Boogie men? (Bicycling magazine)

This time last year, The Observer looked at the bicycle mania seizing the city, which seemed to be the last great culture war of a transformed, civilized, infantilized New York. Even Woody Allen hates them.

Perhaps we gave the cyclists too much credit, as none other than Bicycling magazine is pointing the finger squarely at the two-wheeled set for many of the on-street whoas engulfing the city.

When cyclists are few and the roads obviously hostile and dangerous to us, it seems to me that people are more tolerant of our rule-bending and breaking. We are, depending on the region, either so rare as to not register as anything more than an insignficant annoyance, or else just one small part of a generally disobliging experience—like bad weather, or construction, fumes, and noise. But in places such as New York City, where we now have facilities paid for by taxpayer dollars and there are more of us about, our transgressions become more visible—and less forgivable.

Why should it be so unusual for a cyclist to stop at a red signal that he is thanked for it?

How strange indeed? To join the conversation, head over to the New Amsterdam Bike Festival, taking place this weekend. At 3 p.m. tomorrow, Matt Seaton, the author of the Bicycling article will be hosting a panel to discuss the issues surrounding bike lanes in the city and how we all—on two feet, two wheels, or four—might get along a little better.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Make way! (Streetsblog)

As if there were any question that the bikelash would continue for another year, it is only the second day of the year and the stories have already begun popping up. The Brooklyn Paper called the Prospect Park West bike lane fight one of its stories of the year, and now it looks like brownstone dwellers are not the only NIMBYs wary of new bike lanes.

According to Crain's, businesses along Greenpoint Avenue are opposing the extension of the boulevard's bike lane over the Greenpoint Avenue bridge and into Queens. Cyclists celebrate it as an important safety improvement on a popular bike route, one that needs extra protection given the prevalence of heavy truck traffic on the strips.

But the potential loss of some 50 parking spaces has local businesses worried about their health.

“The community board wants safety first but also wants to balance businesses' needs,” said [community board transit chair Karen] Nieves.

As some businesses see it at this point, that may not be possible. Andy Tsai, assistant branch manager at Scrap King, a scrap-metal yard located near the entrance of the bridge in Brooklyn, fears trucks won't be able to get into his warehouse.

“If they can't come in, sometimes they go to a competitor,” he said.

This is not the first time Greenpoint has seen such a fight. The DOT wants to add a bike lane to West Street, as part of the waterfront greenway, but industrial businesses their also fear for their future. It is an increasingly serious problem as residential encroachment grows in these former factory wastelands.

Indeed, the north Greenpoint waterfront is already scheduled for massive redevelopment. The bike lanes are only the first chink in the armor.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Don't stop us now, we're having such a good time, we're having a ball.

For the past year or so, The Observer, along with the rest of the press corps, has been chronicling the city's, and the press corps', reaction to our burgeoning bicycle culture. The Post, obviously, has been highly critical, to say the least, if not downright damnatory. The News has, understandably, followed suit. Even The Times has been playing against type, turning its back on its pinko-brownstone readership to criticize everything from a--gasp--European-style bike share program to streets czarina JSK (rhymes with DSK!).

We just pointed fingers and laughed.

With all this skepticism about what is basically a child's toy, never did we expect to read the most clear-eyed and concise defense of biking yet in the (ever-so-much-so-these-days) conservative Wall Street Journal. Granted the praise comes from a wry sports columnist, but the fact remains: Jason Gay declares the Bike Wars over, and he may just be right.

Bikes are New York fringe? Email your friends. Ask how many of them own bikes. Then ask how many of them own cars. If more of them say they own cars, look out the window. You live in Connecticut.

[...]

The revival of urban cycling in this country follows a fairly predictable pattern: nervousness and ridicule, followed by the realization that the truth never matches the fear-mongering. The supposed choice between bikes and everyone else is a bogus choice. More bikes in a city doesn't merely benefit riders; it reduces congestion, saves money, improves quality of life, elevates the experience. No one returns from a city and says, "Oh, it was great—except for all the biking."

Whether the bicycle backlash is truly over remains to be seen. Yesterday, arguments in the lawsuit against the Prospect Park West bike lane were postponed yet again until July 20. Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes, the anti-lane group backed by Iris Weinshal, the former DOT commish and Chuck Schumer's wife, as well as officials at Brooklyn College, the botanic garden and a former deputy mayor, want time for depositions and discovery. As Streetsblog notes, this is a rare administrative challenge the group is undertaking, but if it succeeds, it "could turn into another round of media spectacle for the case."

We might be in for a long, hot summer after all.

Well, maybe. As the already crowded streets get more crowded, things can go wrong. Deliveries are missed, parking is harder to find, babies get left in bike lanes, joggers get impaled. (Life in New York is so hard!)

