Streetsblog New York City

The New York City Department of Transportation is nurturing a culture of safer streets that it expects to outlast the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, DOT policy director Jon Orcutt said at last Friday’s Regional Plan Association annual assembly.

Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, where DOT installed the city's first on-street, two-way protected bike lane in 2009. Photo: Ben Fried

Speaking at a panel on the politics of multi-modal streets, Orcutt described Bloomberg’s PlaNYC as a “mandate” not only to modernize city transportation policy, but to “reinvent the public realm.” Building on infrastructure improvements that came about prior to the era of Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, including East River bridge bike paths and the west side Greenway, DOT’s physically separated bike paths and other more recent innovations have made cycling more accessible, Orcutt said, and have helped double the city-wide bike count over the last five years.

“One of the ideas here,” said Orcutt, “is you don’t have to be an endurance athlete or some kind of risk-taker to ride a bike around town.”

Fellow panelist and city traffic guru “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz recalled the now-infamous yarn of how Mayor Ed Koch ripped up protected bike lanes on Fifth and Sixth Avenues in 1980, following a spate of fatal cyclist-pedestrian collisions and a visit from President Jimmy Carter. As the story goes, Koch, Carter and Governor Hugh Carey were riding through Manhattan in Carter’s limo when Carey, in reference to the bike lanes, said to the president: “See how Ed is pissing away your money?” The lanes were removed a month after they were installed.

Schwartz cited the late 60s experiment that closed Central Park to cars from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., undone after Abe Beame’s wife got stuck in Manhattan traffic, and Rudy Giuliani’s Midtown pedestrian corrals, still in place today. To Schwartz, these are cautionary tales that point to the fluid nature of city transportation policy.

But Orcutt made a convincing case that the current effort has taken root. Last year’s media-fomented “bikelash” had the unintended effect of arousing public interest in bike lanes when many New Yorkers might otherwise have been indifferent, he said. When opinion polls consistently showed overwhelming support for bike infrastructure, said Orcutt, the negative stories disappeared. The anti-bike propaganda push, he said, “sowed the seeds of its own demise.”

As the city has added 200 miles of bike lanes, Orcutt said, communities are lining up to request public space improvements. With bike-share to launch this summer, some 10,000 sites were suggested for 600 stations. Pedestrian plazas are popular with business groups that understand the value of foot traffic, and more applications have been submitted than DOT can accommodate. “People are coming to us and asking for these things,” said Orcutt.

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Photo: TNoble2008/Flickr

Looks like the concrete has been poured for new pedestrian refuges on First Avenue in the 60s.

Courtesy of Flickr user TNoble2008, who reports that the construction work extends up to 70th Street, here are some more shots of the progress on the Upper East Side’s first protected bike lane. Apparently the markings and refuges aren’t finished yet but some blocks are already rideable.

If you have Flickr photos you’d like to share with us, add the “Streetsblog” tag.

Photo: TNoble2008/Flickr

Photo: TNoble2008/Flickr

Under one recommendation from DOT's new West Side transportation study, paint would be used to channelize a block of 66th Street from three lanes down to two.

The Department of Transportation has completed a multi-year transportation study of the Upper West Side, and Wednesday night the agency walked local residents through the many proposed changes [PDF]. The suggestions for the area between 55th and 86th Streets, west of Central Park, include a number of valuable intersection-level improvements to pedestrian safety, but left some feeling that the recommendations don’t go far enough.

Locals hoping to expand the protected bike lane network on the Upper West Side beyond the current mile of cycle track on Columbus Avenue were initially disappointed; the West Side study doesn’t so much as mention new bike lanes. When pressed on the issue during the Q&A, however, DOT reps gave residents looking to expand the bike lane’s safety benefits cause for optimism. “We are interested in increasing the bike network in this community,” said DOT Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione.

Forgione said DOT is finishing up a final evaluation of the existing Columbus Avenue bike lane and plans to show the new data to the local community board. Then, she said, DOT wants “to have the board help define where we go next.” The two options she mentioned Wednesday were extending the Columbus Avenue lane and creating a northbound match on Amsterdam.

Included in last night’s presentation were a host of smaller safety improvements. “This is not the sexiest,” warned Council Member Gale Brewer, who provided the original impetus for the study.

Two striped islands on West End Avenue at 58th and 59th Streets would be converted into concrete refuge islands, for example, to provide real physical protection to crossing pedestrians.

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Bus bulbs were to be added to First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service in 2011, but will be coming this year instead. Image: NYC DOT

Since 2010, rapid bus service has been running on Manhattan’s First and Second Avenues. By nearly all accounts, it’s been a success. Bus speeds are up 15 percent. Faster trips mean that the M15 has defied the trend of sinking ridership on Manhattan buses, adding 4,000 more passengers per day.

