The slug for the story on the metro section homepage reads: “New York often resorts to revenue-raising expedients like a lucrative new campaign to keep drivers on Broadway below Houston Street from venturing into the bus lane.”

Dwyer’s piece then uses the enforcement of the Broadway bus lane in lower Manhattan as a kind of poster child for what he sees as an excessive reliance on fines and fees in the city budget. He writes: “Whatever the virtues of bus lanes, and there are many, this one is a trap — a lucrative one.”

Dwyer’s source for claiming that the Broadway bus lane is a “trap”? Well, he doesn’t quote any transit planners with the MTA or NYC DOT, which implemented bus improvements on Broadway in 2007. He doesn’t quote any bus drivers familiar with the route. He doesn’t turn to any of the 41,000 or so passengers who ride the New York City Transit buses that ply Broadway every weekday. Instead he cites a cop who “concedes that traffic would be backed up to 14th Street if some drivers did not make their way into that Broadway bus lane.”

The other expert who turns up at the tail end of Dwyer’s piece is an anonymous state official who, “as it happens,” was pulled over for driving in the bus lane and “managed to wiggle out of the ticket.” A member of the placarded class who got busted but didn’t have to pay. Exactly the type of credible source Times readers should trust to render judgment on transportation policy. The official says of the Broadway lane: “It goes against the intent of bus lanes because it causes congestion.”

And here I thought the intent of bus lanes was to help bus passengers reach their destinations quicker. But who needs transit planners, bus drivers, and bus riders to weigh in on a bus lane when cops and anonymous state officials who drive in the bus lane are so generous with their expertise?

Go back a few years in the Times’ archive, and there’s a great explanation for why Broadway needs bus lane enforcement. From a Willie Neuman story in 2007:

As the bus continued south on Broadway, the driver pointed to the lane next to the curb, which was marked on the pavement as a bus lane. Despite that, the lane was mostly full of parked cars, most of them with city-issued placards on the dash, showing they were used by law enforcement personnel.

More than one bus stop was blocked with parked cars as well, some with placards, others with drivers sitting at the wheel. While the cars with placards are allowed to use the bus lane under the current rules, parking in a bus stop is prohibited.

“This is always like this,” the bus driver said. “And you know what’s missing? There are no ticket agents down here.”

The Times of London has launched what Dani Simons aptly calls a “nearly mind-blowing” pro-cycling campaign. Inspired by a crash that seriously injured a Times reporter, “Cities Fit for Cycling” is the kind of multifaceted public safety program that is normally the province of non-profit advocacy, right down to the eight-point manifesto that covers everything from education and street improvements to truck design.

Here’s a sample:

• “Trucks entering a city centre should be required by law to fit sensors, audible truck-turning alarms, extra mirrors and safety bars to stop cyclists being thrown under the wheels.”
• “Two per cent of the Highways Agency budget should be earmarked for next generation cycle routes, providing £100 million a year towards world-class cycling infrastructure. Each year cities should be graded on the quality of cycling provision.”
• “20mph should become the default speed limit in residential areas where there are no cycle lanes.”

The Times is taking suggestions from the public on how to make streets safer. There’s even an online form that puts readers in touch with their local officials.

“Imagine if the NY Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal put their considerable clout and resources behind an effective strategy to promote cycling safety,” writes Simons. Instead, sensationalist fear-mongering, fabricated controversies and shameless victim-blaming continue to be the hallmarks of cycling coverage in New York, where the press corps tends to be embarrassingly regressive even in comparison to other stateside media markets.

Maybe that will change once city bike-share adds thousands of everyday cyclists to the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Or maybe, if The Times campaign generates enough buzz (and the paper itself isn’t felled by scandal), News Corp. will export “Cities Fit for Cycling” to one of its properties across the Atlantic.

Heads up, Cuozzo.

Jason King was in a Madison Avenue crosswalk when a dump truck driver backed into him and dragged him 30 feet. King's death prompted then-Senator Carl Kruger to take action -- not for tougher penalties for deadly driving, but for a ban on listening to music while walking. Photo: DNAinfo

But a closer look reveals some major caveats. First, the study relied on notoriously unreliable media reports to come up with 116 cases, between 2004 and 2011, in which pedestrians were killed or injured while wearing headphones (total U.S. pedestrian deaths during those years numbered in the tens of thousands). The majority of victims cited in the study were struck by trains, not cars, which as much as anything could call into question the perils of walking on train tracks — or the need for safer pedestrian thoroughfares.

