Brooklyn Spoke

The Daily News continues its coverage of the great bicycling crisis of 2011 with an article by Adam Lisberg in yesterday’s paper.  It’s titled “In the city’s bike wars, the downside of cycling isn’t counted as rigorously as the upside,” although there may have been an earlier or different title for the story, as the URL ending indicates:

getting_city_to_rein_in_rogue_bikers_is__a_vicious_cycle_for_311_callers

Maybe it was changed because it would reveal just how much better the Post is at this whole bike wars thing than the Daily News.  You can’t out-fox a fox (or Fox) and I sometimes wonder why the Daily News hasn’t tried to position itself as the anti-Post instead of competing for the same dwindling audience.

Lisberg’s article centers on 311 and the fact that right now there is no effective way for the system to log complaints against dangerous riders.  There are efforts underfoot to reform how 311 tracks this info, but you won’t learn very much about if you read the Daily News.

While Lisberg may dismiss my criticism as merely coming from a cranky bicycling advocate, he’s missing the point.  My issue is not with his bike reporting but simply with his reporting.  In fact, if there’s a way to give bicycling its own category in 311 then I’m all for it.  Unfortunately, Lisberg’s story is not the journalism you deserve if you are trying to figure out the extent of the problem, its context, and how changing 311 might work.

Lisberg’s article begins with the story of Nancy Linday, a Manhattan resident who was so fed up with “out-of-control cyclists” that she decided to do something about it.

…she took careful note of every lawbreaking cyclist she saw near her office.  A day later, she said, she dialed 311, demanded the operator take notes and dictated them for more than an hour.  It got a response: A sergeant from the Midtown North Police Precinct called her within days, gave her his direct line and told her to call him anytime with bike problems.

Linday’s experience with led her to realize that the city doesn’t have an effective way to log bike-related complaints, because 311 currently lumps bicycling complaints into a general category of “bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades and motorized scooters.”  That provides the jumping off point for Lisberg to dive into the problem in more detail.

Or at least it should.  Lisberg boils down Linday’s story to this conclusion: “In other words, in the city’s bike wars, the downside of cycling isn’t counted as rigorously as the upside.”

Well, not exactly.  I’m open to the possibility that cycling’s disadvantages may outweigh its advantages, but it is also possible that some things simply have a much bigger upside than downside, to the point that counting its downside is difficult or not worth it.  Although it makes for nice copy, it’s not a foregone conclusion that because something isn’t counted it’s therefore being ignored by those with the spreadsheets.

Then again, the city does have a way, however imperfect, of counting bicycle complaints.  For the sake of argument, assume that 100% of 311’s recorded complaints about “bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades and motorized scooters” are only about bikes.  How many calls did it log in 2009?

The city’s 311 operators recorded 426 calls last year about chronic problems with bikes, skateboards, Rollerbladers, and motorized scooters.  The upper East Side topped the list with 48; the upper West Side followed with 38.  An additional 198 callers called with hazardous biking-skating-scooting complaints, which were transferred to 911.  City records don’t break them down by location.

That’s 626 total bike-related complaints.  (The article doesn’t mention how many of them were from Nancy Linday’s hour-long 311 call.)  Even assuming that some people called 311 only to hang up out of frustration with the system’s inability to properly log their complaint, 626 hardly seems like a huge number when you consider that 311 fields 50,000 calls per day.  The fact that the upper West Side accounted for 38 of these calls should be its own statistical standard deviation.  Zabar’s probably gets twice as many complaints about the its checkout lines on Sundays.

Even if the point of the article is to show that the category is so broad as to be ineffective, are there not other 311 categories that are similarly broad and ineffective?  How does 311 tally other chronic complaints that don’t fit neatly into one category?  And where do these 626 bike complaints compare to those related to graffiti, overgrown branches, or consumer complaints?  There’s no context to the data.

Even if the city could track bike-related 311 calls more reliably, it’s hardly the panacea some may be looking for.  It’s not that hard to report reckless driving to 311, but how many people spend 10 minutes–or an hour–on the phone every time they are almost run over by a car?  As a commenter on Gothamist’s post about the story noted, “The city needs to start a new system, maybe 211, for people who feel the need to report things that almost happened.”

Serious accidents involving injury, death or even property damage already have their own data collection method: 911 and NYPD incident reports.  Of course, there are probably many accidents of all kinds that go unreported, but the city can’t be responsible for calls they don’t receive and it can’t be expected to respond to hearsay, although I do hear it’s the perfect basis for a lawsuit.

It’s entirely possible that, NYPD crackdown aside, a bicycle-friendly administration has unleashed an unprecedented wave of rogue cyclists upon a vulnerable population and that city residents are only just now realizing the deficiencies in 311’s reporting methods.  Cycling may have grown so much in the past few years that it caught the Department of Information Technology by surprise.

