Streetsblog New York City

Image: NYC DOT

On Wednesday, DOT outlined a proposal for new Class II bike lanes in Chelsea between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and the Hudson River Greenway. While safe streets advocates welcomed the news, there is concern that their planned location, on W. 29th and W. 30th Streets, may not be ideal for unprotected lanes.

According to DOT’s presentation to the Community Board 4 transportation committee (PDF), W. 30th ranks in the 89th percentile in fatalities and serious injuries. Lincoln Tunnel traffic and trucks en route to and from a USPS facility are ever-present. Marilyn Dershowitz was struck and killed by the driver of a postal truck earlier this summer while cycling on 29th between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. All things considered, committee members worried that unprotected lanes won’t make the two streets safe enough.

“To encourage bicyclists on these streets is a little like leading sheep to a herd of wolves,” said Bret Firfer, as quoted in a DNAinfo report on the meeting.

DOT emphasized that 29th and 30th are the only streets between 23rd and 34th that would allow for an eventual uninterrupted river-to-river route for crosstown cycling. But members of the committee offered 25th and 26th Streets as an alternative, while acknowledging that 25th would mean a couple of turns to reach the Greenway, and in the future would require riding around Madison Square on the East Side.

DOT reps believe 29th and 30th would be no more dangerous than other area streets, and said they don’t believe cyclists would take a detour to find a safer route.

“We are also very concerned about this block, but the fact of the matter is that there are cyclists that exist on this road,” said DOT’s Josh Benson. “We’re very limited in what routes work at all for cyclists. I don’t know if there are better choices out there.” At this point, DOT plans to stripe lanes on the south side of 29th and 30th, along with other traffic lane alterations, in the fall.

“I am not sure there is a right or wrong answer,” transportation committee member Christine Berthet told Streetsblog. “We are just trying to find which pair the cyclists would use most.”

Marilyn Dershowitz was fatally struck by the driver of a USPS truck on W. 29th St. in July. Will planned bike lanes offer adequate protection for crosstown cyclists? Photo: DNAinfo

Cyclists looking for a safer route between protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues and the Hudson River Greenway could soon see a measure of relief. Tonight, DOT will meet with the transportation committee of Community Board 4 to discuss plans for dedicated lanes on 29th and 30th Streets.

Currently, cyclists traveling east-west between 17th and 43rd have few options that don’t include jockeying with car and truck traffic on wide streets.

“There are concerns about the large USPS trucks,” says Christine Berthet of the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Coalition for Pedestrian Safety. In July, cyclist Marilyn Dershowitz was killed by a postal truck driver while riding underneath a building overhang that straddles W. 29th between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, a stretch dominated by USPS vehicles. Following the Dershowitz crash — a hit-and-run; no charges filed — Berthet noted that a neighborhood advisory committee has “proposed a number of east-west connections” to DOT. “Unless these bike paths are protected,” said Berthet, “nothing will prevent another tragedy like this one.”

How much help Class II lanes would provide remains to be seen. DOT declined to release design details prior to the meeting. To find out what’s in store, and to speak up for giving cyclists the means to travel crosstown without risking their lives, head to the Holland House, Piano Room, 351 W. 42nd Street, this evening at 6:30.

A truck driver ran over and killed a 29-year-old male cyclist in Brooklyn this morning, the Daily News reports. According to the write-up, the driver turned right from Metropolitan Avenue onto Gardner Avenue, crushing the unidentified cyclist as he tried to pass on the right side of the truck. The driver did not realize he’d struck someone and had to be flagged down by another truck driver. Police have reviewed surveillance video and will not file charges against him.

The News presents the NYPD’s reasoning like so:

“The bicyclist was at fault,” a police source said. “He should have seen the driver was about to turn. The bicyclist tried to rush by and you can’t do that. The driver had to be going about 5 m.p.h.”

While we soon learn that the cyclist was wearing a helmet, the piece does not inform readers whether the truck driver signaled his turn, whether the truck was equipped with the proper mirrors, or whether the driver should have been able to see the victim before turning into him and crushing his skull.

To cap it off, the Daily News included this poll:

So I guess that’s how to settle the question of what causes crashes. If only there was some rigorous data and analysis the Daily News could get its hands on instead.

