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Brownsville is set to have extra asphalt converted to bike lanes after Community Board 16's supportive vote last night. Photosim: NYC DOT

Good news out of Brooklyn last night: After a community-driven process that started in 2011, Community Board 16 voted to support painted bike lanes and sharrows on 15 miles of Brownsville streets.

The proposal calls for bike lanes on New Lots Avenue, Pitkin Avenue, Mother Gaston Boulevard, and a north/south pair on Hendrix Street and Schenck Avenue. DOT is also in the process of installing more than 600 bike racks in the neighborhood and community partners are hosting bike rides and helmet fittings.

The effort to bring bike lanes to Brownsville was started by Bettie Kollock-Wallace, who now serves as CB 16′s chair. Kollock-Wallace began working with the Brownsville Partnership and the Brooklyn District Public Health Office, which reached out to community members, Transportation Alternatives, and DOT to formulate a plan for bike lanes.

Community Board 5, covering East New York, is expected to vote on the plan soon. Its transportation committee supported an earlier, less comprehensive version of the plan in November. The lanes are slated for installation this spring, according to the Brownsville Partnership.

Image: NYC DOT

Last night, the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6 voted unanimously in favor of a new PARK Smart zone for Atlantic Avenue, Smith Street, and Court Street, and for a Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway segment connecting Van Brunt Street to Valentino Pier in Red Hook.

The new PARK Smart zone, which Stephen covered earlier this week, works differently than PARK Smart in Greenwich Village and Park Slope, where on-street parking rates rise when demand is highest. NYC DOT’s proposal for Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill is to have rates rise progressively after the first half hour. The goal is to reduce traffic by discouraging long-term parking and all-day meter feeding in curbside spaces that should be turning over frequently. Brooklyn CB 2′s transportation committee voted for the plan on Tuesday.

DOT also presented plans for a Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway segment that would loop out to Valentino Pier from Van Brunt Street. We have a request in with DOT for last night’s presentation (Update: Here it is), but in the meantime, below is a map of this part of the greenway from DOT’s implementation plan [PDF]. It looks like the segment that the CB 6 committee voted for last night includes capital projects 12, 13, and 14 (not 14a), or parts thereof:

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A capital reconstruction of this pedestrian plaza on Ninth Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets got a positive vote from Community Board 4's transportation committee last night. Photo: Google Maps

Last night, two community boards in Sunset Park and Manhattan’s West Side voted to support bike lanes, bike parking and permanent pedestrian plazas. As a result, Sunset Park will be receiving shared lane markings on Fifth Avenue, the permanent reconstruction of a plaza at Ninth Avenue and 14th Street will move ahead, and bike lanes and on-street corrals are on track for the West Side of Manhattan.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn Community Board 7 voted to support the extension of shared lane markings on Fifth Avenue from 23rd to 65th Streets. (On Fifth Avenue between 23rd and Dean Streets, there are already bike lane and sharrow markings.)

The proposal received a supportive transportation committee vote in July, but stalled after a 15-9-10 vote at the full board in October. CB 7′s first vice chair, Daniel Murphy, reintroduced the sharrows resolution last night, and it passed, 23-5, with seven abstentions.

“We always planned to reintroduce it, it was just a question of when,” Murphy said, adding that a few board members who opposed the plan in October switched to support it this time around. “We didn’t get angry. We got rational,” he said. Murphy said he doesn’t believe this will delay DOT’s ability to install the markings this spring. Streetsblog has asked DOT to confirm an implementation schedule.

In Manhattan, Community Board 4′s transportation committee passed a resolution in support of the permanent reconstruction of a 9,000 square-foot plaza on Ninth Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets. DOT will add street trees on the east side of the plaza; the committee is asking DOT to add greenery to the center of the space, as well.

The Ninth Avenue protected bike lane, which shrinks to a standard painted lane at this location before becoming a buffered lane on Hudson Street, is often full of double-parked cars and trucks. “They told us there is not enough space on the avenue to create a protected bike lane,” committee co-chair Christine Berthet said. “We’re definitely not happy about it.”

