Your statement that “TA is flip-flopping on the bollards issue” is inaccurate. In 2003, Transportation Alternatives filed a lawsuit against the State DOT to remove the stop signs, not bollards, from the middle of the Hudson River Greenway path. As explained on the T.A. website:

“The Trust’s stop signs were a well intended but misguided attempt to reduce conflict between cyclists and motorists turning across the greenway. But the signs, which were positioned at head height, contradicted green traffic signals, caused crashes, blocked sight lines, were easily moved and confused both greenway users and motorists. The signs violated the requirements of the State Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices because they conflicted with traffic lights located at the same intersections, were placed in the center of the path and were not permanently mounted.”

In addition, pedestrians are only allowed to cross at crosswalks, and emergency vehicles must exercise due regard; neither have "right of way" over traffic with a green light.

I suggest you take a defensive driving course before complaining so vociferously about other people's road habits.

Not less important individually, but vastly less numerous. If you're unable to reason quantitatively then we have nothing to talk about.

& Jonathan--if I was insecure, I sure as heck wouldn't be a cyclist. The name calling seems to be another distraction from the topic, eh? And thanks for the driver's manual quote. At an intersection with a traffic light, who normally has the right of way, traffic with green, or traffic with the red (assuming none is an emergency vehicle or pedestrian)? According to your reasoning, the signals don't seem to mean anything at all!

Whatever the vehicle, rethinking the landscape it moves through is absolutely the right way for to improve safety. It's not that I don't believe in personal responsibility--I am a fiend for personal responsibility--but if you're after results instead of a rush of self-righteousness, telling people to stop biking/driving badly is a joke. People are constantly barraged with cheerful safety messages; "drive carefully" has become the suburban equivalent of "goodbye." And here we are, still suffering several traffic deaths a week in NYC because someone failed to be perfect for a nanosecond. Screaming louder is not going to help.

I do my level best not to be killed by cars. But it isn't unreasonable, lazy, or abnegating responsibility for me to expect the city that builds and maintains our streets to always strive to make them less lethal.

Lastly, remember that cyclists are everyone who happens to get on a bike that day. Especially in places like the Hudson Path and Central Park, cyclists are not a highly trained elite corps, just a cross-section of New Yorkers. Just like buildings and streets should be well designed, so should pathways.

In truth the discussion here is a lot less dogmatic than Curmudgeon may think. I and other cyclists will candidly discuss here at appropriate times the importance of bicyclists riding with the flow, in the roadway as opposed to sidewalks, and in a manner that does not endanger or tend to startle pedestrians. Those kinds of bicycling do a disservice to all bicyclists (and is unfair to others).

The question is, whether a post intended to raise awareness regarding known dangers on the West Side Bicycle path is the appropriate place for "cur" to make the point that sometimes bicyclists contribute to traffic collisions. Most commenters on this thread say "no."

As for the point of bias by police in taking crash reports involving bicycles, the Right of Way study mentioned in comment #25 is the seminal work. I highly recommend everyone read it. (It is free online, but there is no direct link; click "right of Way" in the "Advocacy Section of the S'blog right sidebar; click "research" on the left sidebar of the right of Way page; then click on the "Killed By Automobile" to get the link to the pdf).

Also, I believe Streetsblog has a copy of the police reports created in connection with the death of a cyclist on the 65th Street Transverse approximately 1 year ago (discussed here: http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/08/22/central-park-66th-street-transverse-is-unsafe/). That is another incident in which the police attributed factors contributing to the crash to the bicyclist. Those documents, juxtaposed with the video and other evidence subsequently gathered at the site, would give S'blog readers additional insight into bias in the gathering of evidence of crashes involving bicyclists.

http://www.ghostbikes.org/ghostbikes/New+York+City

Eric wasn't wearing a helmet. He never did. It didn't make any difference: he was hit head on at 60 mph and thrown 50 feet.

