I would dearly love to see NYC bike lanes safe enough for kids to safely ride alone. I think one way to get from here to there is to increase the number of escorted kids riding now. If the City is determined to install 150 miles of Class II's in the next three years, I say put them on relatively calm residential streets where thee is a chance they will be used by families, not on truck routes. We should advocate for more than the measly 5 miles of Class I routes the City is offering, but if the question is where do you put the 5 miles, I say dole it out in small segments in spots like the Q'boro Bridge plaza/off ramp system in Manhattan where all the bicyclists are getting injured and killed.

i talk to many non-cyclists about this topic (how to increase cycling), and most say that if there were a truly safe infrastructure they would enjoy riding to work, school, etc. most people are not afraid of the exercise, they just don't want to be maimed or killed!! unprotected bike lanes do NOTHING to inspire confidence in people who are too scared to ride under current conditions.

My experience may be atypical; through a combination of luck and sacrifice I live within 3 miles of work and our kids' schools. Many others have longer commutes. But I think that the thousands of people who do make most of their trips within a relatively compact area are a key target population for increasing ridership.

My day usually starts with a commute crosstown to school with my son through the park and on-road at a slow pace (~5-7 MPH). We talk and take pictures en route and enjoy the mental and physical health benefits discussed in the WSJ article about European cycling that Aaron has been posting. (We're probably late to school more often than we should be, but there are more important things in life than being on time!). After drop-off at school, I try to get to work as quickly as possible. The Greenways aren't convenient to my workplace so I'll usually pick a five-lane one-way southbound avenue to make the best speed. At ~15 MPH+, there's no point in seeking out a bike lane and the attendant errant pedestrians, double-parked cars and dooring. When this two-leg trip is made by public transportation, it's between 55 and 75 minutes of pure misery on a bus and four trains; by cab it's at least $22 and has never taken less than 35 minutes (even when I make the two legs of the trip on a single fare); and by bike it's about 50 minutes (excluding stops), its free, I get exercise and time with my son.

I would not take my son to school by bicycle without the 103rd St. Class I CP transverse and the Class II bike lanes on the CP loop and on West 77th/78th Streets. A Class II lane is reasonably safe for a properly-trained 8+ year old riding at approximately 5-7 MPH, with an adult riding protectively just behind the child's outside flank. At that speed, the dooring hazard in the bike lane is not so great, and the adult can provide verbal guidance, spot hazards ahead in advance, and block hazards from the rear. Without the Class II lane it's much harder to protect the child's space, and the child doesn't have the lane markings as a guide for where to ride.

With more people choosing to raise kids in the City, targeting bicycling infrastructure toward school commutes is a legitimate way to increase cycling rates. Kids hate mass transit even more than adults do and will insist on bicycling once it is an option, helping to overcome adult inertia. Put the adult on the bike to school, and the rest of the trips that day (including commuting to work) are more likely to be by bike. And one hopes that kids who bicycle in the City will continue to do so when the grow up.

It may seem counter-intuitive to focus efforts on school commutes. Most people are shocked at the thought of bicycling with kids on the street in NYC. I saw 4 other parents taking their kids to school by bike this morning--which happens to be the most I have ever seen in one morning. Apropos of Hilary's comment, I can't recall ever seeing a Mom taking a kid to school by bicycle on-street; it's always Dads. This has got to be the fear factor at work.

The best way to address this fear is to expand the network of Class II lanes on traffic-calmed streets that reach into residential neighborhoods where homes and schools are located. The point of doing this is less to establish that "biking [has] priority over driving" as Angus advocates, but to increase ridership. And getting parents to take the dramatic step of bringing their kids onto the road would probably do more both symbolically and in reality to give bicycling priority; parents will make sure that to the extent safety is an issue, they and their children get priority over the cars. A parent that takes the risk of riding with their kids on the street does much more to signal the ascendancy of bicycling than does the Class II bike lane on First Avenue, which is used by almost no one because of the heavy truck traffic and rampant double-parking.

Folks interested in "serious" commuting on roadways like First or Second Avenues or on Houston Street don't need a bike lane to make time; in fact it might even slow them down or put them in relatively greater danger than simply riding with traffic. Putting the Class II lanes on truck routes may yield a margin of additional safety and convenience for those already on their bikes, but I don't see it generating that many new riders.

