Streetsblog New York City

A go-to NIMBY argument against safe street improvements is that bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and ped refuge islands interfere with emergency responders.

In 2009, one complainer at an event sponsored by then-Council Member Alan Gerson claimed that pedestrian islands on Grand Street “put lives in danger” by slowing down fire trucks and ambulances. Opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane lobbed the same accusation at DOT and got Marcia Kramer to give them a megaphone. Assembly Member Dov Hikind spearheaded a successful campaign to make Fort Hamilton Parkway more dangerous for seniors based on nothing more than specious complaints from Hatzolah ambulance drivers, again amplified by Kramer.

A data set released by the city Wednesday blows another hole in what has always been a weak and cynical criticism. At an event on Randall’s Island yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced that in 2012, FDNY achieved the fastest average EMS response time in the city’s history. Fewer civilians died in fires last year than ever before, which the mayor and fire chief attributed to another near-record low average response time. From a City Hall press release:

The FDNY’s Emergency Medical Service averaged an ambulance response time for life-threatening medical emergencies of 6:30 — a second faster than the previous record of 6:31 set in 2011.

Structural fire response time in 2012 was 4:04, two seconds higher than last year when it was 4:02 due in part to the large call volume that occurred during and after Hurricane Sandy when the FDNY responded to nearly 100 serious structural fires.

Compared to the total amount of street space in the city, the square footage dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists in recent years is actually quite small. But there are still hundreds of places with new sidewalk extensions, pedestrian islands, and bike lanes, and at the very least the FDNY numbers suggest that new measures designed to make streets safer for walking and biking are not having the detrimental effect prophesied by the likes of Dov Hikind, NBBL, Marty Markowitz, and Marcia Kramer.

Advocates for safer streets are alarmed by a New York State DOT “blueprint” for capital investments that scarcely acknowledges walking or biking as modes of transportation.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign noted in November that the NYS DOT document released with the file name “Two Year Capital Plan” [PDF] made virtually no mention of pedestrians or cyclists.

“Although the document uses key buzzwords — ‘multi-modal,’ ‘users of all modes,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘improve livability,’ ‘environmental protection’ — complete streets advocates are left hanging when the document lists the ways New Yorkers get around,” wrote Nadine Lemmon, Albany legislative advocate for Tri-State.

The state DOT released the report at a time when investments in walking and cycling are “getting hit left, right and center” in New York State, according to Lemmon. The new federal transportation bill, MAP-21, resulted in a 30 percent cut in federal dedicated funding, Lemmon says, and new NYS DOT policies put bike-ped projects at a disadvantage when competing for state matching funds.

The omission of walking and biking is particularly striking given the state’s new complete streets law, which took effect in February.

In an email to Streetsblog, NYS DOT spokesperson Beau Duffy distinguished between the document and the capital plan, which will guide state transportation spending for two years.

The document submitted by NYS DOT to the NY Works Task force for consideration represented an infrastructure investment blueprint from which an investment level to support the development of the Department’s next transportation capital program would be advanced. NYS DOT’s report was intended to address four broad-based investment categories (Construction and Program Support, System Maintenance and Operations, Local Roads and Bridges, and Modal Infrastructure) and was not intended to address all of the infrastructure assets or modes under its jurisdiction.

Notwithstanding, each one of the four investment categories detailed by NYS DOT in the report provides support and opportunities for bicycle, pedestrian and safety-related improvements. The Department’s capital program of projects will be developed in coordination with the Executive and the Legislature as part of the State budget process.

Advocates say that explanation is just a long-winded way to distract from the lack of specific commitments to walking and biking as the capital plan takes shape. ”In this document, they are asking for guidance on what funding level will be approved for the next capital program,” says Lemmon. “[T]his is about the capital plan — and [Duffy] says that.”

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It looks like major bike routes are getting cleared after the season’s first snow. This stands in stark contrast to the conditions four years ago, when it took days for bridge and greenway paths to be cleared of snow and ice. What did you see on your way to work this morning?

Thanks to Ian Dutton for these great shots from Flatbush Avenue, where pedestrians are being allotted more space on five side streets from Prospect Park to Atlantic Avenue.

The materials are designed to be temporary, but it’s remarkable what a little paint and plastic can accomplish. According to Ian, crossing distances at Prospect Place and Sterling Place have been reduced by 50 percent. Not bad for a few hours’ work.

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Last year, Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and their neighbors picked up the pieces of a torpedoed bike lane proposal for Lafayette Avenue, showing DOT and Brooklyn Community Board 2 the community’s broad support for safer cycling on the busy street. After 1,400 signatures and countless hours of work, Lafayette Avenue from Fulton Street to Classon Avenue was recently striped with a shared lane for bicyclists.

Following that victory, Cohen is aiming for safer streets in the rest of the borough. She’s launched a new initiative, Make Brooklyn Safer, and is asking all Brooklynites to help identify dangerous intersections on a map — a project called KROSS/walk, for Kids Riding on Safe Streets.

A year ago, bicycle advocacy was new for Cohen. “I had never done anything like it before,” she said. ”I just got sick of biking with my kids and getting run off the road.”