I'm no statistician, but I have lived with the stories of every cyclist killed in the last 3 years. Time after time, we see preventable crashes caused by driver error, negligence, or willfully reckless behavior. I could cite examples, but the full list is available if you want it.

When these people are horrifically killed, I don't want to spend my time discussing what they did wrong.

To the extent that I am a cyclist or a cycling advocate, I accept no responsibility for the actions of other cyclists.

Curmudgeon, I perceive a giant flaw in your reasoning:

Wrong way cycling is sufficiently prevalent that I've taken to scanning against the direction of traffic, not because of motorists, but to prevent a collision with another cyclist. The question, Dav, is why should I have to protect myself from other cyclists when I have a green light?

The answer, as you already know, and as anyone who has ever read the NY State driver's manual (or any other state's driver's manual, I imagine) knows, is that the definition of green light is this:

STEADY GREEN: Go, but yield the right-of-way to other traffic at the intersection as required by law

A green light is not a free pass to continue blithely in your direction of travel. Complaining about the bad road habits of others, whether motorcars, bicycles, pedicabs, or horse-drawn carriages, is a red herring because the ultimate responsibility for your safety is on you. I've looked all over the TA bike-advocacy pages and I don't see any mention that says it's OK to drink heavily and then get on a bike, or to ride at night against traffic without lights, or even to ride without a helmet. I agree with you that people do these all things (sometimes all at once), but being a safe and responsible cyclist like yourself means being aware and looking out for those behaviors.

As a motorist, I know the destructive power of my motorcar and as a defensive driver I am careful not to put others at risk. Your call for greater recognition of "cyclist error" as a cause of accidents doesn't take into account that the motorist is driving a much more dangerous vehicle.

True story: many years ago on a snowy afternoon I was riding along a two-way street and planned to make a left turn across traffic in the middle of the block. I was in the center lane and although there was no oncoming traffic, I didn't see the truck that was trying to pass me on my left. As I kept moving left, he kept moving left and eventually crashed into a parked car on the other side of the street. It was a snowy day, as I said. The enraged driver then chased after me into a doctor's office, while I called 9-1-1.

Get this: a couple weeks later a lady from his insurance company calls up asking for the details of my homeowner's policy so I could help pay for this accident. I hung up on her.

I will gladly take responsibility for the whole accident; if I hadn't been there, the truck wouldn't have executed that particular crash. But the truck driver is responsible for his own vehicle, and on a snowy day a prudent motorist might not have tried to pass me. If I had been driving I wouldn't have tried it.

The moral of my story, Curmudgeon, is that the motorist can't blame cyclists for causing crashes because that's what defensive driving is all about; assuming that cyclists are going to make a sudden left turn, or that kids are going to pop out from in between parked cars, or that a dog will run into your parking place as you're backing up.

Take care of yourself and your daughter and ride in a manner that makes you feel safe, but please don't try to blame your sense of insecurity on people who are just trying to get around the city without a wheeled steel exoskeleton.

Angus, Are you suggesting I haven't worked hard to build political support for taming the West Side Highway?? Tell me you're sick of hearing about it, but not that I'm not in the trenches.

I know that you work hard on a number of issues, but I wasn't aware of anything that was specifically aimed at West Street (i.e. the non-parkway portion of 9A). I apologize for my ignorance. But I'm still sick of hearing about it. The main reason to have opposed Westway is that once the tunnel was dug, it would have been almost impossible to use it for anything other than cars. Certainly not parkland.

Curmudgeon, this afternoon I saw a cyclist riding the wrong way on a wide two-lane one-way street known for speeding - with his dog running next to him on a leash. Boneheaded, reckless and inconsiderate don't begin to describe it.

I'm with you - as long as you aren't suggesting that cyclists have any obligation to "police our own" that goes beyond what motorists have. Sure, I'll confront cyclists going the wrong way or riding on the sidewalk ... after I see motorists getting out of their cars to scold people who fail to yield to pedestrians, or parking advocates using their vehicles to push illegally parked ones off the sidewalk.