The priority for the 200 of miles of Class II bike lanes (which is most of what PlaNYC has to offer bicyclists) should be getting more people onto bikes. That means putting them on already calmed streets where they will run past the doorsteps, grocery stores and schools of people who might use them, and have real impact on traffic. These Class II lanes should be accompanied by 15 MPH limits. As long as the NYS/NYC traffic laws remain unchanged, this network of Class II lanes will serve to increase ridership by overcoming the fear factor, without adversely affecting "serious" commuters who can continue to use the streets or bike lanes as they choose.

I would approach the design question from what breeds the most success. Limited access (few lights), separated, green or park-like, connected. NYC's park and parkway network is pretty ideal. Share those corridors with bicyles, not trucks.

For me personally, increasing the number of cyclists is not an end in itself, only a means to an end. That end is a "walking, biking city," meaning one where walking and biking have priority over driving. We've pretty much agreed that anyone who drives for recreation in New York City is nuts, so if biking and walking are to increase their share and their prominence, it has to be in the areas of commuting and what the Planyc folks call "family and personal business."

Cycling for recreation is more or less irrelevant to the goal of a biking and walking city, except when it can increase the market share and prominence of cycling for commuting and family and personal business. There's also a danger when cycling gets too associated with recreation - it gets seen as a childish toy, not serious or important enough to deserve funding, streetspace or right of way. This is true for walking too, as the Prevention ranking shows.

For example, if bicyle commuters are currently the majority, they are not the majority of potential bicyclists. That majority seek out the protected (recreational) routes.

Another assumption frequently made on this forum is that because the majority of trips in NYC are short (less than a mile), that is where the growth in bicyle use should be expected to be found. This ignores the hassle of taking a bike out of storage or carrying it down to the street, locking and unlocking, etc. Most of us wouldn't bother for a short trip.

If the goal is to make New York a walking, biking city, we need to plan it for everyone.

Plus the traffic is there. All you have to do is take a trip across one of the transverses int he moring to see that there is a great deal of cross-town commuting each day--between 8 am and 9:30 am, the vehicular traffic is generally stop-and-go from the midpoint of the transverse to the entrance. I'd say the Central Park loop carries more bike traffic than than any other North-South route in Manhattan except the West Side Greenway.

The problem is crosstown trips--with the pedestrian pathways prohibition, bikes are relegated to the transverses (extremely dangerous and unpleasant IMHO) or four unidirectional and/or meandering crosstown bike routes through the Park (southern portion of loop, 72nd, 103rd, northern portion of the loop). It would be great if the the 72nd Street crosstown path was widened and made two-way two-way, and/or if the little-used pedestrian pathway just north of the Ross Pinetum and just south of the 86th Street transverse were converted to a bike path.

Another benefit of improving the CP crosstown option is that you make it easier to get from the UES to the West Side Greenway. It seems that the East Side Greenway will always be an inferior route because of (1) stairs at 81st (2) the benches and trees recently placed between 81st and 63rd that narrow the bike traffic from two-way to one-way (whose idea was that?) and most fundamentally (3) the gap south of the Q'boro bridge that will probably always be there (unless millions are spent on a cantilevered structure).

The priority for Central Park in the near term is getting rid of the cars 24/7, but the Park will remain something of an obstacle to crosstown bicyclists without some changes. If DOT is consdering a two-way Class II on East 72nd, perhaps that creates an opportunity to expand the 72nd Street CP pathway to two-way.

Serious bikers should not look down on parks, and connections between parks, just because they look "recreational." When highway planners look at parks, they see rights-of-way -- the government already owns the land, and there aren't any buildings to clear -- and bike planners can do the same. Of course highways ruin parks for their intended uses, but bikes are perfectly compatible with parks, even if the riders are on the way to work.

I ride about 2.5 miles to work every morning, and half of my route goes through a park. It's very nice; I say hello to the joggers, look at the birds in the trees and on the lake, and enjoy the greenery. I don't interfere with anybody else's enjoyment of the park, and I get to my office reasonably fast.

