By Matt Chaban 9/19/12 12:44pm

Street Fighters Too

8 Photos

Here's Looking Out for You, Kids

Look Out! DOT Creates Crosswalk Decals, Ad Campaign to Prevent Pedestrian Accidents

What are you looking at?

When it comes to crossing the street, the city’s Department of Transportation hopes the answer is oncoming traffic—and not your smartphone or your beautiful European model boyfriend.

As any good three-year-old could tell you, always look both ways before crossing the street. But harried, hurried and distracted New Yorkers (and perhaps not a few New Yorkers) are ignoring the rules they learned in preschool, so the department has launched a new campaign to nudge as all into paying more attention when crossing the street. Read More

By Chloe Ashby 9/06/12 6:02pm

Road Rage

Watch it, kid! (Getty)

City Council Puts the Brakes on Commercial Bikers, Delivery Men, Two-Wheeled Speed Demons

“New Yorkers want what they want, when they want it, but that doesn’t excuse the disregard of safety—this is not the Wild West.”

Bronx Councilman James Vacca was sitting behind the long desk inside the 14th floor hearing room at 250 Broadway as a hearing of the Transportation Committee, which he oversees, was just getting started. He had taken the reins, or rather the handlebars, as he so often does when the committee turns its focus on the state of cycling in the city, a subject that gives Mr. Vacca, along with a few million New Yorkers, a great deal of consternation.

Today, the committee was tackling commercial cyclists and deliverymen—figuratively, though they probably would not mind actually tackling a few scofflaw two wheelers if given the chance. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/06/12 10:30am

Street Fighters Too

Factional changes. (Matt Chaban)

Strolling 6½th Avenue With Janette Sadik-Khan: Office Drones and Tourists Love It, Cabbies Not So Much

Janette Sadik-Khan, the sui generis city transportation commissioner, was standing on 51st Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues as rush hour was just starting last week. Rather, she was standing at the intersection with 6½th  Avenue, her latest asphalt confection. The pedestrian passageway was designated and demarcated about two months ago, connecting up a series of plazas running from here to 57th Street. Ms. Sadik-Khan was out for her first official stroll.

“It’s kind of a secret garden, one of the new secret spaces we’ve helped create; we’ve got 500 of them in the city and we’re trying to connect people better to their surroundings, make the city that much nicer,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

She gazed up at the cute little green street sign one of her construction crews had installed. “6½th Avenue” it read, like a sign on any other corner, though it, along with five others along the seven-block passageway, are the only ones in the city bearing fractions. The commissioner looked down and smiled. “It’s like Harry Potter,” she said. “The 9¾ platform. Or Being John Malkovich, with the 7½ floor.”

“I love it.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/11/12 11:10am

Road Rage

Pedestrians? My word!

Bulldogs! Might Some Entitled Yalies Torpedo Plan to Pedestrianize Vanderbilt Avenue?

The knives are already drawn for a proposal that might not even happen, a proposed closure of Vanderbilt Avenue to cars. The mayor supports it anyway, and when the City Planning Commission unveils the outlines for its Midtown East rezoning tonight, New Yorkers may have a better idea of what is in store. Or not. Time and again, it has been stated that this maybe-plan is far from certain.

So now is the time to attack it.

The Post has with relish, as should be expected, and so has The Times in its way, tapping its target demographic, the Yale Club, which faces onto Vanderbilt Avenue. Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/03/12 12:15pm

Road Rage

9 Photos

Protected Bike Lanes? Protected from whom?

New Eighth Avenue Protected Bike Lane Sure Is Nice When It’s Not Full of Pedestrians (Which Is Never)

On a recent night, we were leaving the office in The Observer Building (too late, as usual) when, turning onto Eighth Avenue, we noticed something unusual: the new protected bike lanes had begun to be installed.

We first noticed it a week or two earlier, as the old lanes, on the outside of the parked cars, were ground off the asphalt, but it took a bit of time for the new parking lane to be painted, then that bright green strip. The lane used to stop south of 40th Street, but now would run all the way to Columbus Circle, with a sister lane headed south on Ninth Avenue.

Already, cars had moved into position, even though many of the markings still remained to be installed. Bikers would be zipping along the route any day now. Or not. When we saw the lane in day light, an unusual thing happened. Read More

By Sarah Grothjan and Matt Chaban 6/22/12 5:53pm

Two Wheelers

18 Photos

The Great Brooklyn Greenway

Painting the Boro Green: 14-Mile Brooklyn Greenway from Bay Ridge to Greenpoint Gets Rolling

Most New Yorkers with $14 million would likely opt for a pricey slice of real estate on the Upper East Side, maybe with a little left over for dinner for a thousand friends at Per Se. But in Brooklyn, they choose instead to spend that money on their bikes.

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. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/14/12 5:20pm

Road Rage

Coming to a Midtown intersection near you. (NYC DOT)

6½th Avenue Gets Greenlight: Pedestrian Passageway Approved by Community Board, Installation in June

“I think this is a very important opportunity for this community to back this avenue, which was given to the developers decades ago,” Nancy Goshow said last Thursday night, during a meeting of Community Board 5. “The developers have gotten all the benefits for too long, and it is time we as a community take back these spaces and really push them to be improved and made as nice as possible.”

Ms. Goshow was one of a majority of board members who declared her support for what has come to be known as 6½th Avenue, a Department of Transportation proposal to link a series of arcades and public plazas running from 51st to 57th streets between Sixth and Seventh avenues. The spaces were created through a special zoning district in the 1980s and early ’90s, and are made up of Zuccotti-like privately owned public space, or POPS. In exchange for building the spaces, developers got the opportunity to build bigger buildings.

Last year, the community board, at the suggestion of Friends of POPS, a pro-POPS civic group, asked the Department of Transportation to study ways it might connect these spaces. They are already a popular pedestrian thoroughfare, especially during lunch time and at rush hour, providing a less hectic alternative to the avenues on either side. The board wanted to make the spaces even more inviting. Read More