But the bus could be running even more quickly and smoothly. When M15 Select Bus Service started running a year and a half ago, the Department of Transportation hadn’t yet installed the full package of improvements for the corridor. Two features in particular were scheduled to be added as follow-up items: bus bulbs and transit signal priority.

A presentation shown to the project’s community advisory committee last April promised that both those improvements would be added starting in 2011, with the installation of bus bulbs continuing through this year. That hasn’t happened yet, a DOT spokesperson confirmed, though the wait for further enhancements may not be much longer. DOT said the bus bulbs would be fully installed by the end of this year, but did not comment on the timeline for signal priority.

Once completed, the two improvements will make traveling on First and Second Avenue even better. Bus bulbs — sidewalk extensions into the street at bus stops — keep bus shelters and ticket machines out of the way of pedestrian traffic. And by allowing buses to load passengers without having to pull to the curb and back into traffic, they also make for faster rides. The MTA has estimated that adding bus bulbs would shave about 10 seconds off each stop along the planned Nostrand Avenue SBS route in Brooklyn.

Transit signal priority, planned for the M15 between Houston Street and South Ferry, gives buses approaching intersections a little more green time. The MTA predicted that signal priority would save Nostrand Avenue bus riders another half a minute for every mile they travel.

Those kinds of time savings, which add up quickly over a year’s worth of travel, are better late than never.

New paint and flexible posts made this traffic island at Prospect Park Southwest into a place pedestrians might actually stop mid-crossing.

An enthused Windsor Terrace resident sends this photo of an upgraded intersection at the corner of Prospect Park Southwest, Terrace Place, and Windsor Place. Over the last week, DOT has touched up what was once a widely-disregarded traffic island comprised of faded white paint. Now the island has been repainted with a high-visibility surface and surrounded with flexible posts for added definition.

The geometry of the intersection hasn’t changed, but the quality of walking here sure has. Our tipster says cars used to whip around the corner when turning left from Prospect Park Southwest at the complicated three-way intersection; with the improvements to the island, pedestrians can cross much more comfortably. An image of what the intersection used to look like is below:

Image: Google Street View

In a few weeks, the bike-share station map that accompanies this legend will be available online. Image: NYC DOT

After several months of public meetings and online feedback on bike-share station siting, NYC DOT is beginning to tour community boards with preliminary station maps in preparation for launching North America’s most expansive bike-share system this July.

Yesterday evening, NYC DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt walked the transportation and public safety committee of Manhattan Community Board 3 through the current station siting plan for the district, showing roughly a dozen map segments with a handful of stations pinpointed on each. The agency will be making adjustments to the station plan based on feedback from community board members. A preliminary station map of the whole service area will be available online in the next few weeks, Orcutt said, and the system is on track to launch sometime in July.

In the CB 3 district, which encompasses Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the East Village, DOT aimed to put most stations on the street in response to the board’s request to avoid taking up sidewalk space. The committee was pleased with the site selection, with District Manager Susan Stetzer saying the agency did “a good job” of locating stations. Community board members suggested a few places to add stations and one or two sites they’d like to see shifted elsewhere. Overall they seemed pretty jazzed about getting bike-share up and running.

DOT is waiting until they’ve completed the entire system map before posting station locations online, so I don’t have a map to share, but here are a few takeaways from last night’s presentation.

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Cross-posted from Brooklyn Spoke.

DOT's original April 2010 plan for a two-way protected bike lane on Plaza Street.

In April 2010, DOT proposed an overhaul of the chaotic and dangerous Grand Army Plaza to include two-way protected bike lanes on Plaza Street East and West. (Plaza Street is not the high-speed roadway around the arch and fountain, but rather the less trafficked outer roadways, which already have one-way buffered bike lanes. Plaza Street is fronted on one side by residential buildings and on the other side by planted berms.)  DOT’s proposal [PDF] used the existing footprint of the bike lane and parking lane, as well as two more feet from the very wide moving lane, to flip the parking lane and bike lane, putting a two-way bike lane against the berm side of Plaza Street, protected by parked cars — a design nearly identical to that of the redesigned Prospect Park West.

DOT’s Grand Army Plaza overhaul was eventually constructed in 2011 minus the protected bike lanes, some say as a result of the political blowback from the Prospect Park West bike lane lawsuit.  With the suit now dismissed and the safety and congestion fears of bike lane opponents completely discredited, DOT will re-introduce a proposal for two-way bike lanes around Plaza Street. However, the Brooklyn Paper and other sources indicate that the city might propose two alternatives: one protected by parked cars, as in the 2010 plan, and one unprotected (yet still two-way). This is odd, given the phenomenal success of the Prospect Park West redesign; a meeting next week may be the public’s only chance to speak out for a well-designed, safe, protected bike lane on Plaza Street.

An unprotected two-way lane would essentially take over the existing bike lane’s footprint, with a painted buffer between the bike lane and moving vehicles and bright green paint on the bike lane itself, but would not alter the position of parked cars on the street. This presents a bit of a conundrum: how can DOT protect contra-flow cyclists from moving vehicles, and where does DOT expect cyclists to ride while the bike lane is blocked by double-parked vehicles, motorists awaiting parking spaces, and drivers (quite legally) entering and leaving parking spaces?

It appears that the unprotected proposal is, at least in part, a response to a few local residents’ concerns that relocating parked cars would narrow the roadway on Plaza Street and cause traffic backups every time someone double parks.  But this concern fails on two levels. First, even with a protected bike lane, much of Plaza Street would still remain wide enough to accommodate a double parked vehicle and room for motorists to pass — and emergency vehicles could legally drive in a protected bike lane at any time if they needed to. Second, and perhaps more importantly, since when do we design our streets primarily to facilitate illegal and anti-social acts of double parking, as opposed to protecting our most vulnerable street users?

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A detail from the official 2012 bike map, released today.

2011 wasn’t New York City’s biggest year for bike lanes. After building around 50 lane-miles a year since 2007, DOT only built 8.7 lane miles last year, thanks in large part to the sustained political and media attack on bike infrastructure that peaked that year.

Even so, the bicycle network is a little bit bigger and better than before, so regular cyclists are going to want to get their hands on this year’s official bike map, released today. You can download the PDF on DOT’s website, here.

We particularly enjoyed seeing the First and Second Avenue bike lanes creep northward and new and improved Queens approach to the Queensboro Bridge.

Here’s looking forward to a 2013 map that not only has a bevy of new green, red and orange lines, but 600 bike-share stations marked off as well.

Upgrading the Plaza Street bike lane would provide safer connections between the many bike lanes feeding into Grand Army Plaza.

Is the NBBL era finally behind us? First, Senator Chuck Schumer himself was spotted riding in the Prospect Park West bike lane. Now, the Department of Transportation is reviving a plan, shelved at the height of the NBBL-aided media circus about cycling, to build a two-way bike lane on Plaza Street.

DOT first proposed the two-way Plaza Street lane in 2010, as part of a larger set of improvements to Grand Army Plaza. The package got an enthusiastic reception from a joint meeting of Community Boards 6, 8 and 9, and most of the pedestrian and bike improvements in the plan went forward in 2011, but the Plaza Street lane didn’t make it.

The plan for a protected Plaza Street lane happened to be under discussion at the height of the political assault on the nearby Prospect Park West lane. DOT moved ahead with the Grand Army Plaza proposal last April, without the Plaza Street bike lane, promising to revisit the discussion at an unspecified later date. At the time, Streetsblog called it the “NBBL Effect.”

As first reported by Brownstoner, that later date is now. DOT will present local community boards with multiple options for providing two-way bike access on Plaza Street later this month, said a department spokesperson. “We have continued to work with the community on ways to improve bike access and look forward to presenting options at next month’s meeting,” DOT said in a statement.

The Brooklyn Paper reports that both protected and unprotected options will be on the table. Craig Hammerman, district manager for Community Board 6, hasn’t seen the plans yet, but guessed that any proposal from DOT will differ at least slightly from what was put forward two years ago.

The two-way bike lane would be an important hub in the area’s bike network, allowing cyclists to travel safely and easily between the various bike lanes that extend from Grand Army Plaza in every direction.

Image: NYC DOT

Manhattan Community Board 3 signed off on a package of safety improvements for deadly Delancey Street Tuesday night, according to State Senator Daniel Squadron’s office. The plan, presented by NYC DOT in February, narrows the crossing distance at 14 out of 19 intersections between the Williamsburg Bridge and the Bowery, but doesn’t substantially alter signal timing or traffic lanes heading to and from the bridge. It’s the low-hanging fruit to prevent deaths and injuries on a street that sees a horrific amount of carnage.

Every year, dozens of pedestrians and cyclists are injured or killed on Delancey — 134 between 2008 and 2010 alone, according to Transportation Alternatives. In the past year, drivers on Delancey took the lives of pedestrians Dashane Santana and Patricia Cuevas and cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod.

Since last September a coalition of elected officials, community groups, and advocates under the umbrella of the Delancey Street Safety Working Group have been pushing for changes. Squadron’s office, which convened the working group, said work on the safety improvements is expected to begin in June.

“Our work doesn’t end here,” Squadron said in the statement, “and our working group will continue to study and improve Delancey and its surrounding streets to prevent future tragedies and protect pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.”