Streetsblog New York City

One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

Photo: @jackNruth/Twitter via @MikeLydon

This Twitter photo of LeBron James biking to American Airlines Arena before facing off against Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bulls last night has gone viral on sports news sites all over America.

There are some interesting sociological currents swirling around LeBron James, bike commuter. While the photographer labeled James a “manchild” for taking to Miami’s none-too-friendly streets on a bike, the prevailing sentiment in the ESPN comments section seems to be that the sight of LeBron riding to work will help rehab his public image.

After the Heat edged the Bulls, James told reporters in the locker room that bike commuting is pretty routine for him. In fact, he seems to enjoy talking about the bike ride more than the basketball game:

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Before Streetsblog goes offline for the Thanksgiving weekend, I’d like to reiterate my unsolicited advice for Jennifer Lopez: There is an easy and, I believe, highly effective way to control the damage from the revelation that you did not actually film this Fiat 500 Cabrio commercial on the streets of the Bronx.

For those just tuning in, The Smoking Gun broke this story last night. J Lo filmed her close-ups for the Fiat spot in Los Angeles, while a body double kept the driver’s seat warm for the actual footage from the Bronx, and a digital effects firm added a few touches of computer-generated boogie-down fakery — all to make it seem like Lopez was actually driving around her old neighborhood, on the streets that “inspire” her.

The sophisticated operation to spare J Lo from having to venture out to her home borough is not just great NYC tabloid fodder — it’s national news. So, on to the image rehab advice, which is pretty simple: J Lo needs to film a bike ad in the Bronx. Here are three reasons why this is a great idea:

1. Big points for being down to earth. The suggested retail price of the Fiat 500 Cabrio is $26,000. It’s not a Benz, but it’s kind of an ostentatious display when you can get just about anywhere you need to go in NYC with an unlimited Metrocard and a bike. Even a very nice new city bike, if J Lo were to pitch one, won’t set you back more than $600 to $1,200.
2. The playing-with-kids scenes will be way more believable. Even before The Smoking Gun story came out, the Fiat ad didn’t exactly scream authenticity. That part where the kids run and skip next to a moving motor vehicle with J Lo inside? Didn’t seem fun. A group ride with J Lo would actually look like a good time.
3. Trendsetting. As far as I know, there are no big-time celebrity endorsement deals with the major bike manufacturers, nor are there any bike ads on TV. Probably because the bike industry has a lot less to throw around than the car companies. J Lo wouldn’t be doing this bike spot for the payday, she’d do it to be a pioneer.

I say this all as a big “Out of Sight” fan and a devout viewer of American Idol Season 10 (at least until Haley got voted off). And I didn’t even get to the part about biking being healthy, good for the environment, and a much better fit than personal motorized transport for the Bronx streets that inspire J Lo.

Stewart talks up cycling as transportation with Emilia Crotty of Bike New York

In addition to nerve-wracking weather, one sure sign of spring is the re-emergence of the bicycle as pop culture totem. If you’re on many catalogue mailing lists, you’ve probably seen them — gleaming utility bikes and cruisers at the ready as toned and tanned models relax at the outdoor cafe or by the pool. And they’re not just props — furniture and housewares retailer CB2 has its own city bike, developed with a Florida-based manufacturer ($499; details at Treehugger).

Coupled with poll data and legislative action showing general support for human-oriented public space and transportation initiatives, it’s enough to suggest that the bike-hating American public is mostly a myth, conjured and nursed by out of touch politicians and conflict-craving, auto-driven media.

Enter Martha Stewart. In advance of Bike Month, Stewart invited Emilia Crotty of Bike New York into the studio for a thorough lesson on cycle maintenance, followed by a bike and schwag giveaway (congratulations Georgiana Powell of Moscow, PA). Turns out Stewart is a cyclist herself, as are, at least for this segment, many members of her studio audience.

If this isn’t a marker of cycling for transportation becoming a more mainstream American activity, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

This morning, the hosts of the Today Show played this segment for their 5.4 million viewers. It's this year's edition of Transportation Alternatives' annual Great Commuter Race, where cyclist, transit rider, and motorist vie to see who gets to work first. TA's Wiley Norvell emailed us to explain how the race made the transition to national TV:

After the tenth-straight cyclist victory, there seemed to be some skepticism from the fourth estate about how legitimate the race really was. Well, we took it to some of the most trusted names in America to prove that biking really does come out on top.

A few observations:

• Matt Lauer really lays it on thick pretending not to know his way around the subway and the bus.
• The folks who run Commute by Bike should start polishing their TV pitches.
• Scoff all you want at the short route (72nd and Broadway to 30 Rock). But that means Meredith Vieira never had to drive through the insane traffic bottlenecks at NYC's free bridges, while Al Roker took the Broadway bike lane, probably the slowest riding in the city, and still finished first. 

This is too fun not to post. John Leguizamo, who's been biking in New York since before the actual Summer of Sam, takes a CNN crew on a ride through Midtown and shares some pointers on NYC cycling. (Sorry about the BASF commercial you'll have to sit through before it gets started.) Leguizamo's big pitch to potential cyclists comes about two-thirds of the way through. While I think he might be overemphasizing the danger and thrills, it's hard to argue after you see the police nearly door him.