A median pedestrian island on Ninth Avenue at 15th Street will be removed and replaced with a curb extension. The design will include cobblestones to match the aesthetic of plaza spaces on Ninth Avenue as it approaches Gansevoort Street.

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Image: NYC DOT

Last night, Manhattan Community Board 7 signaled its support for an extension of the Columbus Avenue protected bike lane — which currently runs one mile, from 96th to 77th Streets — north to 110th Street and south to 69th Street [PDF]. The 26-11 vote (with one abstention) was a much wider margin than CB 7′s 23-19-1 vote in favor of the initial Columbus Avenue bike lane segment back in 2010.

Council Member Gale Brewer didn't talk about the bike lane in her comments before the board last night. "I knew it would pass," she said later. Photo: Stephen Miller

Attendees at last night’s meeting were overwhelmingly in favor of the bike lane, with 29 speaking in favor and only two against the plan. Many wore pink stickers from the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign to show their support.

Before the vote, CB 7 Chair Mark Diller expressed his support for the plan as well. Calling it “imperfect but worthwhile,” he said the community would be better off with the safety benefits the redesign brings to the street. Diller added that, unlike many other city agencies, “the Department of Transportation seems to care what we think,” and that the community board would have to continue its dialogue with DOT to ensure that the project is successful.

The protected bike lane extension will bring the types of safety benefits seen on the initial segment — pedestrian injuries dropped 41 percent — to dozens more blocks, but it won’t provide a continuous link to the Ninth Avenue bike lane, at least not yet. One aspect of the plan that may be reexamined is the absence of a protected lane south of 69th Street, where DOT is proposing an additional vehicle lane (currently there are three), one of which would be an “enhanced shared lane” similar to the shared lanes on First and Second Avenues in Midtown.

By wringing additional car capacity from the street, while doing very little for bike riders and providing no improvements for pedestrians near the dangerous bowtie intersection with Broadway, DOT’s plan upset both bike lane supporters and opponents on the board.

“They added something that wasn’t even identified as a problem,” said Lisa Sladkus of the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance. After comments from board members last night, Sladkus told Streetsblog, “I think they know it’s something that needs to be addressed.”

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Theresa Scavo and her car. Photo: Brooklyn Paper

It’s no secret that NYC community boards are highly protective of on-street parking, since their members seem more likely to be car owners than the population at large, but it was news to us that board chairs and district managers have free parking perks.

The Brooklyn Paper reports that, come February 1, community board chairs will lose the city-issued placards that allow them to park in metered spots for three hours. While you’d think that would spur them to walk, bike, or take transit to get to meetings in their own neighborhoods, CB 15 chair Theresa Scavo says she will spend less time performing civic duties and more time feeding the meter.

“If I park at a meter that only takes an hour’s worth of quarters, I can’t stay at the meetings the whole time,” Scavo said.

Judging from the quotes collected for this story, it’s as if free parking is considered a reward for the onerous burden of community service — even among community board staff, who are paid for their work.

“They’re doing the community a favor,” said Community Board 18 district manager Dorothy Turano. “I’m doing it as part of my obligation, and there’s no question I deserve to have this pass, but so does [Community Board 18 chairman] Sol Needle.”

Turano and other district managers will retain their parking perks.

The sense of entitlement on display here goes a long way toward explaining why many community boards tend to value curbside parking — for automobiles, not bikes — above all else. From street safety projects to Greenmarkets, in some districts no sacrifice is too great when it comes to preserving the privilege of on-street vehicle storage.

If it looks like their volunteer work might compromise the time required to tend to their cars, Scavo and other auto-dependent board chairs should consider surrendering their posts to people who have a more realistic perspective on what it’s like to get around in New York.