Although Lafayette Avenue is now improved, Cohen and her children travel on more than just one street. “I am amazed at how fabulous some of the bike infrastructure is in Brooklyn,” Cohen said. “But then it just kind of ends, or it feels like something was forgotten.”

“My daughter is 10 and she’s going to go into middle school,” she said. ”My judgement of a good bike lane is: will I let my kids ride in it?”

Since beginning the Make Lafayette Safer campaign, Cohen has reached out to other parents. “You ask parents in Brooklyn,” she said, and their top concern is “not abduction, it’s traffic.” With children in tow, people gain a new perspective, Cohen said.

Cohen doesn’t want her efforts to just be about bicycling. “If you don’t bike with your kids, you probably walk with your kids,” she said. ”Anybody who moves a little bit slower has a very different perception of the street.”

Cohen wanted to keep the momentum going following her success with her own neighborhood street. When working on Make Lafayette Safer, she discovered that many city agencies actually do want to know what citizens are thinking. “They do want to hear from the public — not just what the community board says we’re saying, but what people are saying,” she said.

“What I learned through Make Lafayette Safer is that you have to have documentation,” she said. Existing tools for documenting unsafe streets just weren’t cutting it. “One of the things I felt about 311 is that you were doing it in a vacuum,” Cohen said. “I always felt like, ‘What are they going to do with this? Am I going to hear anything?’”

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Tomorrow night, the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 7 will take public input on the possible expansion of protected bike lanes on the Upper West Side.

On the agenda is a request from the board that DOT complete a proposal for protected lanes and other changes to the streetscape, including pedestrian islands, turning lanes and loading zones, on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues from 59th Street to 110th Street.

The existing protected lane, on Columbus from 96th Street to 77th Street, was narrowly endorsed by CB 7 in 2010. Six months after its installation, traffic crashes were down by 34 percent, and the number of traffic injuries dropped by 27 percent, according to DOT.

Data collected by the city following the completion of the one-mile segment showed that, on the blocks of Columbus to the north and south of the bike lane, 29 percent of motorists were clocked speeding, while between eight and 17 percent of vehicles on the stretch of Columbus with the bike lane were found to be traveling faster than the 30 miles per hour speed limit.

The protected lane is also popular with residents, according to a survey conducted by City Council Member Gale Brewer. Safe streets proponents want protected bike lanes running north and south, and want those lanes to connect with existing protected lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Nevertheless, a community board recommendation is no sure thing.

“For too long, the leaders of the transportation committee of Community Board 7 have neglected to protect residents and visitors on our streets,” said Lisa Sladkus, of the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance, in an email to Streetsblog. “Protected bike lanes protect ALL road users, including motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists. There are no excuses for not implementing them on many of our streets, connecting people to parks, work, school, and commerce. Yes, parking will be re-allocated for this change. As a community, we need to stand up for safety over the desire to park private vehicles on our public streets. Upper West Side residents deserve safer streets. Please help us in communicating this message to our appointed leaders of the transportation committee. They need to hear a unified and strong voice.”

Tomorrow’s meeting will be held at 250 W. 87th Street at 7 p.m.

With MAP-21 taking effect today, city and state transportation advocates are calling on Governor Cuomo and the New York State Department of Transportation to devote all of its federal bike-ped funds to walking and cycling infrastructure. The coalition of just over 100 groups is also asking that the state make available millions of dollars, allocated as part of the prior federal transportation bill, to such projects before the funds must be returned to Washington.

MAP-21 decreases overall bike-ped funding by 30 percent, explains the Tri-State Transportation Campaign in a media release, and gives governors the authority to take up to half of the bike-ped pool for highways and bridges. Representing transportation, environmental and health interests, the groups want the state to use 100 percent of federal “Transportation Alternatives” funds for bike and pedestrian projects. A letter to Cuomo and the DOT also asks that localities be granted the opportunity to apply for $30 million in bike and pedestrian funds from the last transportation law, funds that must otherwise be returned.

TSTC reports that, in New York State, total injuries to cyclists from collisions with motorists jumped 12 percent between 2009 and 2010, from 5,405 to 6,058, according to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Cyclist fatalities increased from 29 to 36, a 24 percent spike. Pedestrian injuries increased from 15,321 in 2009 to 16,090 in 2010, a 5 percent rise.

“High rates of pedestrian and bicycle injuries and fatalities indicate that all available funds must be used by state and local officials to reduce these numbers,” said TSTC Executive Director Veronica Vanterpool. “Our ‘Most Dangerous Roads’ report found that more than 1,200 pedestrians were killed in the downstate region from 2008 to 2010 — that’s 1,200 reasons to use every available dollar to make our roads safer for all users.”

The Cuomo administration hasn’t shown much interest in traffic safety. Last week, the Department of Motor Vehicles announced a new policy to permanently revoke licenses of motorists with five or more DWI convictions — or three or more DWI convictions in 25 years, as long the motorist has also committed a serious driving offense, such as killing one or more people. Two days later, Cuomo unveiled his “Drivers First” program, which will “prioritize the convenience of motorists and ensure that disruptions are as minimal as possible to drivers at highway and bridge projects across the state.” These initiatives are fairly representative of an administration whose signature transportation project is a multi-billion dollar mega-bridge with no provisions for transit.