Bike-sharing users might be safer because they take fewer risks while riding. These two women trying out Boulder's new bike-sharing system don't look like daredevils. Photo: dgrinbergs via Flickr

People riding shared public bicycles appear to be involved in fewer traffic crashes and receive fewer injuries than people riding their personal bicycles. In cities from Paris and London to Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, something about riding a shared bicycle appears to make cycling safer.

Paris’s Vélib’ is perhaps the most iconic bike-sharing system in the world. Launched in 2007 with 20,000 bikes, its widespread popularity not only transformed how Parisians traveled across their city but set off an explosion of new bike-sharing systems worldwide. With a few years of practice at this point, the Parisian experience is particularly telling.

“The accident rate is lower on a Vélib’ than on ‘normal’ bikes,” a spokesperson for the office of Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë told Streetsblog. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, Vélib’ riders were responsible for one-third of all bike trips in Paris but were involved in only one-fourth of all traffic crashes involving a bicycle.

The numbers are if anything more striking in London, where the Barclays Cycle Hire system — or “Boris Bikes,” to borrow the phrase locals have adopted in honor of their mayor, Boris Johnson — opened at the end of last July. Though the London government didn’t track the relevant safety stats of bike-share users compared to other cyclists, they provided us with the data to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

So far, after 4.5 million trips, no bike-sharing user in London has been seriously injured or killed in a traffic crash, according to Transport for London. Only 10 bike-sharing users were injured at all in the first 1.6 million trips on the system, a statistic that was compiled earlier. A spokesperson also told Streetsblog that they estimate that half a million bike trips take place across London each day, 20,000 of which are on Boris Bikes. Finally, during 2010, 10 people were killed, 457 seriously injured and 3,540 non-seriously injured while cycling in London.

Crunching those numbers, no people were seriously injured or killed on the first 4.5 million trips on Boris Bikes, while about 12 people are injured for every 4.5 million trips on personal bikes. And over 1.6 million trips, ten bike-sharing users received non-serious injuries, compared to an average of 35 such injuries for the same number of trips on personal bikes.

Stateside, transportation officials are seeing the same effect.

Read more…

A Central Park cyclist was killed at this pinch point on the 66th St. transverse in 2006. Photo: rusticumjudicium via Flickr

A plan to open Central Park to east-west bike traffic is poised to move forward, and proponents are encouraged to turn out Thursday night to voice their support.

Phase one of the Central Park Conservancy project, which took root last year, will convert two existing pedestrian paths for shared use in the northern area of the park, one around 103rd St. and one near the 97th St. transverse. If all goes well, the conservancy plans to revamp three additional paths to the south — one south of the 86th St. transverse, another near the 72nd St. transverse, and a third to the south of the Sheep Meadow, in the mid-60s. Only two of the trails, 103rd St. and 72nd St., will require engineering work beyond markings and signage.

The plan is not subject to community board approval, and though Community Board 8 does not border the part of the park involved in phase one, the conservancy will on Thursday night present its plans to the CB 8 parks committee. As Streetsblog readers know, CB 8 is not known for its hospitable attitude toward cyclists. As always, the more friendly faces at this meeting, the better.

The benefits of cycling as transportation being self-evident and all, talking points abound. But the primary reason these trails are necessary is that cyclists currently have no direct way to cross the park that is both legal and safe. The transverses at present are deadly by design, and the city has no plans for improvements that would prevent crashes like the one that killed a cyclist on the 66th St. transverse in 2006.

If you can make it, let CB 8 know that thousands of bike-riding park users need routes that will allow them to go east and west without breaking the law or risking their lives. Details on the meeting are here.

It’s getting to the point — probably well past the point, actually — where the non-stop cyclist hate spewing from the New York Post has attained a level of self-parody. So free of fact and full of bald-faced vitriol is the paper’s latest editorial, praising Ray Kelly’s NYPD for a marked increase in cyclist summonses, that it’s tempting to dismiss it as unworthy of thoughtful response.

Last night a service member was killed on the West Side Highway by a driver who won't face any charges. Good thing police are ramping up bike enforcement. Image: ABC via Gothamist

Basically, the editorialists at the Post believe that everyone on a bike in New York City is an outlaw who has at one time or another endangered the life of a pedestrian. No surprise there. But things get hairy when they aim to support their position with what seems to be an attempt at empirical fact:

Even Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s ubiquitous bike lanes haven’t made the streets any safer.