Village Voice entertainment columnist Michael Musto has been riding a bike in New York City for more than 25 years, long before it was fashionable or we had bike lanes and cycletracks.

Musto has never had a driver's license, and he tells us the bicycle is an advantage in his profession. Although he's had his share of bikes stolen (he recommends buying a used, cheap bike), he has nothing but positivity and praise for the velocipede:

I go everywhere on my bicycle. I go to work. I'll go to my screenings, my Broadway shows, my nightclubs -- and I'll ride it for recreation too, to Central Park... there's no downside that I can think of.

Incidentally, this is my second interview with Musto. The first came in 1999, when I was a volunteer at Transportation Alternatives. Musto was TA magazine's Cyclist of the Month, a feature that I got to write!

We heard from a few people over the holiday break who were disgusted by the Jan. 2 New York Times op-ed from U2 front man -- and celebrity environmentalist -- Bono. In it, the pop star called for the "return of the automobile as a sexual object."

In a blog post today, Streetsblog Network member RIDE Solutions wrote a refutation of Bono's little fantasy -- and nailed the argument:

This picture wouldn't turn us on even if all the cars were electric Aston Martins. Photo: sbisson/Flickr

Bono’s creepy fetishization of the automobile is part of the core psychological problem that has led to the country’s transportation, energy, and urban design mess. Despite the problems we’re currently suffering from too many people being in love with their automobiles -- air pollution, suburban sprawl, skyrocketing gas prices  and the outsourcing of our energy development to hostile foreign powers -- Bono suggests that, in the coming decade, we need to love our cars more, we need to make them prettier, we need to want to spend more time in them and invest more money in them…. 

Even qualifying, as he does, that "the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels," the more he’s aroused, he misses the point that gas mileage is only one small component of a vehicle’s energy and environmental impact. Even a fleet of zero-emission electric Aston Martins need someplace to park and roads to drive on. They still get into car accidents, and require expensive maintenance and production.…

Bono would have been better off, if he insists on his bizarre fetishization, to emphasize beautiful and “sexy” urban spaces. If the idea is to sexualize something so that people want to spend more time with it, why not emphasize our cities and downtowns? Why not take the artists and designers he wants to work with automakers and instead put them on city planning commissions and in city engineering departments? In essence, concentrate design and beauty on where and how we live, not on the tools we use to go to the grocery store.

Excellent points. If "sexy" is linked to "speed" -- which it clearly is, in Bono's Aston Martin–loving formulation -- the last thing we need is more automotive sexiness, even if it is electrically powered.

In case we needed a reminder of how deadly even moderate increases in speed can be, New Haven Safe Streets yesterday posted about an important new study from the British Journal of Medicine that demonstrates yet again how 20 mph speed zones can dramatically reduce casualties and collisions -- by around 40 percent -- with the number of children killed or injured reduced by 50 percent.

Requiring cars to drive more slowly so that fewer kids die? That's the kind of idea that gets us excited.

Count Keith Olbermann among the otherwise well-informed New Yorkers who don't have a clue when it comes to what's happening with the MTA.

Giving transit chief Jay Walder the "Worst Person in the World" treatment last night, the "Countdown" host rattled off a list of service cuts and other measures approved yesterday before concluding as follows:

"All this is the result of the shocking, total surprise budget shortfall that the MTA has had every 18 months or so for about the last four decades. The latest: $400 million they suddenly discovered last week they just didn't have. I know this is a local thing but this has been going on since I was a kid. It is the biggest running scam in this town since they caught Boss Tweed."

Olbermann or his producers must be aware that Walder is new to his MTA post, as he is offhandedly referred to as "this month's chairman." Which makes it even more surprising how widely this misses the mark. It's not clear what exactly he means by "biggest running scam in this town," but since Olbermann singled out Jay Walder for a public flogging -- and not Sheldon Silver, Carl Kruger, Pedro Espada, Richard Brodsky, or any of the myriad electeds who have continually shortchanged transit for, yes, decades -- it's obvious that he buys into the fiction that every MTA crisis is of its own making.

Here's a makeshift screen grab from Game 2 of the World Series, describing how Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee made his way to Yankee Stadium for Game 1 last Wednesday.

According to Fox Sports, after catching a cab from a Midtown hotel, Lee was stuck in traffic an hour later, having traveled about as far as Morningside Heights. Ignoring advice from his handlers to seek NYPD's help getting to the South Bronx, Lee ducked out of the taxi and went underground.

The cabbie had told Lee it would take two additional hours to reach his destination. The subway, even after a transfer, got him there in 35 minutes.

Though he reportedly didn't know which train lines he took (the C to the B, as posited by Gothamist, seems likely), Lee, who starts tonight's Game 5 in Philadelphia, is no stranger to the transit system. Given his super-human performance in the Phillies as-yet sole Series victory, Yankee fans may be hoping for gridlock to help the Bombers put this one away early.

Lee's first pitch is scheduled for 7:57. Amid the excitement of a Yankees win -- or loss -- don't forget polls open tomorrow at 6 a.m.