When: Sunday June 3rd, Registration 8 am – Rain or Shine
Where: Start/ Finish Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park
What: Bicycle tour featuring historic Brooklyn neighborhoods, parks and waterfronts.
Who: cyclists of all ages and skill levels
Info: http://www.tourdebrooklyn.org, call 212-629-8080
Cost: Free but on-line registration required

Bike Brooklyn’s Best 3rd Annual Tour de Brooklyn

This year’s tour gets underway at Grand Army Plaza, a National Historic Landmark at Prospect Park. This year’s 18 mile tour will feature Brooklyn’s southern neighborhoods along the waterfront like Sunset, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst and loops towards the heart of Brooklyn, Kensington and Prospect Park South to end at the Carousel.

If this is your first time to Brooklyn by bike don’t worry you can join our feeder ride, leaving from Cadman Plaza near Brooklyn Bridge. Ride will depart promptly at 7:45 am, arriving at Prospect Park 8:05 am. Safety Marshals will be provided to guide you to the GAP.

This is a family friendly ride at a leisurely pace, escorted by the police and safety marshals. There will be one rest stop along the way where you can take a break, stretch your legs and snack on some food.

Bicycling in New York City has grown by leaps and bounds, there are over 120,000 daily cyclists today, up just 75,000 1992. There are over 36,000 daily cyclists in Brooklyn alone, plus thousands more who bike for fun on the weekends. Transportation Alternatives has been instrumental in winning new bike lanes, improved bridge access, and safe parking for NYC cyclists.

Bicycling in New York City has grown by leaps and bounds, there are over 120,000 daily cyclists today, up just 75,000 1992. There are over 36,000 daily cyclists in Brooklyn alone, plus thousands more who bike for fun on the weekends. Transportation Alternatives has been instrumental in winning new bike lanes, improved bridge access, and safe parking for NYC cyclists.

Transportation Alternatives – 127 W. 26th Street, New York, NY 10001 – (212) 629-8080

A bike lane could only be an asset to my rough block and is sincerely welcomed by my family. The idea that people would have difficulty doing drop offs and pick-ups as a consequence is nonsense: I’ve received DOT tickets for doing exactly that in the present scenario, so what’s the difference?

DOT has included buffer space alongside the bike lanes. The roadway lane allocations work with one vehicle lane each way, a 3 foot buffer in the center of the street and a dedicated left turn lane. Yes, drivers still need to watch for bicyclists and pedestrians when they turn, only there will be one less lane of oncoming traffic to distract them when they turn.

This is not at all like the One-way No-way plan that a different unit of DOT tried to BS us with.

DOT has used the latest thinking in multi-modal traffic planning on 9th St. This is state-of-the-art design to move everyone smoother, and though hard to believe, slow speeding motor vehicles, while getting traffic through the street quicker.

I’d sugest to Bob that the reason that statstics show more crashes involving cyclists on 9th St. is simply because there are more cyclists using 9th St. If there are twice as many crashes but 10 times as many users, then it’s hard to draw a negative conclusion about the appropriateness of bike lanes there.

Fortunately, Prospect Park Alliance doesn’t hear many complaints about cyclists riding recklessly on ped paths. The complaints they hear about cyclists are almost always aimed at the spandex-clad racers who ride in packs around the Loop Drives.

I heard someone suggest that the City put up a “Dismount Your Bike” signs at the entrance to the Park there. Bob, I really hope you don’t let the City do that. That view at the top of 9th Street is really beautiful and it would be a shame to ruin it with ugly city street signs.

I’m not sure where you get the idea that 9th Street is not a bike connection to Prospect Park. 9th Street has been an important bike route on the NYC bike map and NYC Bike Master Plan for many years now.

The weekday afternoon that I was out taking photos of the street I snapped a number of cyclists using 9th Street and I can post some of those here.

Via 9th Street cyclists access the Park either by dismounting their bike and walking it along the short pedestrian path behind Marquis de Lafayette or by taking a right on PPW and entering at Bartel. It would probably make sense to create a bike path along PPW adjacent to the park so that cycists didn’t have to ride on the sidewalk to access 3rd Street. DOT has actually kicked around this idea as well.

We should go for a bike ride on 5th some time. You’ll find that buses and bikes co-exist rather easily on 5th Avenue. Bus drivers, who are trained, accountable, professional drivers, are generally not the big safety problem for NYC cyclists.

I agree with you that if and when the Armory comes online as a rec center, that could justify running a bike lane along 15th Street and maybe 16th as well. Something will need to be done to 15th because that street is really dumped upon by traffic. One thing we could do to help would be to make PPW into a two-way street to relieve the crushing traffic burden on both Union and 15th.

The presentation above is what DOT’s press office sent me the day before the meeting. It is entirely possible and likely that DOT was still working on the presentation, adding and changing it, after this version was posted online. It’s not a conspiracy.

Yes, 9th Street is one of the most dangerous streets in the neighborhood for pedestrians. That is well known in the neighborhood and CrashStat.org shows that very clearly. That is exactly why DOT, in response to community concerns put forward in the summer of ’04 after a car went through the front door of Dizzy’s, is coming in with this plan to provide traffic-calming and pedestrian safety measures, of which, bike lanes are a key component. The safety issues are very real and I’m curious what your proposal is to solve that problem if you don’t like this one.

Your offer of 15th Street is very generous but that is not a good choice for a bike lane. It is a one-way street, it is intensely busy with all of the car traffic being funneled out of Bartel Pritchard, it is, I believe, too narrow to add a bike lane, it is 12 blocks from the nearest bike lane on 3rd Street and it doesn’t really connect important commuter and recreational cyclist destinations like 9th Street.

It’s mind-boggling to me that the car owning residents of 9th Street would complain about the imaginary hardship of having to load and unload their cars atop a painted bike lane yet are ready to ask cyclists to go 12 blocks out of their to find the nearest bike facility connecting to Prospect Park.

But at the meeting this evening someone mentioned an option I hadn’t considered… the park administration, at their discretion, could declare the walkway between West Drive and 9th St. a “shared-use” pathway, shared by bikes and peds.

Incidentally the CB6 transpo committee, to their credit, passed a motion to approve the plan by 4-2 vote.

The slide should show a route up 9th St., right on Prospect Park West, entering at Bartell-Pritchard, and across one of the center drives to exit the park at the same point.

People are going to freak when they show this slide tonight.

i’d also say its good to see DOT do something to improve an area before the car demand increases to meet the extra capacity.