Whether the Post is ignorant of safety gains brought about by bike lanes, or simply chooses to pretend they don’t exist, this is unadulterated crap. Here are a few actual facts to the contrary:

• Since the installation of the protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, injuries to pedestrians are down by 29 percent.
• The protected bike lane on Grand Street has reduced pedestrian injuries by 21 percent.
• A 2008 traffic-calming project on Skillman Ave. and 43rd Ave. in Queens, including bike lanes on both streets, resulted in a “65% reduction in the number of crashes involving injuries to pedestrians on the corridor,” according to city data.
• On First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, injuries to all users are down 8.3 percent following the installation of bike lanes.
• A city study released last summer found that citywide, controlling for other factors, serious crashes on streets with bike lanes were 40 percent less deadly than on other streets.

It could be that the Post is inept at the whole pedestrian safety thing because the paper is so new at it. After years of blaming the victim and doing its damnedest to tear down street designs that have saved lives, it will take a while to turn the ship around.

Unfortunately, the Post has plenty of material to work from. As Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson pointed out on Twitter, over the last five years 766 city pedestrians have been killed by drivers, along with 98 cyclists, while three pedestrians died from collisions with cyclists. Now that the Post editorial board has taken up the cause of street safety, we await a commensurate response. That’d be one motorist-bashing editorial a day for the next two-plus years. And counting.

For decades, dueling camps of cycling advocates have feuded about how to best accommodate riders. Some have pushed for the construction of Dutch-style cycle tracks, arguing that separated lanes make bicycling safer and less intimidating, while others have insisted such infrastructure isolates riders and makes cycling more dangerous than simply remaining within the flow of traffic.

Why is Montreal outshining every U.S. city on cycle tracks? Photo: Richard Layman/RPUS

Though the debate has grown bitter at times, neither group has had much in the way of rigorous peer-reviewed research to argue their case through the years. However, in the last decade a small but energetic group of academics has started to publish regularly on the topic.

The latest salvo, published online in February and in the current edition of Injury Prevention, comes from Harvard University researcher Anne Lusk. Her study compares crash rates at six cycle tracks in Montreal to nearby streets that had no bicycle facilities, and bolsters the argument that cycle tracks are safer. Lusk found that relative risk of injury was 28 percent lower on cycle tracks compared to the on-street routes.

In addition, she found that about 2.5 times as many cyclists used the cycle tracks than the on-street routes. The finding agrees with the conclusions of a number of other recent studies that show protected bicycle lanes improve safety and help attract new riders.

While cycle tracks are common in European countries, they remain rare in America due to institutional inertia. That inertia was not countered effectively enough by a bicycling movement divided over anti-cycle track arguments made by vehicular cycling advocate John Forester, author of Effective Cycling, in the 1970s and 1980s.

As Jeff Mapes recounts in Pedaling Revolution, Forester helped codify and popularize the idea that cyclists fare best when they are treated as “drivers” of vehicles. He encouraged riders to take the full lane when needed, avoid riding on sidewalks, and move with the flow of traffic.

He also vigorously opposed bike infrastructure, fearing that bike lanes and cycle tracks would give authorities an excuse to ban recreational riders from the road. And he argued cycle tracks and other types of bike infrastructure were more dangerous than on-road riding.

Read more…

Nancy Gruskin, who founded the Stuart C. Gruskin Family Foundation after her husband was killed by a cyclist in Midtown two years ago, launched a new campaign to educate delivery cyclists about the rules of the road this morning. The “5 to Ride” campaign will ask restaurants to pledge to teach their delivery cyclists five basic rules, grouped in this mnemonic order:

• Put Pedestrians first
• Stop at Every red
• Ride in the right Direction — with traffic
• Stay on the Asphalt, off the sidewalk
• Pick a Lane, and stick with it (This one is intended to encourage cyclists not to weave between cars.)

Gruskin has focused her organizing on Tribeca to start with and has signed up more than 40 restaurants so far. Participating businesses get a decal to put in their window and pins for their working cyclists advertising their commitment to safe cycling. “The public can vote with their wallets,” said Gruskin.

