Streetsblog New York City

Last night, the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 7 signed off on plans for more bike racks on the Upper West Side and the neighborhood’s first on-street bike corral. The two resolutions mustered more than enough support to overwhelm the objections of committee co-chair Dan Zweig, and both will advance to the full committee in December.

DOT's Jennifer Harris-Hernandez presents the plan for an on-street bike corral at Broadway and West 105th Street last night.

DOT has installed five on-street bike corrals in Manhattan, but none on the Upper West Side. The corner of Broadway and West 105th Street, in front of Henry’s Restaurant, would be the neighborhood’s first.

“It’s replacing a parking spot that we just gained from the change to muni-meter,” restaurant owner Henry Rinehart told Streetsblog. “Any time you turn a parking spot into a bike corral, you have a net gain of seven to nine potential customers.”

DOT’s Jennifer Harris-Hernandez explained that the corral design includes planters as protective barriers, though the committee’s resolution, approved 7-1 with one abstention, asked DOT to swap out the planters for more bike racks after some meeting attendees said the space was needed for more bike parking. Zweig was the lone vote against the bike corral.

The committee also considered a list of potential bike rack locations compiled by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign, whose volunteers had fanned out across the neighborhood to identify 136 spots that are both in need of bike parking and meet DOT’s CityRack installation standards.

The UWS Streets Renaissance sent business owners a letter informing them that the sidewalk in front of their establishment had been identified as a potential bike rack location, asking if they wanted to opt out of the program in advance of last night’s meeting. After 45 businesses opted out, the remaining 91 bike rack locations were presented to the committee.

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Looks like Queens Community Board 1 has some competition when it comes to irrational opposition to on-street bike parking. DNAinfo reports that a proposed bike corral at Wyckoff Avenue and Starr Street in Bushwick has some detractors at Brooklyn Community Board 4.

“The transportation will be disrupted…and anyone hit by a car or bike coming out of that parking lot for bikes has to fend for himself,” worried Eliseo Ruiz, the transportation committee’s chair. “It looks like this is just going to be storage for bikes.”

Excellent points here. Also: Anyone struck by a meteor coming out of that parking lot for bikes has to fend for himself. Anyone attacked by a bear coming out of that parking lot for bikes has to fend for himself. And anyone crushed by a falling piano coming out of that parking lot for bikes has to fend for himself.

It is, after all, just storage for bikes. Watch out!

A fearsome "parking lot for bikes" on Smith Street. Photo: Jeremy Charette

The Mayor’s Management Report, an annual summation of how well city agencies are doing their jobs, includes bad news for traffic safety and sustainable streets. In the last fiscal year, traffic fatalities were at their highest level since 2008, and NYPD moving violations summonses were at a 10-year low. Meanwhile, DOT missed its bike lane and bike rack goals for the year.

NYPD is issuing fewer tickets for moving violations than at any time in the past ten years. That doesn't mean the streets are safer. Photo: Global Jet on Flickr

The total number of traffic crashes dropped for the second year in a row, falling 1.5 percent from last year. DOT says that crashes were most prevalent on highways and during overnight hours, with more than half of motorist or passenger fatalities due to speeding, drunk driving and running red lights or stop signs.

Traffic crashes killed 176 cyclists and pedestrians in FY 2012, up from 158 in 2011, and 115 motorists and vehicle passengers, up from 78 the year before. More than half of the increase in motorist fatalities were motorcyclists. This 23 percent jump in total traffic fatalities comes after four years of decline.

NYPD issued fewer moving violations summonses in the past year than at any time since 2002. Summonses for cell phone use while driving fell to their lowest level since 2005. While the report tells us how many tickets officers are writing, it does little to illuminate whether compliance with traffic laws is getting better or worse.

Transportation Alternatives was critical of police traffic enforcement. “Since January 1, 2012, the NYPD wrote 28 percent fewer tickets for speeding, the number one killer in traffic, as tinted windows,” TA noted.

DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow said that the traffic fatality numbers show the need for ”legislation in Albany to expand red-light cameras and install the city’s first speed cameras.”

DOT failed to meet its own targets for bike lane and bike rack installation, according to the report. The agency barely reached half its annual goal of 50 lane miles, with 25.8 miles of bike lane in 2012, of which 4.7 lane miles were protected bike lanes.

The agency also fell short of its goal of 1,500 new bike racks per year, installing 1,286 bike racks. That’s down by more than 50 percent from the year before. DOT said that development of the meter rack and StreetRack programs slowed progress this year, and said the agency anticipates to pick up the pace for bike rack installations in the future.

Borough President Marty Markowitz wants to reduce parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn, and he thinks developers should be able to convert existing parking spots to other uses.

The area of downtown Brooklyn rezoned in 2004 will be affected by DCP's proposed parking rule changes.