Researchers noted that the overall use of headphones probably increased during the study period. If the study has any evidence that not wearing headphones is safer than wearing headphones, none of the press accounts we’ve seen have picked it up.

Then there’s this detail, reported by NPR:

The study is not the last word on the subject, the researchers concede. Because the data are drawn from media reports, they cannot say conclusively whether accident victims might have also had mental problems or drivers might have been at fault, for example.

Come again? With no accounting for driver error, this study isn’t worth the paper its printed on. In taking motor vehicles and their operators out of the equation, you might as well pin pedestrian deaths on Chuck Taylor tennis shoes or Orbit chewing gum.

Even if you start from the premise that the onus is on pedestrians to protect themselves from powerful multi-ton vehicles, the findings here are suspect at best. And though lead author Richard Lichenstein acknowledges that the study is basically a conversation-starter, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Stories like the ones circulating today lend credence to the idea that traffic crashes are as unpreventable as natural disasters, and the best we can do is remain vigilant and hope we don’t die. When a paper like the New York Post sees a chance to pen a victim-blaming headline, it doesn’t sweat the small print.

East Harlem is beset by disproportionate rates of obesity, traffic injuries, and asthma. The least a respectable reporter can do would be to check Mayor’s claims against the word of an actual public health expert.

Here’s what Joanne Eichel of the New York Academy of Medicine said at a recent community board meeting about the East Harlem bike lanes:

“There is no evidence to suggest that bike lanes increase asthma rates. On the contrary, we know that riding a bike has extraordinary health benefits.” Adding protected bike lanes would be “a major step toward improving the health of people of all ages in the community.”

Why does someone who sells cheeseburgers for a living get to spout garbage all over TV and the tabloids, while a public health professional like Eichel gets ignored?

New York Times coverage of the crash that killed Mathieu Lefevre offered readers a rare look at an NYPD deeply biased against victims of traffic violence. Photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT

When Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu Lefevre was killed by a hit-and-run driver in October, NYPD initially told the media that Lefevre had run a red light and that he was riding in the truck driver’s blind spot. The NYPD crash report contradicts both those claims, yet the department’s final public statement on the case may well be “There’s no criminality. That’s why they call it an accident.”

Rasha Shamoon was riding her bike home in the early morning hours of August 5, 2008 when she was struck by the driver of a Range Rover at Bowery and Delancey. Shamoon, 31, was an experienced cyclist whose bike was covered with reflective tape and equipped with front and rear lights. Limiting witness interviews to the driver, who at 21 had amassed a record of six traffic convictions, and his two passengers, NYPD faulted Shamoon for the crash.

In November 2009, 22-year-old Seth Kahn was killed by a bus driver while crossing Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. Police at first told reporters that Kahn was running to beat the light when he was crushed by the rear wheels of the turning bus. Days later, however, bus driver Jeremy Philhower was ticketed for failing to yield. Almost a year after the crash it was determined that Philhower, who had a history of texting behind the wheel and had reportedly posted comments on Facebook about his desire to kill people, was driving too fast and not looking where he was going.

In the immediate aftermath of any single crash, it’s impossible to tell whether NYPD has sufficient cause to exonerate the driver. The department won’t release details from investigations and withholds crash reports from public scrutiny. But when the data from those reports is compiled by the New York State DOT and vetted by researchers, the cumulative picture debunks the NYPD’s blame-the-victim-first protocol.

The most comprehensive analysis of crash reports is inside the 2010 NYC DOT pedestrian safety report, which examined crashes in which pedestrians died or suffered serious injuries from 2002 to 2006. Among the crashes to which contributing factors were assigned, only 21.5 percent placed primary responsibility on “pedestrian error/confusion.” The vast majority were caused by driver behavior, including inattention (a factor in 36 percent of crashes), failure to yield (27 percent), and excessive speed (20 percent).

Since drivers are culpable for most crashes that hurt pedestrians, this should add up to hundreds if not thousands of cases each year where police and prosecutors file charges for reckless or negligent driving. In 2006, for example, 143 pedestrians died on city streets and 1,313 were severely injured. That doesn’t count less serious pedestrian injuries, which number in the thousands annually.

But as Transportation Alternatives noted in October, NYPD has failed to make use of new state laws intended to hold dangerous motorists accountable. Applications of VTL 1146, the statute that was strengthened last fall to make “careless driving” the default charge when pedestrians or cyclists are injured, have stayed pretty much the same for the last three-and-a-half years, with this year’s total citations on track to remain in the double digits.