If I had the time and expertise, I'd sit down with a map, place dots in every neighborhood and business district (or sub-district), and look for the most bike-friendly route to get from each dot to its adjacent dots. If you could assign a score to each of those connections, and then find some way to aggregate the scores, giving extra weight to the connections that people really need to get from one place to another (do any geographers or topologists read Streetsblog?), you'd have a nice metric to measure a city's bike-friendliness.

A map like this would highlight the connections (low score but high weight) that need to be fixed to improve life for bicyclists. If city officials were really interested in encouraging biking for transportation, a connectivity map would tell them where to concentrate their efforts.

It may sound like I think all the bicycling instructure should be organized around kids and inexperienced or timid cyclists. That's not exactly true, but I do think they are the primary constituency for new bike lanes. I admire Enrique Penalosa's suggestion that a good bicycling city is one in which it is safe for children to bicycle.

When I cycling alone I will use bike lanes if they happen to be available but I don't seek them out unless I am carrying something large. When I want to make time I will select a route like Lexington with signals timed to move traffic for long distances at high speeds and try to keep up; I would not want use a bike lane for that kind of trip, although a sharrowed lane on Lexington would be nice (although the bus lane currently there serves pretty well). In fact, it seems to me that every roadway with three or more traffic lanes should have a sharrowed lane. But that is no substitute for a well-connected (Mitch has the right idea) network of Class I and Class II lanes on traffic calmed streets, which is the infrastructure that would be necessary to double or triple cycling rates, as opposed to marginal improvements in current rates and convencience of cycling.

It's a lot easier to count lane-miles than to develop a metric for connectivity; but connectivity is what makes a place bike-friendly.

There is absolutely no difference between the enforcement that double-parkers receive when parked on bike lanes, shared lane markings or regular old travel lanes. It's $115 in all three cases. No difference.

The 9th Street "Road Diet" design would not be nearly as effective with shared lane markings and street signs, as you propose.

The whole point of DOT's design is to visually narrow the street to two travel lanes with a distinct median in the middle. If you eliminated the 5 foot bike lane and 3 foot buffer a lot of drivers would see that open 8 foot space as another travel lane. Many would use it for driving and passing and some would honk at other drivers for treating the space as a one lane road.

Your proposal would confuse the road and eliminate virtually all of the traffic calming and bike safety benefits.

The overall goal is increased ridership, of all types. An important part of the puzzle is the total number of miles of bike accommodation/lanes.

If bike lanes aren't designed and built to serve the larger goal, they aren't as desirable. But, an articulated, measurable ridership goal puts pressure on municipalities to make the bike lanes matter.

Frankly, I think DOT's new "shared lane" signs and pavements markings are better than Class II bike lanes. Shared land signs and pavement markings heighten awareness among drivers and cyclists, yet permit drivers to double park when absolutely necessary without fear of being ticketed for parking in a bike lane.

And glad to hear DOT is thinking about UES path-park linkages, which I presume means crosstown Class II's on 90th/91st and 60th/61st, perhaps even 72nd. I'm also skeptical as to whether those will be laid, but we'll see. Crosstown lanes would benefit commuters as well as recreational cyclists. In particular, the 60th/61st crosstown could be used in a pinch to link the southern terminus of the UES Greenway at 63rd St. with the easternmost downtown Class II lane in all of Midtown--B'way (pathetic!).

First and Second Ave may work well if they integrate it with BRT, but otherwise, you're right that right now they are just horrible. The added advantage of First and Second is that they connect with the QBB easily and provide access to areas where there is less mass transit access (which will improve with BRT and Second Ave Subway). But they are truck routes and as you say it might never be workable.

For Uptown, Third might work better than First. In fact, I think Third would probably be best as a two direction Avenue like it is south of 23rd. With bike lanes in both directions, it could be a great location.

Park Ave is great because it is passenger cars only. Again despite bikes being more "historical" than automobiles, that is exactly the grounds upon which they would be rejected by some of the "longtime residents".

A Fifth Avenue lane on the park side would be ideal as it minimizes many intersection conflicts. It could be the East Side parallel to the 8th Ave lane. This would not serve the same population as a Second Ave bike lane though. It would be great for folks in Central Harlem commuting to midtown, but not the far east side.

Lex/Madison are both pretty narrow and might not be the best, although they connect up to many more retail destinations.

I'm going to see if we can start the discussion with DOT on this. It's too important to not be included in the next wave of bike lane installations.