Streetsblog New York City

The Rob Ford crack-smoking video is sucking the oxygen from every other bike-related story on this Bike to Work Day, but it looks like a good number of New Yorkers are keeping their eyes on the prize: Today is the last day to get a Citi Bike membership in time to ride on the day the system launches, May 27.

Twitter sources indicate the number of Citi Bike memberships has hit the 13,000 range. Back on Tuesday, the number was about 10,000.

Five years ago, bike-share was something they did in France, and a large-scale system like the one that will launch at the end of the month didn’t seem to be in the cards for New York. There have been plenty of setbacks for NYC bike-share in the past year, but now here we are, 10 days from the launch of a new transit system.

A study published in this month’s American Journal of Public Health finds that highly influential transportation engineers relied on shoddy research to defend policies that discourage the development of protected bike lanes in the U.S. In their paper, the researchers point out that male-dominated engineering panels have repeatedly torpedoed street designs that have greater appeal to female cyclists.

The research team, led by Harvard public health researcher Anne Lusk, examines four engineering guides published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials between 1974 and 1999. All of these guides, treated like gospel by engineers across the country, either discourage or offer no advice about protected bike lanes, despite the fact that research has shown that women, in particular, are much more likely to bike given facilities that provide some separation from vehicle traffic.

Lusk found that many of AASHTO’s official claims regarding the purported safety problems of protected bike lanes were offered without supporting evidence. AASHTO refused the consider data demonstrating the proven safety record of protected bike lanes outside of the United States. And since there have been almost no protected bike lanes in the U.S. until quite recently, AASHTO based its position against protected bikeways on domestic street designs like sidewalk bikeways, not real bike lanes designed specifically to integrate physically protected bicycling into the roadway.

The researchers came to this rather damning conclusion: “State-adopted recommendations against cycle tracks, primarily the recommendations of AASHTO, are not explicitly based on rigorous and up-to-date research.”

Lusk and her team carried out a safety study of their own, examining crash reports on protected bike lanes in 19 U.S. cities. They found that protected bike lanes had a collision rate of about 2.3 per million kilometers biked — lower than the crash rates other researchers have observed on streets without any bike lanes. (Those rates vary from 3.75 to 54 crashes per million kilometers.)

Lusk’s research also suggests the lack of gender balance in the engineering profession may have contributed to the resistance to protected bike infrastructure. Researchers found that in 1991 and 1999, AASHTO’s Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines were written by a committee made up of 91 and 97 percent men, respectively.

“The AASHTO recommendations may have been influenced by the predominantly male composition (more than 90%) of the report’s authors,” Lusk writes.

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Via Twitter, here’s Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer and crew gearing up for Bike to Work Day in Queens this morning.

Don’t forget to share your pictures of today’s commute by adding the “Streetsblog” tag on Flickr or emailing us at tips@streetsblog.org.

Any other electeds make the ride to work today?

Happy Bike to Work Day, everyone. How about this sunshine?

My gut assessment of the bike traffic this morning, based on watching the Manhattan Bridge for a few minutes at around 8:45: More people biking than on a typical day, but the scene was not so different than what you’d see on other clear, spring weekday mornings. Platoons of ten or so cyclists aren’t an uncommon sight on the Manhattan Bridge during the a.m. rush these days.

Meanwhile, reports from the Hudson River Greenway suggest that bike traffic there was much higher than usual this morning. You can share your pictures of today’s commute by adding the “Streetsblog” tag on Flickr or emailing tips@streetsblog.org.

Thanks as always to the TransAlt volunteers who got up early to hand out nourishment to bike commuters. That cold brew coffee really hit the spot.

Update: Here’s some video of people heading into Manhattan on the bridge from Brooklyn Spoke’s Doug Gordon, shot a little after 9 a.m. Definitely more people on bikes than I normally see:

New York City Housing Authority tenants are now eligible to sign up for discounted Citi Bike memberships in a program that was first announced last month. Joining the service costs NYCHA residents $60 per year, $35 less than the standard price. All 29 NYCHA properties in the Citi Bike service area have at least one station a block away or closer.

Tenants must use their NYCHA account number and date of birth to qualify for the discount. Citi Bike is open to anyone age 16 or older, although it requires a credit or debit card to sign up for the service.

Bike-share systems across the country have seen low ridership among communities of color and poorer residents, especially those without access to credit cards or bank accounts. In Washington, DC, Capital Bikeshare has partnered with a program that connects low-income people to banking institutions, while Boston subsidizes memberships for low-income residents through its public health commission.

In Minneapolis, one of the biggest barriers to low-income users looking to purchase a daily or weekly pass — a credit card “authorization hold” to safeguard against theft — was reduced and eventually eliminated after bike theft turned out not to be a problem. In New York, Citi Bike will require a $101 authorization hold.

To further lower the barriers to using bike-share, Citi Bike has partnered with credit unions serving low-income populations, known as Community Development Credit Unions, to offer a discount to credit union members. So far, Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union and NYU Federal Credit Union are participating.

Update: “We plan to do at least one outreach meeting/helmet fitting a week at a NYCHA property in the service area all summer long,” DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow said to Streetsblog via e-mail, adding that there have been bike-share informational events at Farragut Houses, Smith Houses, Elliott Houses, and other NYCHA properties in English, Chinese and Spanish beginning in 2011.

There’s a tussle going on right now about how cyclists should ride on city streets. Yesterday’s Streetsblog Network post took a snapshot of this debate yesterday, excerpting the WashCycle’s response to a Sarah Goodyear piece in Atlantic Cities.

