Streetsblog New York City

Last week, Columbia University professor David King ran a great response to the recent grousing about bike-share stations. He posted this graph depicting how public perceptions of congestion pricing program change over time.

An outfit called CURACAO (one of the weirdest, most tortured acronyms of all time — it’s short for “coordination of urban road-user charging organisational issues”) spent years analyzing various road-pricing attempts in Europe, including shifts in public opinion. This graph of theirs shows that the more people learn about congestion pricing, the more people feel vested in opposing it, and the less popular it becomes — until it’s implemented, after which everyone can see that it works, it becomes the new normal, and popularity climbs.

In Edinburgh and Manchester, voters rejected congestion pricing in referendums before they had a chance to see it in action. Stockholm did it differently, holding a six-month congestion pricing demonstration before asking residents to vote. Having seen the results of road pricing, voters decided to make it permanent.

Transpose this pattern to NYC street redesigns, and it’s all the more impressive that the city manages to make changes, given the current community board process. DOT’s toolkit now includes materials that make possible inexpensive, temporary changes — demonstration projects, basically — but community boards are always asked to vote before any demonstration can be implemented. Vote after vote in favor of pedestrian safety upgrades, protected bike lanes, and bus lanes happened at the point of maximum resistance on this curve. Now imagine if all CB votes happened after a six-month demonstration.

With regard to bike-share and the impending launch on Monday, I doubt the NIMBY noise about station placement signifies a broad drop in public support for the program, which consistently polls in the range of 70 percent approval. But we are at the point of maximum tabloid coverage, maximum litigation, and maximum resistance, such as it is. And in the long run, I think it’s fantastic that the NYC press corps is recording all these complaints for posterity. When bike-share reaches the point where it’s just a nice part of life in New York City, let’s not forget all the screaming headlines from spring 2013. They’re the proof that no matter how worthwhile or popular a given transportation reform might be, you have to overcome some resistance first.

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Kids love bikes and shiny new things, so it’s not a huge surprise that this group of middle-schoolers would flock to the bike-share station at East 11th Street near First Avenue. You have to be 16 to join Citi Bike, but what we see in the video, posted by EV Grieve, are a lot of potential future members. What kid wouldn’t prefer a bike ride to the crosstown bus?

Really though, these guys are just acting on what a lot of New Yorkers are thinking right now.

Here it is: A bike-share station with bikes, and it’s not a photo shoot. A reader sent this shot of Foley Square across from the courts this morning.

Update: More than 850 of the 6,000 bikes are in the stations as of this morning, according to NYC DOT.

The blue bikes are a great conversation starter. After a friend of the blog alerted me to the newly docked bikes at Prince and MacDougal last night, I headed over and immediately started chatting with an older couple ogling the bikes about what sort of trips bike-share would be good for. We agreed: The closest analogy is that you’d use it like a cab.

Here’s another one at Barrow and Hudson, via @BrooklynSpoke:

It took a few days, but the Post found someone to go along with its bike-scare nonsense, according to the Post.

Here’s the latest:

“The bike racks present challenges to firefighters and frankly, trying to get around the city now is harder than ever before,” Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy said at a press conference in Manhattan.

“I think that it is going to continue to impact response times for emergency vehicles in a negative way.”

Cassidy cites no examples of firefighters impeded by bike-share stations. Nor does he explain how bike racks placed along curbs make the city more difficult to negotiate than at any time in the 148-year history of the New York City Fire Department.

Once the tabloid had react quotes from Cassidy, the Post finally excerpted a statement from FDNY Commissioner Sal Cassano, who on Tuesday said bike-share stations are not a problem for firefighters and other first responders. In a story that ran Tuesday, the Post failed to verify with FDNY that it took EMTs over an hour to get a man past an empty bike-share station and into an ambulance, which FDNY told Streetsblog was not true. Yesterday, the Post repeated this account — fed to the paper by people who are suing the city to have a bike-share station moved — and again omitted Cassano’s statement.

In January, Cassano and Mayor Bloomberg announced that FDNY achieved its fastest-ever average EMS response time last year. Cassidy claimed yesterday that the city’s response time numbers are off, but the union’s beef concerns 911 staffing levels, not time spent in traffic or getting around bike or pedestrian infrastructure.

The Advance, CBS, and the Daily News covered Cassidy’s press conference, and none of them reported his bike-share remarks. Yet the Post would have readers believe Cassidy summoned the media to denounce bike share.

Then there’s this:

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Hats off to Matt Flegenheimer for the enlightening piece in today’s Times describing the lessons from other bike-share systems that informed New York’s big decisions about Citi Bike. This passage stood out, given the recent tabloid coverage about station placement:

In London and Paris, stations are trenched in the ground, rendering them difficult to remove. Kiosks in New York’s system, similar to Montreal’s, are simply set on the street surface, secured by their own weight, with no physical tethering to the ground.

“Can you imagine doing 300 miniconstruction sites around the city?” Mr. Orcutt said, alluding to the resident complaints about even the low-maintenance installation.

The flexibility has already allowed the city to adjust kiosks, as workers did recently on Bank Street, where a few spots were removed to avoid blocking a building entrance.

In related news, the sterling journalists at the New York Post insist that rearranging bike-share docks isn’t a sign of the system’s flexibility but instead amounts to “a kind of shell game.” Because it’s so, so devious and deceptive to respond to feedback.

Say what you will about whether the feedback from 99 Bank and 175 West 13th Street was worth a response (Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano said the complaints about emergency access have no basis in reality), the ability to fine-tune Citi Bike stations is a big plus. Unlike huge, expensive wastes of concrete like the parking garages at East River Plaza and Yankee Stadium, it’s a cinch to make adjustments to Citi Bike as needed.

We have a message from FDNY that should once and for all take care of fabricated concerns about bike-share docking stations getting in the way of emergency vehicles.

Here’s a statement from Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano, which we received via email:

Contrary to a news report today, FDNY EMT’s had absolutely no problems responding to and providing medical care to a patient on Sunday on West 13th Street in Manhattan. The FDNY has been working closely with DOT on this initiative and we have not experienced any problems nor do we anticipate issues operating at or near bike racks that have been situated on city streets.

Hear that? It’s the sound of tabloid narratives and NIMBY lawsuits deflating.

Manhattan Institute fellow Nicole Gelinas submitted this response to Charles Komanoff’s critique of her weekend opinion piece in the New York Post about bike-share safety.

Charles Komanoff, in his Streetsblog post, called my weekend Post piece on bike-share “intellectually muddled.” In the piece, he offers no evidence for any intellectual muck on my part. Instead, he uses mirage to distract from a very real safety challenge. Novice bicyclists need to learn that truckers are not their friends. The way to get that message across to new Citibikers is to tell them, as often and simply as possible.

Let’s go through Komanoff’s piece point by point (without making any broad, unsupported generalizations about it, as he did with mine).

I am not a “bike-share detractor.” I favor bike-share, something that anyone who asks would know. The Post article in no way disparaged the bike-share concept. I challenge Komanoff to find a disparaging statement anywhere in the piece. I have ridden the Velibs in Paris for years. My personal opinion on this should not matter to anyone but me, so I feel no need to trumpet it in print. But if someone makes a factual reporting error in mischaracterizing my approach to bike-share, as Komanoff did, he should correct it.

Komanoff characterizes my pointing out that “Three people died in Paris’ first year of bike share” and that “New York should heed Paris’s lesson” as a “ghoulish lede.” Ghost stories are ghoulish. My facts are simply facts. Three people indeed did die during the first year of Paris bike-share. This is a simple stated fact, a fact I haven’t seen reported elsewhere in the New York press. Further, it is hard to argue that we shouldn’t heed lessons that we can glean from any useful data.

Is the Paris data useful? To be useful, Paris’ data would have to be relevant to New York. Komanoff implies we should ignore Paris in favor of cities such as Boston, Washington, and London, three cities that haven’t experienced bike-share deaths. Whether we should compare New York to Paris is where Komanoff presumably could offer some reasonable statistical debate. Yet he does not.

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The official Citi Bike mobile application is now available to download. The app provides a map of station locations and real-time updates about bicycle and dock availability, as well as turn-by-turn directions, riding tips, and a timer to help Citi Bike users avoid charges for exceeding the limits per trip. The app also allows users to locate nearby bike shops and, of course, Citibank branches; this summer, restaurant and event recommendations will be added.