Naturally, a backlash is underway. Not in Queens or Staten Island, though, but the beating heart of boho New York. Both the East Village and Park Slope are home to relatively new bike lanes -- one on First and Second avenues, the other along Prospect Park West. Apparently, some locals are not happy about the interference the new lanes are causing to their usual routine -- like double parking and standing in the middle of the street while waiting to cross it -- and so protests have been planned! As have counter-protests! Things could get ugly.

We've been here before. Last year, Councilman Alan Gerson (an elected official, for gosh sakes) led a protest of the then-new Grand Street bike lane. Which is still very much there 14 months later. Then again, a bunch of politically connected Chasidim got a lane erased in South Brooklyn, supposedly in exchange for voting for the mayor. According to an online poll from Crain's, people are overwhelmingly in favor of bike lanes. Then again, that's not the most scientific proof. For all anybody knows, those voting for bike lanes could just be a bunch of madmen.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

The Times described upper Broadway as “a regular race track” for speeding cyclists, one of them, operating without bell or whistle, killed 7-year-old Katie McGlynn just as she was exiting a streetcar at Broadway and 67th. “They make no noise and go by you with a rush,” said Police Capt. Elbert Smith. “You shout at them to slow down, but they are off before you know it.” But the fashion for bicycles soon waned.

No sooner did Michael Kimmelman declare the city safe for bikes than his colleague Christopher Gray, the Strestscapist, has besmirched them again.

So what does this have to do with the New York streetscape? The retreat to what is left of the sidewalks changes the very essence of the common public realm, just as certainly as if, say, tourists had to stay within the arcades surrounding St. Mark’s Square in Venice, or look out on Red Square from the porch on St. Basil’s. New York’s gridiron allows precious few vistas or plazas, but a citizen could at one time have viewed each block as an entirety, with walls and a floor. Now everyone must hug the baseboards.

The thing is, by most accounts, the bike lanes have decreased, not increased, the number of people using sidewalks because streets are now safer for cycling. One study found that lanes reduced on-sidewalk biking five-fold.

And Mr. Gray contends that "as the domain of the pedestrian—the everyman of the city—is gradually curtailed, so too is the sense of the city as a democracy of public space, open to all." But as Streetsblog-founder Aaron Naparstek points out, this is not true, either. Not only has the current regime at DOT decreased the number of bikers on sidewalks, they have also increased the space on the streets for perambulating, as Mr. Gray indeed celebrates. Whoa be to the horse and buggy.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Not so fast. (Getty)

While it seemed like the bicycle backlash of a year ago had finally cooled off, and those larcenous lanes were here to say—won't someone think of the motorists!—the cold war is back this winter. The Columbus Avenue bike lane expansion was rebuffed by the local community board, bike share has been delayed a few extra month, Steve Cuozzo thinks bikes are a cancer on the city (O.K., so what else is new?), and now opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane have finally won a court case.

After complaints over the lane were ignored in court in the spring, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes appealed the results to a higher court, which today ruled that the lower court had to reconsider the case on technical grounds. The Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that judge Burt Bunyon erred in dismissing the case as lacking merit, and now a hearing must be held over the lane (you can read the one-page decision here).

The politically connected Neighbors group, which counts Iris Weinshal, Chuck Schumer's wife and the former DOT commissioner, and Borough President Marty Markowitz among its backers, argued that the lane was a trial until last year, and thus there was time for the group to file a challenge to the lane. Judge Bunyon, however, found that the statute of limitations for the suit had lapsed. The appellate court found that time was not up for a legal challenge, but neither did the judges rule that the lane was wrong, simply that hearings as to its appropriateness had to be heard.

Indeed, the city's Department of Transportation is holding today's decision up as much as a victory for itself. "We’'re confident that the Prospect Park West bike lane is here to stay," spokesman Seth Solomonow said in an email. "We'’re very pleased that three of the four causes of action were dismissed by the Appellate Court, which also returned to the trial court one claim for a limited finding on a technical issue. We are fully confident that the trial court will decide that there is absolutely no merit to what is left of this case."

Opponents of the lane have been calling for legal discovering all along, insisting the city was hiding something—without any proof, but the suggest that something was being hidden creates an implication that is hard to deny. Now, they may get their day in court, but it still does not ensure a victory.

Still, the group remains undeterred.

“We are gratified by the Court’s decision, and we look forward to finally forcing the truth from the Department of Transportation,” Jim Walden, the Neighbors' attorney, said in a statement. “As we have maintained all along, DOT broke the rules, fudged the data, and orchestrated actual harassment against people who disagreed with its tactics. It is just shameful."

Or delightful, if you're a cyclist. "In the meantime, local residents will continue to enjoy the safety that this community-requested and supported lane has provided every day for the last two and a half years," Mr. Solomonow said.