Mark Gorton is the publisher of Streetsblog and lives on the Upper West Side with his wife and four children. This is an edited version of a message he sent to Dan Zweig and Andrew Albert, the co-chairs of the Community Board 7 transportation committee, after neither of them voted in favor of extending the Columbus Avenue protected bike lane this Tuesday. (The project did clear the committee and will be going to the full board later this month.)

Dan and Andrew,

I am writing as a follow up to last night’s CB 7 transportation committee meeting. I was heartened by the overwhelming community support for extending the Columbus Avenue bike lane, and I was glad to see the outcome of the vote of the transportation committee. However, I am still distressed that the leadership of the transportation committee is still so misinformed about the basics of street safety.

I understand that you have the perception that more cycling makes our streets less safe, but that is just not true. DOT studies on Columbus Avenue and around the city show that protected bike lanes make our streets safer for everyone. Similar studies from around the world also demonstrate that fact. The cities in the world that have the safest streets (Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, etc.) are also the cities with the most cycling. In the complicated ecosystem of our streets, bicycles are a safety device. Ninety-nine percent of the danger on our streets comes from motor vehicles, and the largest safety effect of bicycles is their impact on reducing the danger from cars and trucks.

I understand that you “feel” differently, but the basics of street safety are well-established principles. Whatever your feelings might be or whatever anecdotal observations you might make do not change the reality of street safety. Your misperceptions have delayed much-needed safety improvements for our neighborhood, and as a result, people are being injured and killed. Hundreds of your neighbors have come out time and time again to tell you how much these safety improvements mean to them, their families, and their neighbors. Last night, multiple people were on the verge of tears because they so desperately want these safety improvements. It amazes me that you have not been moved by the strength, depth, and emotion of the testimony from your neighbors that you have heard time and time again.

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After deadlocking in December, Manhattan Commmunity Board 7′s transportation committee voted 7-2, with one abstention, to support the extension of the Columbus Avenue protected bike lane before an overwhelmingly supportive crowd last night.

CB 7 transportation committee co-chair Dan Zweig said last night that he doesn't believe in the accepted standards for analyzing crash statistics. Photo: Stephen Miller

The resolution passed without any help from the committee’s co-chairs, Andrew Albert, who abstained, and Dan Zweig, who voted against the resolution.

At the end of the meeting, CB 7 chair Mark Diller, who had been emceeing the night’s events, came out and endorsed the resolution, while continuing to hedge his position. “I don’t think it’s a slam dunk,” he told committee members, “but it absolutely deserves an airing at full board.”

In previous meetings with CB 7, DOT presented data showing that the lane has yielded safety benefits for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers — including a 41 percent drop in pedestrian injuries. Zweig didn’t accept DOT’s crash data last night, saying that because one year of pre-lane data had a high number of crashes, it should be excluded from analysis.

DOT Bicycle and Pedestrian Director Josh Benson rebuffed Zweig’s attempt to cherry pick numbers. ”We don’t invent new methodologies,” he said. “To just pick one year and eliminate it, that’s just not what we do.”

In his presentation [PDF], Benson also defended mixing zones, spaces leading up to intersections designed to improve visibility between cyclists and left-turning drivers. Some BID representatives and board members had requested that DOT eliminate the zones to preserve parking spots. Instead, the agency will shorten the zones on the existing bike lane to add back one spot per block, while maintaining that they are necessary to reduce the risk of crashes.

DOT has also completed its outreach to 189 local businesses and, as a result, will add or lengthen weekday daytime loading zones at five locations on Columbus Avenue. Additionally, the agency will eliminate the morning rush hour parking restriction between 110th and 96th Streets, opening up 105 parking spots for three additional hours each weekday morning.

At last night’s meeting, DOT said that the street redesign could be complete after two months of construction. Although there was no schedule for implementation, Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione said it’s on track to be installed sometime in 2013.

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Tonight, Manhattan Community Board 7 will again consider a DOT proposal to extend the existing Columbus Avenue bike lane, a mile-long segment between 77th and 96th Streets that’s currently isolated from the rest of the city’s network. If the committee supports the lane tonight, the proposal would go before the full board in February in time to be installed this spring.