This spring the Department of City Planning unveiled a plan to cut Downtown Brooklyn’s onerous parking requirements in half, and Markowitz’s recommendations [PDF] are the latest step on the way to enacting some type of reform. In some respects, his preferred parking reforms go farther than DCP’s original proposal and a resolution passed by Community Board 2 this summer. The borough president wants to retroactively apply the reduced parking minimums to downtown Brooklyn properties developed since 2001, condition the relaxed parking requirements for new development on the inclusion of affordable housing units, and increase the requirements for bicycle parking.

While this bodes well for Downtown Brooklyn parking reform, it also indicates that DCP didn’t aim very high with its original proposal. With local Council Member Steve Levin being an early proponent of reform, perhaps the complete elimination of Downtown Brooklyn parking requirements would have stood a chance.

Markowitz’s bike parking recommendation is attracting the most attention this week, but his most significant request may be to retroactively apply the new parking rules to any development built since 2001, which would allow parking spaces that currently sit empty to be converted to more productive uses. Markowitz’s position goes farther than Community Board 2, whose land use committee voted 9-2 in June to support retroactive application only for projects that included an affordable housing component, after a vote to apply the rules to all existing development failed.

Markowitz does not go so far as to support removing parking minimums entirely. “We should not make future plans based on initial trends of the past decade,” he states in the letter. Arguing that the area may attract residents in the future who “will view access to automobiles in a different light,” Markowitz says that one of the country’s most transit-rich neighborhoods needs parking mandates in cases when “public transportation is inadequate for the intended journey.”

And in fact he’d like to attach some conditions to relaxed parking minimums in new development. Echoing CB 2, Markowitz wants the zoning code to create further incentive for developers to utilize the inclusionary housing program, by triggering the reduced parking requirements for market-rate units only if at least 20 percent of a project’s units are affordable. It should be noted that lowering parking minimums is, on its own merits, a way to reduce the cost of housing.

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Earlier this week, East Village blogger EV Grieve posted the above picture of an Astor Place bike rack scheduled for removal. He surmised that the bike rack could have been on the way out to make room for the 55-dock bike-share station planned for the location, but fear not: No such personal bike vs. shared bike parking fight is going down.

According to a DOT spokesperson, the rack is being temporarily removed in order to make room for a Summer Streets activity station. The city’s marquee car-free streets event runs down Park Avenue and Lafayette Street and the open expanse that is Astor Place is a perfect spot to place attractions like a “Cyclo-Phone” and to hold some on-street sunrise salutations. The bike racks will be back after the final Summer Streets installment on August 18.

Streetsblog’s own theory about the not-quite-mysterious bike rack removal didn’t pan out either. The city’s plan to reclaim thousands of square feet of street space at Astor Place and Cooper Square, which was unanimously endorsed by the local community board last January, was supposed to be under construction by spring 2012. Neither DOT nor DDC responded to a Streetsblog inquiry on when the city would break ground on that major new pedestrian space.

A survey conducted by Lower East Side coalition Local Spokes found a widespread desire to own bikes but significant obstacles that need to be addressed.

After a year and a half of grassroots activism, last week the Lower East Side’s Local Spokes coalition released a wide-ranging action plan to improve cycling in the neighborhood [PDF]. The plan includes both actions that Local Spokes member organizations plan to undertake, like developing a bicycle safety curriculum for area residents and organizing businesses to provide bike parking, and those they intend to lobby the city for, such as more bike-share stations and better bike parking in NYCHA buildings.

The Local Spokes coalition includes some of the neighborhood’s deep-rooted community organizations, like Asian Americans for Equality and Good Old Lower East Side, as well as issue-focused groups like Transportation Alternatives. Together, they developed a plan to improve conditions for cycling in the neighborhood based on sustained grassroots organizing, including a 1,200 person survey, eight public visioning meetings and a team of youth ambassadors who combed the neighborhood.

“Local Spokes’ Neighborhood Action Plan is the culmination of close to two years of community engagement and planning,” said AAFE Director of Community Building and Organizing Douglas Nam Le. ”As a next step we will be working with resident groups, elected officials, city agencies, and ally organizations to build support around the plan, and to work with partners to implement key recommendations.”

Based on Local Spokes’ research, there’s substantial latent demand for cycling among low-income residents of the economically diverse neighborhood. Low-income residents possessed bikes at a lower rate than others surveyed by the coalition, but expressed more interest in bike ownership than any other group. They also lived farther from transit stops. Cost, ability to ride safely, and storage space were all identified as obstacles to owning bikes.

To help would-be cyclists get around the neighborhood more easily, the coalition has a slew of recommendations. On each issue, they’re also willing to put some skin in the game. Local Spokes wants the city to increase the number of bike racks in the neighborhood by 20 percent, for example, and include up to five new on-street bike corrals – and they promise to find the bike-friendly businesses needed to maintain those corrals.