Repeatedly, the lane has been overwhelmingly supported in local surveys and community board votes.

Rumble strips? More like grumble strips? (Brooklyn Paper)

Hasn't the Department of Transportation had enough headaches on Prospect Park West?

The new bike lane was at the center of the bicycle backlash over the past year, even leading to a lawsuit against the city (an appeal was recently filed after the city saw the case soundly dismissed). Obviously, the Department of Transportation is attempting to tweak the plan and make it less controversial, but really, it just seems like the new proposals, for pedestrian islands with relocated walk signals, is picking at a fresh scab, as The Brooklyn Paper makes clear:

“Why do it?” said James Bernard, a longtime bike lane opponent and board member. “We’re supposed to be preserving the street’s character — and we’ve already been the guinea pig enough.”

And lane supporters joined Bernard, though for a different reason: The bike lane has been so successful in reducing accidents, that making changes to the “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs is “unnecessary.”

The board — which proposed the controversial bike lane as a traffic-calming measure in 2008 — did ask the Department of Transportation for some minor tweeks such as rumble strips to alert cyclists to slow down, a Ninth Street drop off area reconfiguration, more light signals along with raised pedestrian islands.

Just look at the big plans for Times Square, plus all those filled potholes. Maybe Janette Sadik-Khan is addicted to shovels in the ground.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

We're waiting.

Can we just install bike share already?Maybe it's just us, but The Observer already can't wait for the city's 10,000-strong bike share system to get here. Just consider our experience the past two days, since the system was unveiled.

The first was heading back to the office, on 44th Street and 8th Avenue, from the announcement at Madison Square. We headed underground, waited a good seven minutes for the R-train to come, headed up to Times Square, then had to fight through the midday crowds to get to The New York Observer Building. (Never heard of it? It's the one with Birdland in the ground floor, across the street from Shake Shack.)

Total trip time? About 22 minutes. According to Google, we could have biked that distances in 13 minutes, but we know, even on one of those lumbering bike share bikes, we probably could have done it in half that time—or about as long as we were waiting for the subway alone. The trial bike we took for a spin down to 8th Avenue and back was only a four minute trip. And which is more unpleasant, sweating on a bike or in a sweltering subway station?

Then, yesterday, The Observer was running late to the Jane's Carousel opening in Brooklyn Bridge Park. We thought it was happening in a different part of Dumbo, to boot, so we took the F-train instead of the A-train (yeah, yeah, you'd think we just moved here, it is embarrassing). Ten minutes of running around could have been cut down to three or four—assuming we could comfortably navigate the cobblestones.

Then, we hopped back on the A-train to meet up with the wife in Chelsea for the David Bryne opening at Pace that our friend put together. It took seven minutes to walk down 25th Street, something we could have biked in two, which is maybe a little extreme. But hell, we're a neurotic bunch, and is there really any other way to pull up to a David Bryne show than on a bike?

City officials and transportation advocates, in discussing the new bike share program, talked widely about how it is not so much a new piece of infrastructure as "an extra layer to our ferry, subway, bus and taxi network" as DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said Wednesday. And our experience seems to prove this. Running late for a meeting or a date? Just can't wait to get where you're going? The sidewalks are especially crowded? Grab a bike, and off you go.

This makes the new East River ferry service make a lot more sense, for example, and all that new development on the Far West Side. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than building a new subway, or even a bus line. In fact, it's free.

Despite the bicycle backlash of the past year, The Observer is going to go out on a limb and say the bike sharing program will be even more popular than the gearheads imagine. If only we were patient enough to wait for the system to be complete next summer.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

It's big in D.C. In New York, it will be big. (Getty)

The city has been in the thrall of a bicycle backlash for the past year, after the city’s Department of Transportation ran lanes through the East Village, Upper West Side and, most controversially, along Prospect Park West, which led to a lawsuit filed by neighbors living on the thoroughfare.

Things seem to be finally calming down—the lane lawsuit was defeated, recent polls have put bike lane support north of 60 percent—but how will the city react when the Department of Transportation and its love-her-or-hate-her Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan roll out a massive bike sharing program across Manhattan and Brooklyn next summer?

Comprising roughly 600 stations with 10,000 bikes, the scheme will, according to two people briefed on the plans, stretch from the Upper East and Upper West sides down to the tip of Manhattan and over the bridges into Brownstone Brooklyn, reaching as far as Greenpoint and Crown Heights. “The whole point is it needs to be dense,” a city official told The Observer. “It needs to serve a lot of different trips in order to be viable.”

The city has selected Alta Bike Share of Portland, Ore., to install and manage the system in a public-private partnership. The firm launched the popular Capital Bike Share in Washington, D.C. last year, which was expanded again this year, and this summer it opened the New Balance Hubway in Boston. With 110 and 61 stations respectively, both are considerably smaller than New York’s planned roll-out. Capital Bike Share is currently the largest such program in the country.

