Don't forget to tip your driver and look out for bikes. (NYC DOT)

(NYC DOT)

Last week the city's Department of Transportation (in partnership with the fed's Department of Transportation) unveiled new LOOK! crosswalk decals and bus banners to remind pedestrians and drivers to pay attention to each other while making their way across the busy cityscape.

Now the department, along with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has unveiled new stickers that will adorn the doors and windows of the city's 13,000 cabs. They implore occupants to "LOOK! for cyclists." These are accompanied by a new 30-second spot in everybody's favorite ad-viewing venue, Taxi T.V.

“This safety campaign takes the message to New Yorkers and visitors that you need to take a second and take a look around whenever you get out of a car,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said in a release. “The best protection that bike riders and pedestrians have is our attention, and there is one thing everyone can do—look.”

The idea is to make cab riders, especially those who might not be from town, more aware of their surroundings. The city has recorded seven deaths because of dooring incidents over the past five years.

Like all good taxi ads, TLC commissioner David Tassky said these new spots will really get people's attention: "We believe the stickers and video will really resonate with riders and inspire them to pause for that critical second before they open the door and exit the taxi. It’s that moment of pause that could make all the difference in the world to both a bicyclist and the taxi passenger alike.”

“We are issuing a call to expand the human capacity of the bridge,” Councilman Brad Lander of Park Slope declared at the Manhattan entrance to the 129-year-old span yesterday. An average of 4,000 pedestrians and 3,100 bicyclists cross the Brooklyn Bridge every day, according to the Department of Transportation. A good many of them have close encounters of the two-wheeled kind.

Along with a few colleagues in the council, Mr. Lander wants the city to consider expanding the narrow boardwalk atop the beige bridge to accommodate more passengers. The plan calls for tripling the crossing’s width, to the current size at the piers. This would create twice as much room for pedestrians as well as a dedicate lane for bikes.

Currently, the two mix in the narrow strip, with many near misses as bikes swerve around slow walkers and photographers unwittingly back into oncoming traffic for that perfect shot of the new Frank Gehry building.

“Everyone knows that the Brooklyn Bridge is such a popular tourist destination, we want to make sure the bridge is safe” Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents Lower Manhattan, said. “To maintain a healthy New York, it’s important to expand the walkway.” Because nothing is worse for your health than a big fat tire print.

The council members admit they have yet to explore the feasibility of the project, though they acknowledge the engineering challenges and cost could be considerable. At the same time, a new walkway was added to the Williamsburg Bridge when it was rehabilitated by the Bloomberg administration, so the pols are hopeful the same could be done here. It could even become a matter of debate during the upcoming mayoral elections.

“We’re not engineers,” Mr. Lander admitted.

But when they represent some of the most bike-crazed constituencies in the city, something must be done. “The Brooklyn Bridge belongs to all New  Yorkers,” North Brooklyn Councilman Steve Levin said. “It was an amazing engineering feat in its age, but in 2012 it’s time to update it a bit.”

Hide yo' bikes, hide yo' wives (Getty Images)

Bike parts being stolen in Brooklyn can mean only one thing: It's officially summer. (It doesn't matter how hot it is outside, if you can keep your bike safe for over three days in Bushwick, it's still Spring.) Now go down to the police precinct and file that police report that won't do you any good.

Yesterday, Natalie O’Neill of The Brooklyn Paper wrote a blog post about the rash of bicycle wheels stolen in Park Slope over the past week. Five of those bikes were left with a note attached, which was photocopied a phone number and a message: "Who ever owns the bike and 2 stolen wheels, I caught the guy + have the two stolen bike wheels."

Ms. O'Neill floated the theory that the person who left the note was part of an elaborate bike wheel-heisting crew, who were looking to ransom the cycle parts back to their owners.
Except that the man who answered the number listed on the sheet says that he only left one note.

The Observer called the number listed on Brooklyn Paper's photo and was connected to an older gentleman who refused to identify himself. He claimed to be retired and on Social Security and told us to call back at 9 p.m. because he "couldn't afford to pay any more for these prank phone calls."

When we asked if he knew about the notes, and for his name, the man started yelling. "How dare you! Do you know how many people called yesterday because of that young woman's blog! Just because I left one note? I got the bike wheels, I caught the guy trying to steal them, and I don't want to be hassled."

The Observer agreed to call back the unidentified man after 9 P.M., when hopefully his free minutes will allow him to be more generous in his explanation of how his note got photo-coppied and used in identical bike thefts.

