I'm with you on London boroughs being a potentially good model for NYC. That means elected executives and borough councils for areas just a little bit bigger than our community boards. So Brooklyn would be divided into 10-12 "small boroughs." The existing borough would be scrapped except for the judicial system. At least for land use and transportation, our current system does not work.

I hear you. In the current environment, it is hard to imagine how a community planning process could work. Hell, at this PSCC meeting the other night I, essentially played the role of DOT representative. Angry 9th Street residents were pointing at me and saying, "This plan of yours!..." I suppose it was some sort of karmic payback for helping to bring out 650 people to the "One Way? No Way!" meeting a few weeks ago. I've been to enough community meetings to know how hard it is to deal with the "community."

There are really good precedents out there for productive community planning processes. First, take a look at how London is approaching its even more aggressive bike network build-out using this process called CRISP in which community stakeholders are brought together by city government and they actually all go out together and ride the proposed bike route:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/11/21/847/

Then look at the Context-Sensitive Solutions movement in the US:

http://www.contextsensitivesolutions.org/content/case_studies/

Or just look at the open source software movement. The best products are now being built not be top-down centralized command and control systems but systems that allow the users to help create the product:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

Simply put, NYC is a huge city. There is no way one can expect a single centralized agency with limited resources to be able to take care of all of the miniscule details required to make a livable streets movement agenda work. DOT needs to get better at brining local stakeholders into the process. It'll create a better product.

That being said: I think we also need to have a major reform of the Community Board system in NYC. With their unelected life-time appointees and limited power, CB's often don't do a good job of representing the community. One of the things I noticed in London and Paris on recent trips was that their borough and arrondisement-level governments represent almost the exact same number of people as our community boards, between 160K and 220K (I should double-check those numbers).

So while in Brooklyn 180,000 people have a staff of four and 50 unelected appointees representing them, over in the London Borough of Islington pretty much the same number of citizens have a City Hall, a mayor, an elected council, their own street sweeper machines, parking agents and parking permit revenue.

The Imperial Mayor thing just isn't working very well for NYC in a lot of ways. We need more local accountability and control.

Here's a pretty good presentation by traffic engineer Michael Ronkin that illustrates similar redesigns and the benefits. Here's another one by Dan Burden.

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.

We also tend to overestimate people's beliefs translating into direct action and underestimate the power of the human mind to rationalize their actions afterwards.

In the past year I think less than 5% of the cyclists I've see are wearing skin-tight pants, and most of them were on Route 9W in NJ. Certainly most of the bike-lane advocates I've met haven't been wearing skin-tight pants.

The whole point of bike lanes is to make cycling safe for sissies and thus increase motorist familiarity with cyclists and swell the ranks of cycling supporters. You might disagree with this strategy, but sissies are an integral part of it.

I swear, this town gets more sissy by the minute.

The PSCC vote doesn't mean all that much necessarily.

In fact, CB6's transportation committee voted to approve the project last Thursday by a margin of 4-2. Though, CB6 members will try to have that vote overturned at their full board meeting next Weds. 4/11.

Do you realize what you're saying? You want DOT to install more bike lanes but you want them to include the community in planning all of them? Any idea how long that would take? To get 200 miles in three years you can't have a three month planning process with the community for every lane.

Also, any idea how much would be sacrificed to build a consensus? You'd end up with sharrows for every lane mile in the city!

And even if the "community" is included in the planning process who does that represent? Not every neighbor is going to show up, only ones with a certain agenda. What about all the other people who are affected but can't spend their time coming to bike lane planning meetings? And what about people who don't live in the community but would use the bike lanes?

New York motorist have met the enemy and it is them.

The problem is not an over sense of entitlement on anyone's behalf. We are all citizens and this is a democracy.

It's that we have a process that encourages those most affect to express their views and come to meetings and for people to take extreme positions in community meetings like this with the only common denominator or compromise position be "keep things as they are".

There needs to be more of a chance to take a sense of the larger community in a more thoughtful and collaborative way.

If anyone seems entitled, it's car owners who simply must be allowed to double park, no matter where they live.