The New York system is expected to be similar in that 24-hour, multi-day or annual subscriptions will be available, and as with Boston or London, where Barclays is the partner, Alta will be seeking a sponsor to help bring in revenue, with any profits to be shared with the city. As with its two U.S. systems, the first 30 minutes are expected to be free, with nominal fees for each 30 minutes after.

An annual membership should cost less than the price of a monthly MetroCard, according to the official.

A call to Alta’s offices in Portland confirmed that the firm was the winner and said that an announcement would be made today, though the woman who answered the phone said that was all she knew. A DOT spokesman declined to comment.

Gene Russianoff, spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign, said he did not know anything about the specifics of the city's bike sharing program but whatever the program, would be a boon for the city's mass transit system. "Not to sound to policy wonky, but it extends the reach of the subways and buses because these things tend to be placed near the stops," Mr. Russianoff said. "What might have been a schlep isn't so much anymore."

Concerns have been swirling in the city about a bike share program, particularly after The Times published a story in June pointing out that Montreal’s Bixi system, in which Alta is a partner, had been losing money and had to be bailed out by the city for more than $100 million.

The bigger issue will be deciding where to put all those stations. “DOT and Janette Sadik-Khan’s problem is they say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, take it or leave it,’" said Sean Sweeney of the Soho Alliance, a frequent DOT critic. "Instead, it should be, ‘Here’s 20 racks, where would you like them?’” He expressed concern about whether the stations would be located on too-narrow sidewalks or in valuable parking spaces or other inopportune locations.

Still, he said it would be nice if done right. "I walk a lot, I'll walk from 59th Street downtown," Mr. Sweeney said. "Let's say I don't want to walk or take the subway, then a bike sounds nice. But it's still a matter of giving over public space to a private company, so we have to be careful." He added that no stations should be place in Soho.

The department has long argued that it goes out of its way to work with the community on project siting, but just last week it went a step further and agreed to coordinating with the City Council before placing any of the bike stations. "There are plenty of wide sidewalks or plazas, little underutilized corners of the streets where these would be perfect," the city official said. “It’s like a bus station, though. You can’t tell us you don’t want them anywhere in your district.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Beep, Beep. (Village Voice)

The four outer-boroughs suffer the worst commutes in the country, according to the 2010 Census. No wonder drivers get so worked up about Transportation Czarina Janette Sadik-Khan. Even if the city's D.O.T. is improving the roads for drivers, any efforts even perceived to be undermining cars, like bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, is seen as a threat, regardless of whether or not it improves transportation not only for drivers but bus riders, bicyclists and pedestrians, too.

Besides, whether or not Ms. Sadik-Khan can take all, or even any, of the credit (as some readers have argued to us, these programs have been in the works for years—still, all the experts we talked to applauded), a new report by IBM shows that New York's commutes are better than many in the world and are getting better.According to the Commuter Pain Index, New York ranks 14 out of 20, with a fairly happy rating of 28, better than L.A. (34), Paris (31) and Madrid (28), who are immediately ahead in the rankings, while Toronto (27), Stockholm (26), Chicago (25), London (23) and Montreal (23) feel less pain. (Don't forget Stockholm and London have congestion pricing schemes, while Chicago has a robust commuter rail system.) The three most painful cities are Mexico City (108), Shenzen (95) and Beijing (95).

Feel the pain! (IBM)

What is interesting is, that while the city, or at least the press, has been consumed with the bicycle backlash over the past year, New Yorkers polled for the the pain index said their commutes have actually improved over the past year. IBM found that 24 percent of respondents thought traffic had improved, compared to last year, when only 12 percent thought it had. That may not be a rousing endorsement, especially when 35 percent of respondents found traffic made them angrier, compared to 14 percent last year, and a whopping 45 percent said traffic increased their stress levels, compared to 13 percent last year.

Ouch.

What makes New York fairly fortunate is our density: 60 percent have commutes under 30 minutes, and we top the list of micro-commuters at 23 percent.

Ultimately, this is a not a question of driving but one of transportation on the whole. IBM finds that there is too little room or money to simply build more streets. The best options are smart street design—remember, bike lanes and pedestrian plazas cost but 1 percent of the DOT's total budget—and technology.

And many New Yorkers seem to get that. Just look at the rising support for bike lanes. And New Yorkers are voting with their feet: IBM found that 59 percent of metro area drivers survey are driving to work, opting instead for mass transit, compared to 90 percent of drivers last year.

As Ms. Sadik-Khan told us, “We need to define a new approach. It can’t be just one perspective from behind the windshield. We need to innovate and find new solutions because we can’t pour any more concrete, we’ve run out of room.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC