Streetsblog New York City

…and NYC’s first bike corral fills up with a dozen bicycles faster than you can parallel park an Escalade.

Reader Jeremy Charette sends this shot from the corner of Smith Street and Sackett Street in Brooklyn, where a crew was installing what I believe to be a genuine first for NYC: on-street bike parking.

Eight bike racks are getting bolted into the blacktop in what’s currently a no-standing zone. In addition to the added convenience of the bike parking, anchoring the racks in the pavement will keep the sidewalk uncluttered and prevent illegally idling and/or parked cars from obscuring sightlines at the intersection.

The safety dividend should be significant, Jeremy writes:

Since I moved in seven years ago, I’ve seen countless car accidents at the corner of Smith and Sackett in Brooklyn. Problem is, drivers coming from Sackett Street can’t see around parked cars on the Southeast corner of the intersection, making it a blind corner. Cars tend to roll through the stop sign on Sackett Street, and at least 1 or 2 a year get t-boned by vehicles coming down Smith Street.

This year they finally put up a “no standing” sign for the two spots before the corner, but cars and trucks STILL park there!

I came out this morning to find this! They’ve painted the no parking zone, put up a curb, and are installing bike racks!

In Portland they call this on-street parking set-up a bike corral. NYC DOT has reclaimed curb space for bike parking before, but that always entailed building out the sidewalk, which is pleasant but comes at a considerable expense. This new treatment effectively preserves pedestrian space too, at a much lower cost. (There’s also a hybrid treatment at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, where DOT added bike parking to an epoxy-and-gravel sidewalk extension.)

It’s great to see bike corrals arrive in NYC.

Hundreds of defunct parking meters are on their way to a second life as bike racks. Reader Joanna Oltman Smith sends this photo of DOT handiwork on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where the columns of defunct coin-slot meters have been awaiting rebirth as bike racks for some time. Muni meters took over many blocks on Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue in conjunction with the Park Smart program.

These new racks should relieve some of the pressure on the neighborhood’s bus stop poles, parking regulation poles, and conventional bike racks, which tend to swell over capacity with bicycles during times of peak usage.

More bike parking should also be coming to the Upper West Side, where 240 meters are slated for conversion to bike racks, and Madison Avenue, which is where DOT’s meters-to-bike racks project got underway in 2009.

Well, this doesn’t make up for the eminent domain abuse, inexcusable subsidies-slash-dealmaking, crappy urban design and extensive surface parking acreage, but the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay reminds us that the Brooklyn basketball arena financed by Bruce Ratner, Mikhail Prokhorov, and the taxpayers of New York State will include 400 bike parking spaces.

Gay’s report on yesterday’s media event announcing the arena’s opening date of September 28, 2012 has some sharp commentary on NYC’s media-fueled bike bashing:

On Monday I rode my bike in Brooklyn, because I live there, and because that’s what terrible people do in Brooklyn — load up their hemp backpacks with baguettes and copies of “Das Kapital” and ride their bikes everywhere, ruining civic life in New York City.

But lo, the outlaw behavior gets crazier. I rode my Satan bike in a Satanic bike lane to see the Nets.

P.J. O’Rourke take note: This is great satire.

With the opening of the 18,000-seat arena less than 18 months away and the Nets saying that it will host 200 events a year, 400 bike parking spaces will come in handy. But what about those oceans of surface parking? There must be a better way to plan for people to get to the arena than to invite thousands of car trips to one of the most transit- and bike-accessible sites in the entire city. Streetsblog will be taking a closer look at the Atlantic Yards transportation equation in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned.

If you did and you woke up on Sunday to find your tires shredded, you can find the backstory on the Brooklynian forum. Apparently, a misanthropic type went on a bike tire slashing spree Saturday night along Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. A witness reports seeing “an older man in a hooded sweatshirt, looking like a Jawa, stealthily slashing each bike as he passed” before entering St. Joseph’s Apartments on Dean Street.

In other news, we recently heard from a reader that bike owners can get a pretty good deal on monthly parking at the garage on Underhill and St. Marks. With some haggling, you might be able to work out a price that beats Edison ParkFast’s $20/month rate.

The combination of the Bicycle Access to Garages law and the market’s invisible hand are bringing cheap bike parking to locations across Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. As of last month, every garage operated by Edison ParkFast, one of the largest parking companies in the city, is offering bike parking at the rate of $1 per day or $20 per month.

Edison was already offering bike parking at its larger garages, said Executive Vice-President for Parking Ben Feigenbaum, due to the requirements of the Bicycle Access to Garages law, passed last August. That law required all public lots with over 100 spaces to provide parking for bikes, allowing garages to set their own rates. “We attracted virtually no customers,” said Feigenbaum.

The bikes-in-garages law is set to take full effect later this year, covering all lots with 50 or more spaces — meaning every Edison lot. Rather than wait until that deadline hit, said Feigenbaum, Edison is trying to figure out how to make the economics of bike parking work now. “We need to offer low enough rates to see if people are really interested,” he explained.

So far, said Feigenbaum, “there’s been a few more people that have come out of the woodwork to park” their bikes, but most racks remain empty.

Why the low interest in what seems like a pretty good deal (especially compared to the exorbitant rates we’ve found at some garages)? It may be that potential customers haven’t learned about the offer yet. People may also be reluctant to pay for bike parking when some of the same signs advertising low prices tell cyclists that they park at their own risk. On top of that, cyclists have to bring their own locks. So even if prices are down, the added security of going to a garage isn’t as high as it could be.