With $14 million in funding, secured by Congresswoman Nydia M. Velazquez, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and the Regional Plan Association, the borough will finally see the completion of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a 14-mile foot and bike path running from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge. Some segments of the greenway already exist on some streets and riverside parks, but these funds will help stitch the entire thing together.

The greenway's implementation plan, which was finalized today by the city's Department of Transportation, details plans of a finalized route, implementation framework and funding options for 23 capital projects to connect the neighborhoods. Congresswoman Velazquez represents many of these waterfront communities, hence her support for the project.

The document arrives after a three-year planning stint with the first phase finally coming to fruition. If all goes well, it is projected to enhance access to the borough’s waterfront as well as to improve safety and boost the area’s social allure.

“This plan was designed by Brooklynites for Brooklynites, and it charts a course for a reimagined waterfront stretching from Newtown Creek to Owls Head Park,” DOT Commish Janette Sadik-Khan said in a release. “This document marks both the end of the planning stage and the start of a new era, as these dynamic neighborhoods embrace the waterfront as New York’s sixth borough.”

For a visual, imagine a repaved and freshly painted Flushing avenue, accompanied by a foot and bike path extending the length of the road.

Unfortunately the folks in Manhattan will still have it a bit nicer. Because long stretches of the Brooklyn waterfront remain intermittently industrial, much of the greewnway will run near but not on the water, as it does along the East River in Manhattan and in Hudson River Park.

Still, this lets Brooklynites continue to nurse their superiority/inferiority complex while clinging to what little grittiness in the borough remains.

Are the bikers really the problem? (AFP/Getty)

When people tend to complain about bikes, it is in terms of law-breaking dare devils. Whether or not this is accurate, at the very least, the pedestrians who so often feel threatened by these two-wheeled madcaps need not look over their shoulders fearing for their lives.

Well, that might still be a good idea, especially with an 18-wheeler barreling down behind the bike, but the odds that a cyclist might actually kill, or even maim you are incredibly slim, according to new city data.

Last year, the City Council passed Local Law 13, requiring the Police Department to track all bicycle accidents. Some critics of the legislation argued this was simply a tactic to demonize cyclists, a not uncommon practice at the Council. One of the advocates of the law was Nancy Guskin, whose husband was struck and killed by a delivery cyclist headed the wrong way down  Midtown street. "The main problem is that there aren't accurate statistics now, so we don't know" if the street-level policies are work, she told Gothamist two years ago.

But now that the data is out, it is clear how unmenacing cyclists actually are. Streetsblog crunched the numbers:

According to reports collected by NYPD and compiled online by NYC DOT [PDF], police responded to 27 bike-ped collisions citywide in the last three months of 2011, resulting in 26 injuries.

Over the same timeframe, 754 car-bike collisions injured 755 cyclists and killed three. Ten motor vehicle occupants were injured in those crashes.

[...]

Based on the most recent data available from the state DMV [PDF], more than 2,600 New York pedestrians are injured by motorists in a typical three-month period, and 50 are killed. In addition, about 15,000 motor vehicle occupants are injured in traffic crashes. (Raw numbers compiled by NYPD [PDF] show somewhat higher rates in April 2012.)

We’ll have to get a full year’s worth of bike data to make an apple-to-apples comparison. But with these preliminary numbers, looking just at the risk to pedestrians, it seems motorists are causing about a hundred times more injuries than cyclists. These raw numbers don’t account for the severity of injuries, which is almost certainly a great deal worse for crashes involving multi-ton vehicles capable of high speeds than for crashes involving lighter and slower bikes. The lack of pedestrian fatalities caused by cyclists gives some sense of the severity gap between car crashes and bike crashes.

At the same time, 30 percent of commuters drive or ride in vehicles (including taxis), compared to less than 1 percent who bike to work every day, so an apples-to-apples comparison is still far off. If anything, though, more bikes make the streets safer, as traffic fatalities across the board have fallen at the same time ridership has risen, so the more people on the street, the busier it may be, but also the safer. People will indeed remember to look over their shoulders.

She looks jealous to us. (NY Post)

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.

"I think it's really important that the stations meet the needs of the communities," city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told The Journal. "We're not really looking to put them where there isn't a lot of demand."

Have you ever heard of such an easy victory? It's like we can finally, for once and for all, say whose side God is on. Still, not everyone is pleased. The whole point of a transportation system, as bike share aspires to be, is that it serves all neighborhoods, whether their residents want it or not. (That's how a system works, right?)

And even some Hasids want to bike! They just don’t want to be associated with the kind of bicyclists who are “more naked than clothed.”

Baruch Herzfeld, former proprietor of  Traif Bike Gesheft and a member of the Orthodox community told The Journal that he found great demand among local Hasidim for his rental bikes.