I don't cycle very much at this point, but to the extent that I am a cyclist or a cycling advocate, I accept no responsibility for the actions of other cyclists. People will be assholes, and the point is not that cyclists can cause no damage, just that the most inconsiderate and suicidal boob on a bike trying as hard as he or she can cause a heck of a lot less damage than the most considerate, careful motorist can cause by accident.

For the most part, I don't view wrong-way-cycling as imprudence on the part of the cyclist. I view it as a failure of urban design. There is clearly a huge demand for two-way bike travel on NYC's auto-oriented one-way streets. There is plenty of space on most of those streets to meet that demand. Until the demand is met, I fully expect to see cyclists coming at me in the wrong direction pretty frequently.

When I cited data about cyclist error accounting for crashes, instead of acknowledging that there's some possible reality there, you just dismissed it as "police bias", which is a way of avoiding a discussion of how cyclists (and not just the government) can contribute to bike safety. So I had to push that point to the absurd extreme.

Oh, and Dav, that's Curmudgeon, not Curm, to you!

I guess I just don't see the problems you're seeing.

All of the bike commuters I know are highly focused on what they can do to keep themselves safe and sound on the streets of NYC. Of all the various modes in NYC, I find cyclists to be the most alert and sensitive to traffic law and road safety, by far.

And I can't find the part of this conversation where anyone said that cyclists never cause crashes.

The Right of Way analysis of police crash reports is solid. I find that Komanoff, if anything, tends towards being too conservative in his analysis. He accounts for his own bias. The cops, not so much. For example, it has probably never occurred to most cops that it is biased to describe a car crash as an "accident."

Angus, Are you suggesting I haven't worked hard to build political support for taming the West Side Highway?? Tell me you're sick of hearing about it, but not that I'm not in the trenches.

Charles, There were several iterations of the buried highway and the best would have carried less traffic and at slower speeds than what we have now on the surface. The best reason for opposing Westway was the cost.
Your link for the site showing examples of freeways successfully turned into boulevards didn't work for me, but the cases I know of were elevated highways, which almost always are worse than their surface counterparts.

BTW, on my ride home this evening up the greenway 0/3 cyclists I encountered were using lights. They were literally invisible. I expect an announcement from any day now demanding that the city do something.

Researchers who have methodically gone through police reports have found that the NYPD's assignment of blame in ped and bike crashes with cars is highly biased.

I think Right of Way did a good study a while back.

Jonathan, the safety in numbers effect will be harder to reach in reality to the extent that cyclists behave or react in ways that tell non-cyclists or would-be cyclists that cycling is dangerous. Plus, in my own cycling I've had more than a few close calls with cyclists riding the wrong way, running reds, and failing to yield the right of way. Why is it so hard for the cycling community to insist that their own ranks do more on their own behalf in terms of safe cycling? Yet on these fora such a simple, straightforward suggestion seems to be outrageous. And besides, it's not me demanding minimum standards of behavior. There is something called traffic law, which posters on these fora are always demanding that others follow.
What I'm talking about isn't so much a demand, as a suggestion that there are other ways, entirely under the control of cyclists, to stay safe. For example, we can lobby for the city all we want to "do something" to prevent dooring. I'm not sure what the city can do. But I know that cyclists riding at least 4ft from parked cars will drop the dooring rate to zero.
We should be aware of the long term effects of an unbalanced focus on separate "protected" facilities. We are already "de facto" 2nd class citizens on the road, though for the most part traffic law makes us equal citizens. In the long run, a focus that cyclists' safety can only be had through special separated facilities, combined with a resistance on cyclists' part to acting like equal citizens on the road will wind up formalizing our 2nd class citizenship. The focus on facilties to "protect" bicyclists often come with laws that ban riding on the roads, treating cyclists like children who must be 'protected' rather than self-empowered adults who can take responsibility for their safety.