Tonight, CB 7 will again consider a critical extension of the Columbus Avenue bike lane. Photo: DOT

Since the initial segment was installed, speeding is less frequent and pedestrian injuries have dropped 41 percent along the redesigned stretch of Columbus. The proposal [PDF] would bring the protected lane north to 110th Street and south to 69th Street, with an “enhanced shared lane” connecting south to the Ninth Avenue protected lane, which begins at 59th Street.

Last month, DOT presented the plan to CB 7′s transportation committee before a full house, with most in the audience supporting the bike lane. Things were different on the committee itself, which — in a near-repeat of its 2010 vote on the initial bike lane segment — deadlocked in a 5-4-1 vote. Half of the no votes came from the committee co-chairs, Andrew Albert and Dan Zweig, who have a history of obstructing changes to the streets of the Upper West Side.

Although Council Member Gale Brewer wanted the full board to vote in favor of the bike lane at its meeting last week, the issue has instead returned to committee. CB 7 chair Mark Diller told Streetsblog in December that now is the time for the committee to conclude its deliberations. ”We’re putting other things on hold to make room for this,” he said. ”We’re going to get a resolution out of transportation in January.”

Tonight’s meeting begins at 7:00 p.m. at Goddard Riverside Community Center, 593 Columbus Avenue.

The beginnings of the neighborhood bike network for Brownsville and East New York would repurpose extra asphalt for painted bike lanes on Pitkin Avenue and four other streets. Photosim: NYC DOT

The transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 16 last night voted in favor of a plan to stripe Brownsville’s first bike lanes, reports Nupur Chaudhury of the local non-profit Brownsville Partnership.

The plan presented by NYC DOT would stripe four bike routes in Brownsville and East New York: on New Lots Avenue, Pitkin Avenue, Mother Gaston Boulevard, and the north/south pair of Hendrix Street and Schenck Avenue. The New Lots and Hendrix/Schenck routes were originally slated for a future round of striping, but DOT was able to bump up the installation schedule to 2013, according to Chaudhury. “It means there’s two east/west routes and a north/south route in both East New York and Brownsville,” she said.

These bike lanes aren’t top-of-the-line infrastructure — they’ll provide stripes and, in some places, just sharrows, not physical protection — but they’re a milestone for two eastern Brooklyn neighborhoods that currently lack any on-street bike routes to speak of. The sight of bike infrastructure is still new enough here that when DOT began putting in the area’s first bike racks (they’ve installed 200 in the CB 16 district since the summer of 2011), Chaudhury heard some residents express confusion about what they were for. With the beginnings of a neighborhood bicycle network in place, getting around Brownsville and East New York by bike won’t seem so unusual.

The Brownsville Partnership is one of several neighborhood organizations, along with the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and the Pitkin Avenue BID, that have joined with DOT and the Department of Health to make local streets more bike-friendly. The community workshops and events they put on starting in 2011 led to this point and will provide the basis for more improvements to come.

Next up: The proposal goes before CB 16′s full board meeting on January 22. DOT will also be going back to CB 5 with the current plan, which includes more routes than the version approved by the board’s transportation committee last fall. Chaudhury says installation this spring and summer is looking likely.

The traffic and transportation committee will be considering safety improvements for the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Canal Street, as well as a package of sidewalk extensions, daylighting, and other upgrades for the area where Varick Street converges with Carmine and Clarkson Streets. As you can see in the video from BrooklynSpoke’s Doug Gordon, Holland Tunnel traffic makes this spot pretty hellish for walking.

Also on the agenda: three bike corrals that could bring the one-two punch of safer intersections and more convenient bike parking to three intersections in Greenwich Village and SoHo.

If you live or work in the area, this will be a good opportunity to start off your year in livable streets activism. The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at the NYU Silver Building, 32 Waverly Place, Room 401.