"I always heard them say, 'I wish I could ride a bicycle,' and I'm like—'Why don't you ride a bicycle?'" Mr. Herzfeld said.

Not that Hasids are becoming cycling enthusiasts any time soon, especially not the children, if the powers that be can help it. Alas, although the community shows occasional interest in change, they are not its biggest fans. In that, they join other insular enclaves like Brooklyn Heights and Turtle Bay, who have also voiced opposition to hosting bike share stations.

kvelsey@observer.com

No matter how tall the pole is, without a sign or post on top, some ingenious bike thief will come along and do something like this to your poor ride.

Watch your head. (Edward Reed/Mayor's Office)

Is it possible that requiring every New Yorker to wear a helmet while cycling might actually be more dangerous for bicyclists than letting them continue on their merry way—cranium at the mercy of crazed drivers, hapless pedestrians, flying rats and their own personal incompetence?

That is exactly the argument made by every cycling enthusiast from Mayor Bloomberg to Joe Twowheels after Brooklyn City Councilman David Greenfield proposed a bill last week that would mandate cyclists don a Styrofoam dome before hitting the streets. Right now, that applies to children under 14, who also have the right to ride on the sidewalk, and delivery cyclists, who believe it or not, do not.

Mr. Greenfield wants to charge cyclists $25 for their first helmetless offense, $50 for the second and $100 thereafter. He points out that a good bike helmet does not cost much more than that first ticket, so what’s the excuse? “It’s basically common sense,” he said of his bill.

But bike advocates argue that the bill will have the opposite effect, making the city less safe for cyclists because it will depress ridership—after all, most New Yorkers are more worried about suffering helmet head than head trauma.

“There is safety in numbers,” said Michael Murphy, communications director for Transportation Alternatives. He pointed to the fact that as the number of cyclists has quadrupled in recent years in the five boroughs, the number of accidents and deaths has concurrently fallen despite the greater number of bikes. "The more bikers, the more awareness, the better off we all are," Mr. Murphy said.

But, it is those numbers that have Councilman Greenfield worried, especially with the city rolling out 6,000 new bike-share bikes this summer and a total of 10,000 by next year. “We’re talking about thousands of tourists and new bikers,” he said. “New York is a unique city, and it’s one of the most challenging places to bike on the planet. I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure our cyclists are safe. This isn’t Topeka, Kansas.”

Backers of the helmet law have pointed to the fact that the administration once supported such a plan, five years ago, under then-Commissioner Iris Weinshal. They also tend to ignore the fact that she has been leading an anti-bike campaign ever since a protected lane appeared outside her Prospect Park West doorstep.

Still, the timing of this proposal seems to be what has so many bike bigs bothered. If helmets mean fewer riders, that will be doubly the case where bike share is concerned. The entire point of the new Citi Bike program is to encourage hop-on, hop-off convenience. A helmet requirement makes it almost impossible to do that unless one carries a helmet hooked through a belt loop at all times.

“This is a huge canard,” one DOT insider said. “If you want to do something about safety, this is not the problem. No world class bike-sharing city has this law.”

Councilman Greenfield, who said it is not his intention to curb the bike-share program, says no matter, just build a kiosk beside bike stations with helmets inside. “They’re adjustable,” he said. Well, only so much.

And DOT counters that any bike share user gets a coupon for a discounted helmet at local bike shops and can even call 311 for a free helmet, something the department has done for the past five years, handing out thousands in the process. To claim the city is anti-helmet is not exactly correct.

“I think everything is a balance,” Councilman Greenfield said. “But public safety has to come first.” Whether a bike helmet does that, is the question.

For the WWI history buff: Limar's X-Urban Matt Green helmet

For the Englophile: Art's Cyclery's Union Jack Nutcase Helmet

For the patriot: Art Cyclery's Stars and Stripes Nutcase Helmet

For the hipster: Lazer Cityzen's Red Checker Helmet

For those channeling Weekend at Bernie's: Yakkay's Tokyo Blue Technic Helmet

For the fashionista: Sawako Furuno's Limited Edition Leopard Helmet

For the athlete: Bern's Carbon Helmet

Already have a helmet? The blog, CRAFT, has some quirky, DIY tips (think plastic flowers and creepy doll parts) for sprucing up your dome, or why not buy one of Wiggstyle’s colored Mohawks or spikey wigs to, as the website says, “Pimp your helmet?”

realestate@observer.com

Scofflaw? (Bridget Flemming/Downtown from Behind)

City Councilman David Greenfield is introducing a bill today to require every New York City cyclist to wear a bike helmet.

It is an intriguing proposal on a number of levels.