Sarah wrote that cycling is no longer a mode for daredevils and mavericks weaving through traffic. Some cities now have street infrastructure that accommodates cyclists and guards their safety. Bicycling is increasingly incorporated into the transportation system in these cities, and as such, cyclists need to follow the rules.

Few people would contest the idea that for the transportation system to function well and safely, drivers need to abide by the rules of the road. It’s obvious that when drivers break the rules, the consequences are dire, since they’re operating a heavy vehicle capable of high speeds.

But safety isn’t the only issue. The orderly functioning of our streets is also a priority of planners, and should be a priority for all of us. When the signal says walk, we ought to know that we can walk without being hit by a motorist — or a cyclist — who’s decided that the rules don’t apply to him.

“I am truly sick, at this late date, of people wanting to have it both ways: calling for protected bike lanes and a bike-share system, demanding that cops step up enforcement when it comes to cars, and then blithely salmoning up a major thoroughfare and expecting everyone look the other way,” Sarah writes. “It makes all of us look terrible and it’s a real hazard.”

She also claims that cyclists aren’t special and don’t deserve their own rules. I part ways with her there. Riding a bike doesn’t make you special because it’s badass or good for the environment. It’s special because roads designed exclusively for automobiles don’t work well for cycling. And we should advocate for rules and infrastructure that safely accommodate sustainable and efficient modes of transportation at least as much as destructive and polluting ones.

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The Hudson River Greenway between 133rd Street and 135th Street in West Harlem is closed until December, with users instructed to use 12th Avenue as a detour during the greenway’s busiest warm-weather months.

Detour signage has been placed on the greenway as users approach the closed section, though our tipsters said there was no warning signage in advance of the closure.

The closed section is along a seawall bulkhead, while nearby sections are not immediately adjacent to the riverfront. It also passes a Department of Sanitation facility and a natural gas facility, both of which are located on the river and connected to the path by pier structures.

This isn’t the first time the Parks Department, which manages the Hudson River Greenway, has shut down sections of this key cycling artery to Upper Manhattan. A few years ago, Parks banned biking on greenway access paths linking to Riverside Park, but later reversed the decision. Last year, rehabilitation of a bridge over the Amtrak corridor threatened to shut the path entirely north of the George Washington Bridge. After a nor’easter last November, the the department decided to shut the path altogether.

Streetsblog has asked the Parks Department why the path is closed and what kind of work will be taking place there. We’ll let you know if we hear anything back. Update: A utility company will be performing construction work at the site, according to Parks Department spokesperson Phil Abramson. “The work is not happening on parks property but they need room for construction staging,” he wrote in an e-mail.

New York in 1993 has been a topic of discussion since the New Museum opened its exhibit exploring the city of two decades ago. Now, another time capsule has been unearthed: a promotional video from Transportation Alternatives inviting New Yorkers to take part in Bike to Work Week.

While some things have remained the same — bike commuters can still score some free coffee and breakfast on Friday morning — the city’s streets and physical landscape have changed. Noah Budnick from Transportation Alternatives and Clarence Eckerson from Streetfilms both pointed out that some of the video was shot along the West Side Highway before Hudson River Park was built on land that had been parking lots.

For more information on the 2013 edition of Bike to Work Day, you don’t have to pick up your landline and call TA’s office. Instead, direct your computer (or phone) to the Bike to Work Day website for the complete schedule.

Daily News reporter Simone Weichselbaum likes her bikes light and fast. The self-proclaimed “proud bike snob who is rarely without her SE Draft steel-frame fixie” said in 2009 that “biking here can be a death sentence,” and that bike lanes are “battle zones.”

So it’s no surprise that Citi Bike — featuring a 45-pound three-speed with balloon tires and a low center of gravity — wasn’t her cup of tea. What she intended as a scathing review of the bike-share two-wheelers might turn out to be their best endorsement yet.

“The seat is wide and spongy. The handlebars are extra wide. The tires are fat,” Weischelbaum wrote, as if it were a bad thing. If even the Daily News’s resident bike daredevil couldn’t manage to do much beyond an easy pedal on a Citi Bike, it’s hard to see how the unfounded nightmare visions of “hell on wheels” conjured by the paper’s editorial board could come true.

To be fair, Weichselbaum did run into a common problem when she tried to take the bike out of its dock, but only because she was doing it the wrong way. “The thing wouldn’t move. I kept yanking on the handlebars. Nothing,” she wrote. If she had followed instructions printed on the bike and lifted by the seat instead of the handlebars, she could have saved herself the trouble.

Bicycling should be for everyone, not just people who keep a fixie in their apartment for a high-speed, high-stakes experience. For those just looking to get around town safely, cheaply and quickly, Weichselbaum’s review shows that Citi Bike should be exactly what they need.

Across the street from Grand Central, a new pedestrian plaza is being installed this afternoon. Jonny Hamilton, who works nearby, snapped this short video of DOT workers laying down the new surface at Pershing Square between 42nd and 41st Streets, on the east side of the Park Avenue viaduct.

Once the plaza is installed, the block will also receive two bike-share stations with 59 docks each, making it the city’s biggest bike-share hub.

An airport bus stop was relocated to accommodate the plaza and bike-share stations, ”turning that street essentially into a bike-share plaza that would really allow it to be a gateway to Grand Central,” DOT’s Kate Fillin-Yeh said at a bike-share planning meeting with Community Board 5 last year.

On the other side of the viaduct, Hamilton said the southbound block of Park Avenue didn’t get attention from DOT crews today, but it will soon: a plaza plan in the works for that block since 1987 is scheduled to begin construction next year. The space will be managed by the Grand Central Partnership business improvement district.

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