C. and became a fan.)
I was of two minds when I saw him walk away. One was that this was the guy whose wife set this never-ending saga in motion, who allegedly used his political connections to ask City Council members what they were going to do about Prospect Park West and other bike lanes, and who could probably make the entire Jim Walden media circus end with a single phone call. Why won’t he just do the right thing?
The other was that Schumer, rolling his bike back home, just seemed so average. With just a pair of khaki shorts, a green windbreaker, and some sneakers, he was the kind of older cyclist who’s aware of New York City riding enough to chain his seat to his frame but who carries a light padlock and chain instead of a Kryptonite. He was no different from any of the real “seniors for safety” I saw with their bikes enjoying an afternoon in Brooklyn.
I imagined that if he wasn”t the senior senator from New York, he’d simply be Chuck, that old guy you’ve seen riding around the neighborhood ever since you could remember, the kind of Park Slope character who chats with strangers in front of Connecticut Muffin or La Bagel Delight. In fact, seeing him like this one could even imagine him joining the vast majority of his community and sticking up for the Prospect Park West Bike lane at a Community Board hearing, if only his wife would let him.
In typical intellectual fashion, it takes Herbert London of the Manhattan Institute this many words…
Most bicyclists in Manhattan are delivery carriers, and most New Yorkers resent the usurpation of road space.
Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, continues to argue that the bike lanes are popular, but the claim doesn’t seem to square with observation. To test my suspicion that these lanes are barely used, I stood at two busy locations— 30th Street and First Avenue and the intersection at Houston and Allen Streets. In the second case, I arrived at 5 PM on a weekday, the beginning of rush hour. For the next half-hour, I didn’t see a single bicycle in use, despite bumper-to-bumper traffic on Houston Street. Similarly, at First Avenue, where both sides of the street have bicycle lanes, I stood near the entrance to New York University Medical Center counting bicycles at 9:30 AM, near the end of the morning rush. In one hour, I counted just two bicycles, only one of which used the bike lane.
…to say what tabloid master Steve Cuozzo can say in far fewer:
Her ever-proliferating bicycle lanes not only look dreadful, they’re hardly used; I’ve counted as few as a dozen riders per half hour, mostly Chinese-food deliverymen, in the lanes on Grand Street, Ninth Avenue and Broadway.
But then again, Cuozzo has a lot of practice with this line:
You don’t need a degree in statistics to grasp what’s obvious to any New Yorker out for a stroll: The DOT’s bike lanes are usually devoid of bikes except for food-delivery personnel. The lanes are the superhighway for General Tso’s chicken, but lonesome highways for everyone else.
Again, here’s Herbert London:
As for the pedestrian plazas, while they’re sometimes crowded with tourists seeking a respite from walking around the city, more often their chairs stand empty, and for good reason. At Broadway and 40th Street, the car fumes are so intense that al fresco dining and even simple conversation are impossible.
Her Times Square “plazas” are even worse — block after block of prison-yard asphalt devoid of meaningful landscaping, furniture or other amenities, crowded mainly with Big Mac-chomping tourists.
Get ready, Brooklyn! You’ll have two chances this weekend to test out bike share and learn more about how it all works. Honestly, getting your hands on a bike share bike is like cradling your first iPhone: you’ll be hooked immediately. Come kick the tires, literally, at these demonstrations.
Saturday, October 1st, 2011, 12:00 AM–4:00 PM
Test bike share out at Grand Army Plaza and test ride the bikes along Prospect Park West. Bikes will be located on the top of Prospect Park West, just around the corner from Grand Army Plaza. In cooperation with Park Slope Civic Council, Park Slope Neighbors, Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, and Councilmember Letitia James.
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011, 12:00 PM–6:00 PM
The Atlantic Antic, a one-mile long street festival with local bands, local food and vendors galore is equipped with bike share for its 37th year. A bike share demo station will be set up at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Nevins Street.
Via Sheepshead Bites, 9/28/11:
It wasn’t a war scene that Barbara saw out of her window. It was an accident that involved six cars, and left three people including a pedestrian hospitalized.
A white Infiniti QX56 was one of the vehicles now plastered against the fence. It was also the culprit in the accident, according to witnesses and emergency responders.
The owner of one of the vehicles damaged, a Mercedes S550, said he was driving southbound in the right lane on Ocean Avenue when he saw the Infiniti speeding north down the striped median, heading for the left turn lane. He estimated the car was doing about 60 miles per hour when the driver swerved into oncoming traffic.
The Infiniti slammed into a maroon Nissan Altima, leaving a chunk of his bumper in the Altima’s windshield and ripping open its side. The Altima nipped the Mercedes, while the Infiniti continued on. It careened into a row of park vehicles, nicking one and tossing the other – a BMW 525i – into the same gate that eventually forced the Infiniti to come to a halt. An Acura parked behind the BMW took a chunk of the momentum out of the impact, crushing its hood.
The driver and passanger of the Altima were hospitalized, as was a pedestrian on the sidewalk.
But it’s nothing new to that intersection, according to Barbara. The corner is an accident hot spot begging for some Department of Transportation relief, she said.
“This is horrible. Every day there’s an accident here,” Barbara said. “Every day. Every other minute.”
Emphasis mine. Here’s Sheepshead Bites from a post the same day:
It’s no secret that City Councilman Lew Fidler is not one to coddle bike lane advocates. The pol has been painted by bicycling enthusiasts as a car-crazed obstructionist hell-bent on keeping his district’s yokels addicted to gasoline. But to locals, he’s a bit of a savior, winning over Community Boards and civic groups in his district by blasting the Department of Transportation’s misguided installation of bike lanes in awkward, unsafe and unwanted areas.
“Whether you’re a biker, or not a biker, whatever your preference, communities know best what their desires and their needs are,” Fidler told Community Board 15 last night, explaining the purpose of the bill. “Every now and then the bureaucrats have to shimmy down from their ivory tower and come out to the community and listen to what we have to say.”
“…we are spending a lot of money building lanes that few people use when we are making really tough choices about cutting education and social-benefit programs that give access to food, health care, and job training.” – Gibson Dunn Attorney Jim Walden.
I thought I’d update this post with a quote from this recently published article by Ben Adler at The Nation:
It’s certainly true that many of the bikers pedaling around the hipper city precincts appear to be of the bourgeois-bohemian persuasion. But take a look across the country and bicyclists are a diverse lot, including immigrants who lack the documentation to get a driver’s license and people who are too poor to own a car. These are disproportionately minorities. According to a 2006 report by the Brookings Institution and the University of California, Berkeley, 19 percent of blacks live in households without a car, compared with 13.7 percent of Hispanics and 4.6 percent of whites.
Adler writes that “Bike lanes are not inherently liberal or conservative; they are just good, pragmatic governance.”
Brooklyn Spoke 