Currently, only children 13 and younger are required to wear a bike helmet. Think of the last time you saw a cyclist cruising by—were they wearing a helmet? Through highly unscientific personal observation, this reporter would say odds are evenly split for and against helmets. Maybe it's a little higher, hopefully, so this is simply a safety measure, and a warranted one, like seat belt laws.

This is to be the attitude of the councilman, who told The Observer, "This is the simplest thing a cyclist can do to protect themselves. To do anything else is frankly irresponsible." He pointed to federal statistics showing that 96 percent of bicycle fatalities involve people not wearing helmets (which may have as much to do with the cyclists attitude and actions as the presence of a helmet, but the numbers still speak volumes.)

Still, the best way not to get killed on your bike in the city is to keep from getting hit by a car. Which begs the question if this is not simply more anti-bike legislation masquerading as pro-bike legislation. Going back to the back-of-the-envelope assumption that half of city cyclists don't wear helmets, dumb if legal as that may be, how many of them might stop riding if it meant the choice between mussed hair and a $25 fine? With thousands of bike share bikes on the way, could this kill the program before it even gets off the ground?

There has been a rising current of such legislation amidst the bike backlash, some good, some bad. The call for bicycle registration has been widely viewed as a way to cut down ridership, while everyone can agree cracking down on bad delivery bikers is good for all New Yorkers—they can make life miserable for walkers, riders and drivers. Even the supposed NYPD crackdown on bikes is good if done right. Harassing riders safely traversing Central Park is one thing, but people going the wrong way down streets or blowing through stoplights not only present a safety risk but also create animosity among the ranks by giving the good cyclists a bad name. (Ditto angry drivers and jaywalkers, of course.)

With the exception of his complaints about the Ocean Parkway bike lane being shoveled while surrounding streets were not—a reasonable complaint, but one that also ignores that different machines for different jobs were used on the job—Councilman Greenfield is generally progressive when it comes to transportation issues, with the possible exception of leading the charge against those Department of Sanitation shame stickers, which proponents argue help enforce parking rules.

"It's basically common sense," the councilman said of his bill.

Perhaps bikers really should start wearing their helmets voluntarily. Maybe they should even be more diligent about following the laws, even when it's not convenient or entirely necessary. Sure, putting a foot down at an empty intersection where the light is nonetheless red might slow you down but it will also win you some respect. Even as a jaywalker next to you decides to cross since things are all clear.

This is what we were thinking when reading Justin Davidson's bracing defense of driving in the latest issue ofNew York magazine. Amazingly, he makes the practice sound appealing, rather than appalling.

Driving in the city is an extreme sport. Arriving from more placid places, you can feel the intensity spike as you home in on it. Lanes become notional, tailgating distances narrow, and you become more attuned to the body language of other cars. If you’re vigilant and blessed with good peripheral vision, you can often predict when another car will swing from the left to dart into a right turn.

Once you get into the lurching, irregular groove of city driving, it has a perverse adrenaline kick. Sharp as a forest beast, you process the crackle of random stimuli at a rate that would make a processor blanch. The other day, in the 30 seconds it took to drive one Manhattan block, I registered a double-parked SUV, a weaving bike messenger, a bus muscling abruptly into my lane, a jogger sprinting across the street as the light changed, an eighteen-wheeler filling the center lane, a massive pothole at my right wheel, and, at the corner, a walker gripping half a dozen dogs eager to bound into oncoming traffic. Somehow, my brain filtered those relevant observations from the streaming data of awnings and mailboxes and jackhammer noises and passersby. If mental exercise can slow the aging process, then driving in New York just might be the fountain of youth.

But for driving to work, so must every other mode of transportation—the more the merrier, and the merrier everyone will be:

Fulminating against drivers makes them feel beleaguered and resentful of changes that improve their lives. From behind the wheel, each new bike lane can look like an incursion into automotive territory, but it’s actually an amenity that gives us all more ways to travel and eases pressure on the roads. Streets designed solely as traffic conduits attract unsustainable amounts of traffic. For those who must—or choose to—drive, the best way to make the route more fluid is to help others ditch their cars.

[...]

If New York is to become a better habitat for automobiles, it should never be cheaper to drive than to take a less convenient form of transportation. To put it another way: Saving time should cost money, and vice versa. That way, car-­haters can stop spluttering about the ills of driving and let the rest of us whip around the city in ­motorized tranquility.

So long as a bike helmet law is done for the right reasons, to make the entire transportation system safer and smarter, it will be hard to argue with. But if it undermines these goals, then the whole debate is headed downhill faster than an out of control delivery bike.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC