Streetsblog New York City

One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

New Yorkers submitted dozens of suggestions for bike-share station locations in Chelsea alone. Next week, local residents are invited to a Community Board 4 meeting to determine where stations will go. Image: NYC DOT

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations — this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk — is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

Last fall, DOT officials said that public comments will help determine where to place bike-share stations. Community boards can say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Manhattan CB 2 last October. The stations have to be spaced appropriately and follow certain guidelines — no stations on narrow sidewalks or in parking spaces on busy avenues, for example — but within those constraints locals will get to choose where the bikes go.

Next Tuesday, the city’s first bike-share planning workshop will take place. Hosted by Manhattan Community Board 4, State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, the event will be an important opportunity for people who live or work in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen to help shape this significant addition to the New York City streetscape. The difference between a bike-share system where most stations are on the sidewalk and one where most stations are in the curbside lane may be determined at these meetings, for example.

After Tuesday’s meeting, the next workshop will be the following week and cover Manhattan Community Board 2′s district: SoHo, Tribeca and the West Village. For a full and up-to-date listing of the workshops, including time and location, head over to DOT’s bike-share timeline.

Neighborhood residents who've fought for a safer intersection at Parkside and Ocean cheered DOT's plan when the agency unveiled it in December.

We have a late breaking addition to the Streetsblog calendar. Tonight the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 14 will be discussing DOT’s plan to add more pedestrian space and realign the intersection of Parkside Avenue and Ocean Avenue at the southeast entrance to Prospect Park [PDF]. The redesign will be made possible by relocating a park loop entrance for cars from this intersection to Lincoln Road. An average of 20 people are injured in traffic at this location every year, and the project is expected to cut that number in half.

Neighborhood residents campaigned long and hard for safety improvements here, but Community Board 14 has a spotty record on livable streets. If you live in the area and want to see this project move forward, tonight’s meeting gets underway at 7:00 at 810 East 16th Street, by Avenue H.

Patsy's Pizza owner Frank Brija, right, claimed at a CB 11 meeting that protected bike lanes in East Harlem would make asthma rates worse. Photo: Jeff Mays/DNAinfo

After a misinformation campaign by two local business owners, East Harlem’s Community Board 11 rescinded its vote in support of plans for protected bike lanes along First and Second Avenue Tuesday night. The board will soon vote again on the project, which has the backing of local Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito.

Community Board 11 has already voiced its support for the protected bike lanes twice. In 2010, the community board expressed outrage over being first promised a protected lane, then having the Bloomberg administration recant. Then, this September they voted 47-3 to support the construction of the protected lanes, setting the stage for construction as soon as the spring.

But, as DNAinfo first reported, after restaurant owners Frank Brija and Erik Mayor organized against the project, the board voted to take back its most recent endorsement. The community board will vote again on the bike lanes after considering the businessmen’s arguments and hearing a new presentation from the Department of Transportation.

“They’re ready to do Occupy Milk Burger.”

Community leaders, including Mark-Viverito and CB 11 chair Matthew Washington, support the bike lanes and promised to ensure that the board has accurate information about the project.

Brija and Mayor, the owners of Patsy’s Pizza and Milk Burger, respectively, gathered signatures from 61 business owners in East Harlem. Mayor claimed that the businesses had not been contacted about the project, though DNAinfo’s Jeff Mays reports that DOT Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione said her office contacted every business along First and Second Avenues, as did the board’s district manager and transportation committee chair.

The East Side project would bring protected bike lanes and new pedestrian refuges to a neighborhood with some of the most dangerous streets and severe asthma problems in the city. Mayor and Brija threw the kitchen sink at the proposal. In addition to arguing that the lanes would remove parking spaces and be underused, Mayor and Brija claimed that the bike lanes would increase congestion and actually worsen asthma rates in the neighborhood.

“There was a lot of confusion and misinformation provided that night,” Mark-Viverito said of Tuesday’s vote. She added that she’d personally be working with the board leadership to make sure that CB members get the best information possible about the effect of bike lanes.

“I don’t see this as any sort of slowing down of the process to get the protected bike lanes we want and need in East Harlem,” she said. “The vote was not to say no to the bike lanes.”

Read more…

Does it get less democratic than this? The City Council Transportation Committee Chair, James Vacca, just told the New York Post that Transportation Alternatives shouldn’t help people join their local community boards.

Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca. Image: CBS 2

For the past few years, TA has held an annual event walking people through the process of applying for community board membership. The event is open to the public. If you go, you don’t get a seat on your community board, but you’ll come away with a better understanding of how to get appointed by your local council member and borough president.

But apparently, if you’ve demonstrated an interest in safer streets for biking and walking and better transit, you’re persona non grata to Vacca:

City Councilman James Vacca (D-Bronx), chair of the Transportation Committee and a bike-lane critic, blasted the pro-biking group’s influence peddling.

“If such a ‘jamboree’ was held by real-estate developers in any neighborhood in the city, I think there would be a hue and cry, and rightfully so,” Vacca said. “We don’t want any board to be dominated by any particular interest.”

Transportation Alternatives spokesman Michael Murphy shot back, “We are empowering residents to get involved in their own communities. I can’t think of anything more democratic than that.”

He also took a jab at Vacca, who was a community-board district manager for 26 years before becoming a councilman.

“It’s pretty ironic that Chairman Vacca, the self-proclaimed champion of community process, is criticizing us for encouraging local residents to participate in community process.”

“We don’t want any board to be dominated by any particular interest.” Agreed. So why do people who speak up in favor of safer streets get booted from their local community boards? And why, in districts where the vast majority of residents don’t own cars, do the interests of the privileged few with free curbside parking so often trump the interests of the many who would benefit from a more democratic use of street space?

Upgrading the Hudson Avenue bike lane would extend the protected lanes on both Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

The transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 2 voted unanimously on Tuesday to endorse a community-generated plan to upgrade the Hudson Street bike lane to a parking-protected lane.

Right now, Hudson Street has a buffered bike lane. It’s one of the oldest in the city according to Ian Dutton, a former vice chair of the transportation committee, who proposed the upgrade along with community board member Maury Schott and Mike Epstein, who works in the area. But the lane has become inadequate for safe travel. The paint on the street has been totally worn away and the lane is constantly blocked by double-parked vehicles.

Since it is already buffered, however, upgrading to a parking-protected lane is easy. “All we’re doing is flipping it,” said Dutton. “It has no impact on moving lanes — they stay right where they are.” The only trade-off for the safety upgrade is a few parking spaces that would need to be removed for new mixing zones and pedestrian refuge islands.

“All the statistics point to the fact that parking protected zones reduce both pedestrian, bike and vehicle passenger injuries,” said Schott. On Eighth Avenue, total street injuries fell between 18 and 35 percent after the upgrade. On Second Avenue, injuries fell 11 percent while the number of weekday cyclists using the lane more than tripled.

Hudson Street effectively runs in two segments. Above Abingdon Square, Hudson runs southbound, connecting Ninth Avenue to Bleecker Street. Below the square, Hudson runs north until it becomes Eighth Avenue. If installed alongside existing DOT plans for bike lanes in Midtown, therefore, the upgrade would create continuous protected lanes on Eighth Avenue from 59th Street to Canal Street and on Ninth Avenue from 59th to Bleecker.

Nearly every member of the public who spoke at the meeting voiced support for the proposal; a straw poll of attendees showed seven in favor and one opposed. Testimony submitted by e-mail weighed overwhelmingly in favor of the lane.

Safety — for both cyclists and pedestrians — was the top issue. CB 2  member Denise Collins,  said she worried for parents and children cycling to Hudson Street’s P.S. 3. “There are people who don’t even know that we have a bike lane on Hudson, it’s just totally washed away,” she said. “I hold my heart in my hands sometimes when I see these people on bikes.”

Ellen Peterson-Lewis, a public member of CB 2′s environment committee, noted that the neighborhood has a growing senior population, a group she included herself in. “To have that flip and to have that pedestrian island there,” she said, “I do think this is an excellent idea.”

Read more…

Manhattan Community Board 8 has a checkered history when it comes to bike-friendly policies. In the past few years, the Upper East Side CB voted repeatedly to support protected bike lanes, but also put out resolutions drenched with anti-bike vitriol on more than one occasion (most recently this June, when the subject was establishing shared bike-ped paths across Central Park).

Last night the board’s transportation committee heard from NYC DOT about the city’s bike-share plans, and apparently it was a drama-free affair.

Streetsblog reader Steve Vaccaro (also our attorney in the FOIL case seeking documents from opponents of the PPW bike lane) sends this recap:

On bike-share, a CB8 member who adamantly opposed the proposal for cross-park shared bike/ped paths four months ago expressed no hostility, asking if the bikes would have enough cargo room for all her things, and if DOT would consider including three-wheelers in the bike-share program to better accommodate seniors.

The co-chair of the transpo committee, Jonathan Horn, who also opposed the cross-park bike path reso at the full board, expressed no opposition to bike-share and helped explain that the CB would have an opportunity to select exactly where the stations would go, subject to the DOT’s overall density requirements and safety restrictions.

Read more…

Earlier this month NYC DOT set off on a bike-share information tour, giving an introduction to the city’s plans for a public bike-sharing system to every community board in the proposed service area. Bike-share plans got an enthusiastic reception from the Manhattan CB2 Transportation Committee. And it turns out that the full board backs the program too. On October 20, CB 2 voted 41-0 for a resolution stating that the board “fully supports DOT’s new Bike Share program.”

Next up on the bike-share tour: Manhattan Community Board 8. The transportation committee will hear from DOT this Wednesday at 6:30. If you want to bring bike-share to the Upper East Side, you might want to speak up at this community board, where bike improvements seldom have an easy go of it.

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

By a vote of 26 to 10 Wednesday night, Manhattan Community Board 4 endorsed DOT plans to extend the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenue from 34th Street to 59th Street. The bike lanes will improve safety for all users on some of Midtown’s most chaotic streets, which pass by Penn Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.

Though there were objections from a couple of businesses when the CB 4 transportation committee discussed the project last month, last night only one person testified about the lanes.”I’m just someone who got injured and started biking to heal the injury,” said Detta Ahl. “I found it was a good way to get around the city. I want to get around the city safely.”

Ahl also pointed out that the redesigned streets will improve safety for pedestrians and motorists as well as cyclists; further south on Eighth Avenue, a similar redesign reduced traffic injuries for all street users by 35 percent.

On the community board, opponents of the bike lane focused on what they saw as bad behavior by cyclists. Calls for additional education and enforcement of traffic laws earned loud applause.

Construction will take place in two phases next year. The lanes will be extended to 42nd Street in the spring and to 59th Street in the fall.

The Second Avenue bike lane in the East Village. Photo: DNAInfo

Last night, the full board of Manhattan Community Board 8 voted in favor of building a protected bike lane on First Avenue between 60th Street and 96th Street.

Once construction is finished, the lane will be one segment of a complete street running from Houston to 125th with Select Bus Service, protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands (though the cyclist protection and pedestrian islands disappear near the Queensboro Bridge). On the Upper East Side, the Second Avenue lane will be on hold until subway construction is complete, but the First Avenue lane could be in place as early as this fall. In East Harlem, construction will start on Second Avenue next spring.

CB 8 approved the project by a vote of 20-11-1. That total masks the closeness of the vote, however. According to community board member Scott Falk, with two people left to vote the total stood at 16-13-1. Since resolutions need more than half of all voters to support them to pass, had both those two people voted no, the resolution would have failed. Neither did, though, and once the resolution had passed, two nays switched their votes to join the winning side.

The biggest issue was how the bike lane would affect local businesses’ ability to make deliveries, said Falk. “This was going to force triple parking, as they put it.” That argument was ultimately defeated by an appeal to the life-saving effects of protected bike lanes. Said Falk, “This isn’t about bicycles. It’s about safety by design.”