So not only is there a huge mismatch between what actually causes crashes and what NYPD feeds the media, the department is as a rule letting drivers off the hook for inflicting death and serious injury.

Well, in a lot of ways they made the same mistakes that Marcia Kramer and her producers at CBS2 tend to make when the subject turns to pedestrian plazas and bike lanes.

For the people-on-the-street quotes, they turned to motorists, not the people enjoying the plazas or the cyclists riding in the new lanes. They put Sadik-Khan and Michael Bloomberg on the defensive for her “brash,” “imperious” style, never acknowledging the ample public demand for safer street designs or the community board votes in favor of them. They gave airtime to Louise Hainline’s discredited bike counts on Prospect Park West. They never mentioned the fact that most New Yorkers don’t own cars, or that bikes and buses can move the same amount of people as automobiles while consuming much less space.

Still, the piece had a few things going for it.

1. Broadway at Times Square looks great without cars.
2. They gave Sadik-Khan time to speak. I’m sure a lot of material ended up on the cutting room floor, but the DOT commissioner makes a clear, compelling case on camera for redesigning congested city streets.
3. Bloomberg provided a choice quote about why it makes sense to give people more transportation options.
4. I’m speculating here, but the average person watching at home probably came away thinking that training a spy camera on a bike lane from your apartment is not the behavior of a well-adjusted adult.
5. The one-two punch from Gridlock Sam and Sadik-Khan at the end said it pretty clearly: A hundred years of car-centric design have not made streets function any better; we need to do things differently.

But then came anchor Brian Williams, blithely dismissing the case for change that Smith’s piece had been building toward. An avid horsepower aficionado, Williams seemed to revel in his ignorance of how traffic works (“Those cars, they’re not going to stay home!”) and almost openly rooted for bike lanes to be torn up. The larger truth — that traffic will only get worse unless you give people better options for getting around — apparently escaped him.

Michael Kimmelman

For once in a Times story on bicycling, there’s no fear-mongering about lawless bikers or hand-wringing about misused street space. That’s partly because the article is rendered as criticism rather than reportage and thus doesn’t require “balance.” But mostly it’s because the writer, Michael Kimmelman, formerly the Times’ chief art critic and, as of July, its architecture critic and senior critic to boot, clearly wouldn’t stand for it.

“New Yorkers should love bicycling,” Kimmelman begins. At the conclusion of the piece, he writes: “This [cycling] was the only way to travel.” Between these bookends is an autumn day spent riding from the West Side on the Hudson River Greenway, through Midtown to the Lower East Side, over the Williamsburg Bridge, along the Brooklyn waterfront, back to Manhattan by ferry, up First Avenue, to and through Central Park and then home, with abundant pauses to eat, converse, consider, and, yes, stop at red lights.

Much of the ride is in the company of Janette Sadik-Khan. Mercifully, the DOT Commissioner isn’t likened to Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs but is allowed to be herself: “a keen bicycler… the driving force behind the city’s new bike lanes and now also a piñata for their vocal opponents.” Opponents whom Kimmelman rebukes for their myopia even as he invites them to join him:

It’s too bad that so many New Yorkers still complain about the bike lanes’ contribution to the inconvenience of urban driving instead of promoting them for their obvious role in helping solve the city’s transportation miseries, and for their aesthetic possibilities. I don’t mean they’re great to look at. I mean that for users they offer a different way of taking in the city.

That passage conveys a lot: not just that it’s time for “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and their tabloid enablers to get off Sadik-Khan’s back and get a life — or, better, a bike — but that there’s a new voice at the Times’ bully pulpit: one for whom architecture isn’t just buildings but is the fabric in which structures, spaces and society intersect and interact.

In recent columns, Kimmelman has extolled “the power of place” in fostering political protest from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and has written of the value of melding green design with quality architecture in public housing in the Bronx. In his piece today, Kimmelman plants his critic’s flag squarely amidst New York’s contested streets, and states openly that bicycling is “a no-brainer” — not just “for the obvious health and environmental reasons and also because cycling can be the swiftest way to get around,” but because bicycling lends our city “civic diversity.”