Currently, all stations on the application’s map — which includes a layer showing bike lanes — are colored gray and listed as “inactive” until the system launches on Monday. Some station locations also have yet to appear on the map. DOT said in a statement that the map will be “continuously updated in the coming days.”

The app, developed by Publicis Kaplan Thaler, is available for Android and iOS. A third-party Citi Bike application called “New York City Bike” has been available since earlier this month.

New York won’t have the same app — Spotcycle – used for bike-share systems in Washington and Boston. Last year, Spotcycle’s developer, 8D Technologies, was dropped as a contractor by the Public Bike System Company, which supplies the equipment for Citi Bike.

Just when you thought the bike-share detractors might have run out of steam — or at least taken a time-out — along comes an intellectually muddled piece in the NY Post warning of dead bike-share users littering Midtown streets.

“Three people died in Paris’ first year of bike share. New York should heed Paris’s lesson.” That’s the ghoulish lede of Manhattan Institute transportation expert Nicole Gelinas’s “Gore de France” piece last Saturday. But despite the headline, the column can’t be dismissed as mere tabloid titillation.

For one thing, Gelinas is a thoughtful journalist — probing, numerate, and far more prone to squawk about municipal unions’ pensions than the city’s pursuit of livable streets. In an aptly titled, in-depth 2012 City Journal piece, “Ungridlocked,” she lauded DOT chief Janette Sadik-Khan’s re-engineering of city streets for greater safety and efficiency, and warned the next mayor not to backtrack on the city’s new bike lanes and bus lanes. “Rip out the new, pedestrian-friendly Times Square?” Gelinas wrote then. “You may as well suggest demolishing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.”

And there’s truth enough in Gelinas’s reminder that traffic hazards await bike-sharers. Despite a roughly three-fold drop in NYC cyclist fatality rates (deaths per cyclist), by my calculations, over the past dozen years, cycling here can morph from joy to jeopardy in the blink of an eye. Concerns that new cyclists could be placing themselves in harm’s way are reasonable enough.

But “Gore de France” misses its mark. It overhypes prospective increases in cycling deaths due to bike-share. It treats dangers that cyclists face as a separate species from dangers to pedestrians, and thus passes up a chance to advocate for traffic safety approaches that would benefit everyone, not just cyclists. Its negative slant obscures bike-share’s potential life-extending benefits from traffic-calming and healthful transportation.

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Update: Streetsblog had a call in to FDNY about the Post story. After this post went up, we talked with spokesperson Frank Dwyer, who said: “We had no operational or response issues to this call. Period.”

If you believe the story in today’s New York Post, it took an EMT crew over an hour to get a 92-year-old man past an empty bike-share station and into an ambulance on Sunday. But the piece cites no EMTs to back up its claim.

Reporters Julia Marsh and Amber Sutherland quoted no sources other than residents of 175 W. 13th Street and their lawyer, who are suing the city to have the bike-share station removed.

“It’s exactly what this building feared would happen,” said Steven Shore, the building’s attorney, who filed a lawsuit over the bike racks last week. “The good news is the guy’s not dead.”

Parking spots for 39 bicycles create a barricade that runs the length of the 20-story co-op. The ambulance was forced to park three doors down along West 13th Street for the emergency call, the co-op board’s vice president, Dave Marcus, told The Post.

It took EMS workers more than an hour before Liss was taken to Beth Israel Hospital.

“With great difficulty they managed to get the guy out,” said Marcus. He called the kiosk, which was installed in the dead of night last month, an “impregnable wall.”

“The ambulance was forced to pull in at the eastern-most portion of the bike rack, where they had a clear shot to the sidewalk,” Marcus added.

It’s specious at best to claim that EMTs who must constantly work around any number of obstacles, like automobile traffic, could be foiled by a bike rack — particularly since the bike-share station in question replaced car parking. But clearly the Post has no qualms with printing straight-up propaganda from anyone who opposes Citi Bike.

Bonus: The Post put up a video with this story. What it shows is an FDNY vehicle stuck behind motorists, followed by footage of sanitation workers easily loading a truck from the sidewalk in front of 175 W. 13th.

Better luck next time, New York Post.