The Department of Sanitation has backed off its controversial plan to remove ghost bikes from the streets of New York, relenting to a public outcry in favor of the memorials to cyclists killed while riding. Proposed rules governing the removal of derelict bicycles released in June would have taken away even the best-maintained memorials, but the final version published on Friday [PDF] specifically carves out an exemption for ghost bikes.

Originally, Sanitation was only going to spare what it called “ghost riders” for an extra few weeks. Ghost bikes would have been removed thirty days after being tagged with a notice, compared to five days for ordinary derelict bikes. The new rules, however, include a specific exemption for (the now-properly named) ghost bikes in the definition of what counts as a derelict bike. A statement attached to the rules declares that “under these rules ghost bikes will never be deemed to be derelict.”

This is a victory almost entirely attributable to the bike activists who mobilized over the issue. The revisions were made solely “based on the written comments and the public hearing that we had,” said a spokeperson from the Sanitation Department, which received over 250 comments on the proposed rules.

Read more…

A tipster sends this picture of one of the city’s new bike racks that, someway, somehow, got wrenched out of the pavement. We’re told that the sidewalk at Fulton Street and Rockwell Place in Brooklyn had a big chunk missing where the bike rack would have been.

After this bike rack design won a 2008 competition to replace the U-rack as the city’s standard unit of on-street bike parking, NYC DOT committed to installing 5,000 of them within three years.

I don’t know what tore this one out. Maybe a car ran up on the sidewalk and knocked it loose, or maybe someone yanked it out with their bare hands. If it was vandalism, the nice thing about this rack design is that, unlike a U-rack, ripping it out of the sidewalk doesn’t really help someone steal the bike. Still, it seems like the bolts anchoring this thing in the ground could stand to be sturdier.

If you see a busted bike rack, here’s where to report it to NYC DOT.

Last Saturday, ten cyclists returned to where they had parked their bikes in Hudson River Park to find them gone. They had been attached to a railing along the river and, as reported in Gothamist, confiscated by the park.

By Hudson River Park regulations -- the park isn't run by the city Parks Department -- bikes may only be parked at a bike rack. "Bike racks are designed to have bikes locked to it; our railings and lightposts are not," explained Hudson River Park spokesman David Katz. "This was an iron railing. It's going to get scratched. It's going to get scuffed."

According to Katz, the bikes had been locked to the sea wall railing near Leroy Street for around two and a half hours when park enforcement officials decided they had to go. Katz claims that staff asked nearby park users, including those in the dog run and at Pier 40's athletic fields, if the bikes were theirs. When no one claimed them, they cut through the locks and took them to the park headquarters inside Pier 40. "Since they are in violation of park regulations," added Katz, "they are summonsed."

Ultimately, all ten bikes were reclaimed, said Katz. The owners had all been on a cruise together on the nearby Queen of Hearts boat.

The Gothamist report pointed a finger at the park for not notifying the cyclists that their property was about to be seized. In particular, the lack of signs announcing the rule was seen to make the seizure unfair. Katz claimed that the rule was prominently displayed. "There are large signs at every entrance to the park," he said, including the bike parking rule along with other regulations. 

Read more...

When the MTA service cuts took effect last month, 570 bus stops around the city suddenly became a collective no-man's land. Buses weren't pulling up to the curb anymore, creating an irresistible vacuum for motorists. If you belong to a neighborhood message board or listserve, you may have come across a few dispatches from car owners salivating over the prospect of more parking.

Maybe it's impolitic to discuss how to use this space while the pain of the service cuts still stings, but the NYPD isn't waiting to manage all that real estate: They've stopped ticketing motorists for parking in the bus stops. Acres of space that used to accommodate transit riders are now de facto parking spots.

We reported in May that this is mostly what the city has in mind anyway. DOT's plan is to turn most bus stops into parking spaces, or convert them to loading zones where deemed necessary. At a meeting of Brooklyn Community Board 6 last night, a DOT representative reiterated the department's intention to primarily use the bus stops for storing private vehicles. He also expressed some openness to installing bike parking in the bus shelters, but not on the street itself.

While the loading zones will help reduce double-parking, it looks like we're still on track for a significant redistribution of public space that won't benefit the 55.7 percent of New York households which don't own a car. 

It doesn't have to end up this way. In San Francisco, the city took some highly visible steps to convert defunct bus stops to non-automotive uses. Some bus stops were re-purposed as bike corrals, with secure parking for six to twelve bikes at each stop. Elsewhere, they used the free space to shuffle around the street's parking spaces and install a "parklet," a temporary public plaza built along the curb.

This is an important time to act on the idea, exemplified by Summer Streets, that streets form the bulk of the city's public space and belong to everyone. Here are a few treatments that would make life better for New York's car-free majority:

• At dangerous intersections, shift the parking spaces around so that the pedestrian crossings are daylighted, allowing drivers and peds to see each other better
• If a BID or other group can maintain the space, set it off with planters and add some seating
• On streets with lots of foot traffic, designate official zones for food vendors
• We said it before but it just makes so much sense: bike corrals

DOT has figured out how to do some pretty ingenious things with newly available curbside space, and really, the only equitable way to divide up these stops would be to devote most of them to car-free uses. New Yorkers who don't own cars shouldn't be shut out of using our old bus stops.