“Great cities offer up as one of their distinguishing virtues [a] combination of serendipity and complexity,” Kimmelman writes. Accordingly, he doesn’t sugarcoat cycling’s pitfalls, but recalls “plenty of accidents over the years… crashing into double-parked cars, abruptly opened taxi doors and reckless riders,” and grumbles about the traffic-blocked bike lanes and “crosstown madness [that left him] cursing the downsides of cycling.” But even that, he implies, is a price worth paying to find “New York unspooled as a series of surprises.” Cycling “provide[s] a natural mix of intimacy and distance. On a bike, the city shrinks.“

Kimmelman does hit a bump, attributing to Jacobs rather than the mid-century urban thinker Lewis Mumford the crucial insight that “new highways only create more traffic as cars multiply to meet increased capacity.” No matter, it’s grand seeing Moses’ obsessive program of more and wider highways exposed as magical building; hearing Sadik-Khan describe the concept of safety-in-numbers for cyclists as an “architecture of safety”; having Kimmelman himself proclaim that “the bike lanes are about urban livability and about encouraging the sort of street culture that, as Jacobs reminded us, a healthy and democratic city depends on“; and reading his shout-out to London’s “traffic-congestion fee program for drivers of the sort that New York was wrong to reject.”

I’m probably making too much of Kimmelman’s essay. One article, even in the Times, doesn’t a revolution make, and the enemies of livable streets will probably ignore it anyway. Take it, then, as a harbinger of the livable streets revolution that, though fitful, is now firmly underway.

If you want to know what happened here, the city tabloids won't help you. Photo: Gothamist

The prevailing narrative has it that last Friday, September 2, at approximately 8:30 p.m., Djandji was riding behind a friend eastbound on Borinquen Place in Brooklyn when he ran a red light at Rodney Street, turning left into the path of a driver headed west on Borinquen.

Read the Post: “A Brooklyn biker was fatally struck and dragged by a car after he ran a red light last night, witnesses and cops said.”

The News: “A Brooklyn bicyclist was struck and killed on Friday night when he ran a red light in South Williamsburg, police said.”

Also from the News: “A Brooklyn artist became the 10th person in the city killed while riding a bicycle this year when he ran a red light and was struck by an SUV in Williamsburg.”

And the Brooklyn Paper: “Police determined that the cyclist ran a red light at Rodney Street.”

Of all the reports we could find, only Benjamin Sutton at L Magazine pointed out the obvious:

“As that intersection has no left turn signals she [the driver] must also have been passing through it after the light had turned red.”

With such a gaping hole left unaddressed by media reports, we called NYPD for clarification. A spokesperson told us there was no mention in the incident report of Djandji running a red light. When we told the officer what the papers were saying, he was dismissive, indicating that this detail did not come from NYPD.

It’s impossible to know where the media’s version of the collision that killed Nicolas Djandji originated — perhaps from a witness, or an offhand remark by an officer at the scene. Nor do we know details like how fast the motorist was traveling, and based on the solid information available it’s impossible to say who was culpable. But we do know two things. One is that in cases where dead cyclists and pedestrians can’t speak for themselves, the city press corps is willing to forgo due diligence and repeat unsubstantiated claims. The second is that when it comes to traffic crashes in New York City, you can’t trust anything you read.

Update: A reader reports that eastbound Borinquen has a delayed green signal at Rodney, meaning that contrary to the L Magazine excerpt, it’s possible for someone traveling westbound at that intersection to have a green light while someone traveling eastbound has a red.

Sadik-Khan with Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro and cyclist-baiting Council Member James Oddo. Photo: NYC DOT via The New York Observer

Matt Chaban at the Observer has filed a balanced, thorough and, dare we say, mature profile of Janette Sadik-Khan. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth a read.

Eschewing the pat cars vs. bikes conceit, and with nary a mention of the commissioner’s sartorial preferences, Chaban examines NYC DOT spending and wonders why critics refuse to acknowledge that, under Sadik-Khan, the agency is busting its hump to keep roads and bridges in good shape for motorists.

Of the 775 projects funded under the current capital plan, only a handful involved pedestrian plazas, like the closure of Times Square and the rest of Broadway, or bike lanes, like the litigious route along Prospect Park West. Some of these projects are so cheap, they do not even make the budget. All told, DOT has spent $19.2 million on plazas and $15.8 million on bike lanes. That is less than 1 percent of all capital spending over the past four years.

“She has done more for drivers than anyone since Robert Moses,” one transportation professional told The Observer.

All of which means nothing, Chaban writes, to a media and political establishment wedded to the status quo. When politicos and the press go into convulsions over the slightest perceived inconvenience to the motoring minority, when a junk lawsuit literally drives the news cycle of the city’s paper of record, DOT’s success stories don’t stand a chance.