“With the stroke of a pen, Governor Cuomo can save lives and improve the health and quality of life of all New Yorkers,” said Brian Kehoe, executive director of the New York Bicycling Coalition. “This is money that gets spent locally, improves the safety of our roads and sidewalks, and creates trails, making our communities better places to live. Leadership is needed to adapt our community infrastructure to 21st century needs.”

At a press conference at Union Square this morning, DOT and the Taxi and Limousine Commission announced another facet of the LOOK! campaign, a new video and a decal reminding taxi passengers to exit on the curb side and check for cyclists before opening cab doors.

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and TLC Commissioner David Yassky were joined at the event by Ken Podziba of Bike New York and Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives.

The video will be shown in rotation on Taxi TV. While the video takes a little while to get to the point and, unlike an older LOOK! PSA, sanitizes the experience of a crash, it’s a good reminder to taxi passengers, who like many often don’t think about cyclists before opening a vehicle door.

Unlike the Ford Crown Victorias that make up most of the current taxi fleet, the Nissan minivan that the TLC has chosen to replace them has sliding doors for backseat passengers.

DOT noted that seven cyclists have been killed in dooring crashes in the past five years. Now if only NYPD and the press corps understood that dooring is illegal behavior, and not an unavoidable “freak accident.”

New data is online about the extent of bike-on-ped crashes in New York City, and it adds some much-needed perspective to the public discourse about the “safety crisis” on city streets.

According to reports collected by NYPD and compiled online by NYC DOT [PDF], police responded to 27 bike-ped collisions citywide in the last three months of 2011, resulting in 26 injuries.

Over the same timeframe, 754 car-bike collisions injured 755 cyclists and killed three. Ten motor vehicle occupants were injured in those crashes.

The data, the result of 2011′s Local Law 13, were compiled somewhat differently. The crashes involving cars produce MV-104 reports, which provide the basis for those numbers. The crashes without cars are tallied based on “AIDED reports,” which are triggered when police respond to the scene of an injured pedestrian or cyclist and no motor vehicle was involved.

Last month, City Council Transportation Chair James Vacca said commercial cyclists’ behavior amounts to a “crisis… of people’s safety, pedestrians’ safety.” As much as cyclist behavior could improve, the hyperbole about the threat posed by bikes doesn’t help people evaluate the real danger on the streets. With these new numbers, it’s more obvious than ever that bikes are a trivial source of traffic injuries compared to cars.

Based on the most recent data available from the state DMV [PDF], more than 2,600 New York pedestrians are injured by motorists in a typical three-month period, and 50 are killed. In addition, about 15,000 motor vehicle occupants are injured in traffic crashes. (Raw numbers compiled by NYPD [PDF] show somewhat higher rates in April 2012.)

We’ll have to get a full year’s worth of bike data to make an apple-to-apples comparison. But with these preliminary numbers, looking just at the risk to pedestrians, it seems motorists are causing about a hundred times more injuries than cyclists. These raw numbers don’t account for the severity of injuries, which is almost certainly a great deal worse for crashes involving multi-ton vehicles capable of high speeds than for crashes involving lighter and slower bikes. The lack of pedestrian fatalities caused by cyclists gives some sense of the severity gap between car crashes and bike crashes.

It is well past time to drop the “bike bedlam” hysteria and the “safety crisis” hyperbole about bikes. Address the real safety crisis — the tens of thousands of injuries caused by car crashes each year — and the streets will be safer for everyone.

We have word that a major bike-ped link to the Hudson River Greenway in Northern Manhattan will be out of commission later this year.

Long-time Streetsblog reader (and sometime contributor) Lars Klove was at a meeting this week where NYC Parks Department officials informed Community Board 12 that a bridge over the Amtrak tracks connecting the Greenway to Washington Heights and the George Washington Bridge will be closed in the fall for nearly two years.

In addition to runners, cyclists and others who use the bridge to access the GWB, uptown commuters rely on it as a safe route to and from the Greenway.

“I take the Greenway downtown every day and back to and from my office,” says Katharine Van Itallie, Klove’s wife. “Anyone not able to go over the Amtrak bridge would have to go down Riverside Drive or Ft. Washington Avenue to the next entrance ramp at 155th Street. It’s MUCH more dangerous, obviously, mixing it up with cars hurrying to get to work or to get home.”

There is a lesser-known path to the Greenway, a narrow unlit trail through the woods to the south of the GWB, which Van Itallie describes as “scary,” though it could conceivably be improved as a safe alternative route.

Streetsblog has messages in with the Parks Department and Community Board 12 concerning the bridge and its reported closure.

Editor’s note: This story originally stated that Parks Department personnel at the CB 12 meeting were dismissive of providing a “safe alternative route” between the Greenway and Washington Heights. In fact, discussions of an alternate route referred to another Greenway construction project planned near the George Washington Bridge. Further, remarks characterized as dismissive were made by a CB 12 member, not an employee of the Parks Department. Streetsblog is researching the second Greenway project.