Gruskin was joined by Bike New York’s education programs director Rich Conroy and City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca. “It’s imperative that all cyclists, whether riding for commuting, work or fun, know and follow the rules of the road,” said Conroy. “More resources should be available for commercial cyclists.” Bike New York will work with the Gruskin Foundation to provide additional safety training for restaurants that request it.

Vacca focused his remarks on the importance of education and safe behavior. “Whether you’re on two wheels or on four wheels, you have to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he said. When Streetsblog asked him after the event about possible engineering solutions to improve bike-pedestrian relations, he said that any design had to be site-specific and turned the conversation back to the pledge campaign.

If you just landed in the city or you’ve been off the grid for the past eight months, you might be wondering what the heck is going on on Prospect Park West. To catch yourself up, dive into this exquisite piece from the Guardian’s Matt Seaton.

Seaton’s blow-by-blow masterfully sets the scene: the controversial, effective transportation chief, her wealthy, well-connected detractors and their high-profile corporate lawyers, all engaged in a battle over a few hundred feet of asphalt in a drama playing out on the front page of the “world’s finest newspaper.”

But unlike local media, Seaton puts all the pieces in one place:

Two days before the lawsuit was launched, the Sunday edition of the New York Times’s Metro section led with a feature about how much Sadik-Khan had upset people with her highhanded approach to policy-making. Putting aside the implicit sexism of the piece, there was no attempt to report the facts — the booming commerce in the newly pedestrianised Times and Herald Squares, the improvements in road safety, particularly pedestrian casualty numbers, from the traffic-calming effect of installing bike lanes, and the increase in cycle use itself.

“What is more,” Seaton writes, “the article made occasional use of an interview with Sadik-Khan evidently recorded some weeks earlier; so clearly, this feature had sat on the stocks until an editor decided the moment was ripe. And that moment just happened to be the Sunday before the Monday when the lawsuit was filed.”

Media conspiracy theories aside, Seaton, like Rob Hoell before him, illustrates how outsiders have a better grip on the politics at play than our own media. And he certainly shows a keener understanding of what’s at stake.

New York City justly sees itself as the world’s greatest city: here, in some sense, people live the way everyone would live if they had the chance. How New York — the city that still has a uniquely low level of car ownership and use — manages its transport planning in the 21st century matters for the whole world: it is the template. If cycling is pushed back into the margins of that future, rather than promoted, along with efficient mass public transit and safe, pleasant pedestrianism, as a key part of that future, the consequences will be grave and grim.

“If we want to give meaning to multi-modal transportation … and if we want a vibrant city, then we must encourage safety for people who walk and bicycle.”

That was Phil Mendelson, the city council member in Washington, DC, who chaired a hearing on pedestrian and cyclist safety earlier this month (as quoted by TBD). Contrast his opening remarks with the intro to a hearing last December by New York’s own James Vacca, the transportation committee chair who considers sound bike policy a “tradeoff” between safer streets and more parking.

The DC hearing was marked by emotional testimony from victims and family members of DC residents lost in collisions with drivers. Several spoke of mistreatment at the hands of police. Among them was Ruth Rowan, the mother of Alice Swanson. In July of 2008, 22-year-old Swanson, riding in a bike lane on her way to work near Dupont Circle, was killed by the driver of a garbage truck. According to Rowan, shown in this video from David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington, the investigation into her daughter’s crash was stalled by a detective who went to great lengths to blame Swanson for her own death, despite a mountain of contradictory evidence.

What is clear is that, whether in DC or New York, pedestrians and cyclists are routinely held to a model of care and responsibility not expected of their counterparts sheathed in glass and steel. Vacca has shown substantial interest in pedestrian safety, slowing down speeders, and opening up crash data, so maybe he would consider convening a council hearing that shines a spotlight on the vital issue of NYPD crash investigations, which all too often seem to reach conclusions before all the facts are in.

Given the current topsy-turvy climate, where cyclists and pedestrians are singled out for scorn and scolding while their killers are spared comparable scrutiny (at least two pedestrians dead in the last two days), it would be nothing short of revelatory to hear Vacca and other prominent council mems echo Mendelson, who — while issuing the obligatory call for enforcement “against pedestrians and cyclists as well” — at least acknowledged that, “If someone is driving a 2,000 or 4,000 pound machine, they need to be held to a higher standard.”