By Kit Dillon 10/10/12 2:30pm

Street Fighters Too

What's good for bicyclists is good for business? (Kristine Paulus, flickr)

Bilking the Bikers: East Village Gets Cyclist-Centric Business District

The city has a love-hate relationship with its cyclists, but at least a few savvy Village business owners have embraced the city’s two-wheeled denizens for fun and profit.

Last month, Transportation Alternatives, the pro-transit advocacy group, in collaboration with Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, opened the city’s first Bike Friendly Business District on the Lower East Side. The district, a network of some 150 businesses and institutions now dedicated to better bike infrastructure, was proposed as way to increase customer traffic to local businesses. It’s an idea that has, according to the latest study, worked remarkably well. Read More

By Kim Velsey 6/11/12 9:40am

THE BIKESHARE COMETH!

Bike share? No thank you. South Williamsburg couldn't possibly accept.

Keep Your Bikes To Yourselves! South Williamsburg Shuns Bike Share

When the blue Citibank Citi Bikes—thank you again impossibly selfless, unfailingly generous corporate overlords!—start rolling out of their stations, there is one neighborhood that will not be sharing.

South Williamsburg is noticeably lacking in any of the city’s new bike-share stations, The Wall Street Journal noticed. And this time the Hasidic community didn’t even have to battle against naked hipsters to get their way!

There were so many communities clamoring to host the cruisers, ugly Citibank logos be damned, that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community simply stayed mum and let the sought-after stations go where they were wanted, the city transportation commissioner explains. And that wasn’t South Williamsburg. Read More