How many of you were among the 79% of Brooklyn voters who re-elected him in 1995, instead of the 7% who voted for Gloria Mattera?

In general I agree with Random's idea that the boards are broken, but have you even tried to make them work? How about if you took note of every community board member who opposes the bike lane and wrote to Markowitz to complain?

And has anyone figured out who the community board member was who, when faced with 700 constituents adamantly opposed to the DOT one-way avenues plan, drafted a wishy-washy resolution that failed to reflect the mood of the neighborhood, and that failed to call for any specific measures to calm Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West?

It might be better to support a slightly inferior plan that is politically possible rather than a superior plan that is politically impossible.

Just a thought. Since I am not there, I am obviously not an expert on the political realities that are involved.

And why should bike lanes and other traffic calming devices be subject to community board approval? Nothing else is.

Either turn these hack boards into something that really speaks for their neighbors, hook them up with some permanent professional planners or stop giving them any control over the few good ideas that are coming out of our city government these days. These 9th Avenue nay-sayers clearly no longer give a sh*t about their neighborhood.

(Something tells me these residents don't walk around a whole lot.)

That's a thoughtful suggestion, but not quite right. The reason bike lanes are good for everyone is that they traffic calm the street and help reduce speeding by making the street seem narrower. Traffic planners call it "channelizing." We know from lots of studies (maybe someone can link a couple in here) that motorists go slower when they think the street is narrower. Narrower lanes also have this effect. So if you went without the bike lane, you would still want to narrow the lanes, widen the median and create the appearence of a narrower street.

Residents were just as mad, because they considered this an issue of bicyclists vs. cars, rather than seeing that it is a matter of slowing traffic and making the street safer for everyone (particularly for residents).

At the time, I suggested that it might be easier to get the plan through if we eliminated the bike lanes and just had the center turning lane plus two wide traffic lanes.

Let me make the same suggestion here. It would eliminate all of the resident's objections listed above. It would be almost as safe for bicyclists to ride in those wide lanes as in a striped bike lane (since cars will stop and block the bike lane even though it is illegal. Two traffic lanes would mean slower traffic that is safer for everyone, including bicyclists.