If that’s true, then Lisberg leaves some very important questions unanswered: How do the 626 bike-related complaints compare to previous years?  Has there been a sudden uptick that’s risen with the addition of bike lanes?  And if changing 311 is a good solution, how much will it cost to retrofit the system so that the bicycle category stands on its own?  Is it as as simple as rewriting a few lines of code and reprinting a page of the 311 handbook or will it be a huge, laborious undertaking?

My issue with Lisberg’s article is not that it’s negative or that he quotes people with whom I disagree.  My problem is that if I was a totally uninformed Daily News reader, this story would not help me make sense of the problem and its potential solutions.  Journalism’s job is to not only report the news, but to put the news in context for readers.  That’s why I think Lisberg’s article fails.

Lisberg’s excuse is that he doesn’t have “endless space like Streetsblog does.”  Two points for the clever dig, but it’s not exactly as his story had to be written exactly the way it was written in the space his editors provided.  Then again, given how many stories and editorials his paper has devoted to rogue cyclists this year alone, it seems as if the Daily News actually does have plenty of space to devote to biking.

This has been posted on Streetsblog, but should be seen by everyone everywhere.  It’s a very hard video to watch, but it’s one of the most effective arguments for speed and red light cameras I can imagine.  It’s telling that most of the angry talking heads in this video probably don’t object to the kinds of cameras that are used to manage traffic.  I visited the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s control room in Boston and can tell you that they can easily track your every move through the Big Dig tunnels in order to effective manage traffic and respond to accidents.  It would make Big Brother proud.  But use cameras to capture people doing something illegal and people go nuts.

I live on 4th Avenue and can’t possibly count the number of times I see cars run lights long after they’ve turned red or even stop at a red only to ignore it and keep going.  The rule I have for myself, especially when I’m walking with my daughter, is to never cross 4th Avenue until I’ve actually seen the cars stop and have a sense that they’ve seen me about to cross.  If something could be done to reign in the rampant speeding and red light running on 4th Avenue, I’m all for it.  This video makes the case with great power.

On my walk home from daycare pickup yesterday evening, two members of the Auxiliary Police were handing out these fliers on the corner of 5th Avenue and 5th Street.  (I’ll upload an image later.)

Attention Parks [sic] Slope Community

Please be advised that we had a pedestrian accident on

Jan 5th at 5 Ave & 5th St at 3:20 PM.

Please exercise caution at this intersection.  Remember to Cross

with signal and not in between cars.

I asked one of the officers what happened and he said that a pedestrian had been struck by a car.  He didn’t know much more than that, or even if it involved a student from Middle School 51 across the avenue.  My fear is that because it happened at 3:20 PM, it did.  If you received one of these fliers or have more information, please let me know.

I refrained from saying anything other than thanks to the officers, since it’s not their call on who to flier or what message to send out, but this flier is pretty indicative of the blame-the-victim approach to traffic safety that many of us have experienced from the NYPD.  It’s telling that one of the only times I’ve seen cops on foot this winter was on an occasion when they were telling pedestrians to be more careful around cars.

On the one hand, you can’t exactly blame a driver if a kid appears out of nowhere from between two parked cars.  Even if you’re doing nothing wrong, bad things happen.

On the other hand, kids are more or less stupid when it comes to traffic safety, so I’d hope the 78th Precinct would recognize this and do more to keep them safe.  An environment where hundreds of pre-teens and teenagers pour onto the sidewalks and into streets where cars speed by is a recipe for disaster.  Instead of passing out fliers, the 78th could hand out tickets to all the illegally double-parked drivers.  It would take the same amount of effort, actually do something to make the street safer, and generate revenue in the process.

There’s so much more the 78th Precinct could have done.  It could have parked one or two cruisers on the street or posted signs telling drivers to slow down and “exercise caution at this intersection.”  They could have handed out fliers to drivers stopped red lights.  They could ticket car service drivers for making illegal u-turns.  In general, they could devote more resources to ticketing reckless drivers and less to the tiny threat posed by bikes. Instead, the 78th Precinct focused solely on pedestrian behavior, using a herding cats strategy of getting hormonal middle high schoolers to be more rational about their safety.

Good luck with that.

My morning walk to the train from Daniel Sieradski on Vimeo.

Here’s a tour of 4th Avenue that’ more or less covers the same route I take to get to the subway station entrance at Pacific Street.  As you can see in the (shaky) video, it’s not just the snow that’s the problem. There’s an abandoned motorcycle at the corner of Pacific and 4th Avenue that’s swirling with garbage.

This tiny corner is home to an entrance to one of the city’s busiest subway stations and the starting point for the growing number of people who call this area of Boerum Hill, Gowanus, and Park Slope home.  At prime rush hours, it’s hard to find space on the sidewalk to wait to go down into the station.  Crossing the street from any direction means competing with fast-moving 4th Avenue traffic.  Add mounds of trash to the sidewalks and there’s even less room for pedestrians.

As City Council member Stephen Levin gets his Traffic Task Force going, I hope he targets areas like this, a prime candidate for raised crosswalks, neck downs, and other pedestrian friendly improvements.  He could also get someone out there with a very large broom.