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A DOT crew installed a bike corral in front of Park Slope's Gorilla Coffee this morning. Photo: Christa Orth

On her way into the office this morning, Streetsblog development manager Christa Orth spotted some fluorescent safety vests as she pedaled up Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. A DOT crew was out in front of local coffee shop Gorilla Coffee, which had agreed to maintain a new bike corral in front of their store. One parking space is being replaced with room for about eight bikes — or as Gorilla might call them, seven new customers.

New York’s first bike corral was installed last summer. Now it looks like the treatment is really starting to spread.

Here’s a look at the finished bike corral, courtesy of Gorilla:

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The Atlantic Yards site may still have a giant surface parking lot at one end, but it will hold half as many cars as previously stated. Unfortunately, promised indoor bike parking has been put off until an unspecified future date. Photosimulation: Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council/Jonathan Barkey

When Brooklyn’s Barclays Center opens with a Jay-Z concert this September, it will be one of the most transit-accessible arenas in the United States. But as Streetsblog has noted before, the transportation planning for the stadium is excessively car-oriented. Developer Forest City Ratner had been planning to build an 1,100-space surface parking lot, marring the pedestrian environment and inducing more driving to the stadium. As opening day nears, there’s good news and bad when it comes to parking.

The bad news first: Forest City no longer plans to keep its much-touted promise to build a staffed indoor bike parking facility in time for the arena opening. Instead, for the foreseeable future, the bike parking will consist of plain outdoor bike racks.

In the December 2009 Atlantic Yards Amended Memorandum of Environmental Concerns, Forest City promised to implement a number of measures “prior to the opening of the arena” to encourage people to leave their cars at home when traveling to the Barclays Center. One of the commitments the developer made was to “provide any ticketholder traveling to the arena by bicycle with free indoor bicycle storage in a secure, manned facility designed to accommodate at least 400 bicycles on the arena block.”

That bike parking, Streetsblog has learned, won’t be available for opening day or anything close to it. Arana Hankin, the director of the Atlantic Yards project for Empire State Development, said in an e-mail that while there will still be room for 400 bikes at the arena, it will be provided via outdoor bike racks for the foreseeable future. The bike parking will be indoors once the project’s “Building 3,” located at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Dean Street, is complete, at which point it will be located in the basement, Hankin said.

There’s currently no public timeline for the construction of Building 3, and Hankin didn’t respond to a Streetsblog inquiry about when the building might be complete. Right now, construction is only scheduled for one non-arena building, at the corner of Flatbush and Dean.

With the larger Atlantic Yards project stalled, it’s impossible to say when the promised bike parking will be provided, except to say not any time soon.

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Photo: Mike Epstein

Reader Mike Epstein sends in this shot of DOT bike corral construction on Ninth Street between First and Second Avenues in Manhattan. It’s good to see this treatment expanding. Corrals that accommodate multiple bike racks offer a much more efficient use of street space than a one-car parking spot. They make streets safer by improving sight lines, and they don’t leave cyclists and pedestrians fighting over sidewalk scraps.

Looks like a couple of bikes are already in the queue for this one.

Bike traffic on the Eighth Avenue protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

One of the year’s most exciting street safety projects is on track to get better. Thanks to a recent set of recommendations from Community Board 4, the extension of the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues will include additional sidewalk expansions and on-street bike parking. Though DOT didn’t adopt all of the board’s ideas — most notably, the agency is leaving a gap in the physical protection for cyclists in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal — on the West Side, the community board’s requests are helping to build a better bike lane.

The Eighth and Ninth Avenue project, which will extended protected bike lanes from the low 30s to 42nd Street this spring and then up to 59th Street in the fall, was first approved by CB 4 last October. The chaotic Midtown streets badly need the redesign: Between 2005 and 2011, 14 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes on these blocks. In addition to the new bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the project is expected to improve safety by narrowing each travel lane by two feet.

While the community board wholeheartedly endorsed the project, it had a number of recommendations to make Eighth and Ninth Avenues even better places for walking and biking. Some of those have been incorporated into the project and are now set to become a reality.

In three locations, pedestrians packed into cramped Midtown sidewalks are going to get a little bit of breathing room. Sidewalk extensions will be added to the west side of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets, the northeast corner of Ninth and 41st, and the southwest corner of Eighth and 57th, according to a draft of letter from the board to DOT, which the board shared with Streetsblog.

Even more sidewalk space could be cleared up by adding on-street bike racks in former parking spaces, or bike corrals. Believing that bicycles locked to poles and scaffolding were taking away too much pedestrian space, the board requested the corrals last fall. DOT said that the bike parking could be installed in 2013 (though the board wants them now), and would most likely be placed next to bike-share stations. The city’s first bike corral was just installed last summer.

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