Of course no one ever flipped breathlessly to a story about a pothole-free street, or a pedestrian who made it home safely. (“So much of what DOT does is invisible,” says Sam Schwartz.) But Chaban notes that even a sure-fire spectacle like the replacement of the Willis Avenue Bridge only got play for a day or two, “compared to at least a year’s worth of reports lambasting bike lanes.” Another example: If any media outlet in the city has connected the makeover of Times Square with the subsequent rise in retail rents, please send us a link.

If the city were really ramping up cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure at the expense of motorists, at least Sadik-Khan’s detractors, misguided as they may be, would be arguing from a point of fact. But as it is DOT is making New York a more livable city on the cheap with little to no impact on drivers — if anything, the emphasis on maintenance and repair is a blessing for motorists — and is saving lives in the process. Only through willful ignorance could this story continue to go untold.

So while the News and other outlets (the story made the AP wire) howl over $52 million in fines issued to “unsuspecting motorists” for running red lights in 2010, here’s the real news: a lot of drivers are running red lights. The fact that, in the course of a year, just 150 cameras caught a reported 1,053,268 drivers potentially putting lives at risk is a pretty good sign that the actual amount of red-light running is off the charts. (Is Komanoff in the house?) One can’t also help but conclude that the 2010 figures represent about 1,053,268 drivers who, if not for the cameras, would have gotten away with it.

But that’s not much of a surprise either. What jumped out at us, again, is the show of support for red light cameras from James Vacca. An avowed skeptic of other traffic-taming infrastructure and promoter of unfettered parking access, the City Council transportation committee chair has remained consistent in his condemnation of reckless driving. Said Vacca to the News:

“People who run red lights can kill people. These cameras go a long way towards making this a safer city.”

“I hope we get to the point where these cameras do not raise revenue and there is compliance with red lights,” he said. “Stop means stop.”

Granted, this is no big lift, and it’s exactly what the council transportation chair should be saying. But with more red light cameras, along with speed cameras, on the agenda, Vacca’s ongoing vocal support could be a big help in prodding Albany to allow the city to deploy additional life-saving, and popular, traffic tech.

Celeste Katz, center, and Alex Nazaryan, right, work their keyboards for today's online chat about bike lanes. Photo: anjalimullany/yfrog

Earlier today I participated in a live chat debate on the topic of bike lanes, hosted and moderated by Celeste Katz. The chief sparring partner for supporters of bike lanes was Alex Nazaryan, who sits on the paper’s editorial board and joined a group of cyclists for an uneventful ride across the Manhattan Bridge the previous morning.

Number one takeaway: If you have something to say about street safety issues and you want the Daily News opinion team to notice, write a letter to the Daily News. Based on what transpired in the chat room today, the editorial board puts more stock in those letters than other public opinion data or facts about street engineering and transportation policy.

Here’s a compilation of Alex’s points from the debate. In some places I’ve interspersed commentary from other participants and comments that I typed in but did not get posted by the moderator. (You can check out the full transcript, including a lot of discussion about behavior and enforcement that I’m not including here.) This is the caliber of thought that goes into the opinions on bike policy written by the Daily News…

Alex Nazaryan:

Well, at this point, New Yorkers don’t really seem to want bike lanes. So enforcement might just be the thing to get people over on the side of bikers. You don’t want them to been as mavericks.

Participants then referred Alex to the recent public opinion polling by Quinnipiac, which found 59 percent support for adding bike lanes, and Marist, which found 66 percent support for bike lanes among NYC adults.

Alex Nazaryan:

The vast majority of the letters we get from ordinary New Yorkers seem to indicate otherwise. Not really sure if Marist poll is indicative.

I tried to post this response, but it wasn’t published: “Alex, both the Marist poll and the Quinnipiac polls that found tremendous support for bike lanes were conducted using statistically rigorous methodology. Letters to the Daily News do not constitute a rigorous survey of NYC opinion.”

But the moderators did run this from reader JBK:

NYDN believes it’s letters section is more reliable than Marist?

Alex Nazaryan (separate comments):

Our letter-writers are ordinary New Yorkers who live and work here, especially in the outer borough. You discount their opinions at your own peril.

There is another issue: the people who have, as a rule, wanted bike lanes are wealthier residents of Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. I just don’t know of that much demand in, say, East Elmhurst.

Mike Epstein:

Alex: Perhaps you’ve not noticed the HUGE groundswell of demand (and support) for bike lanes in East Harlem? Stereotypes are easy, but often false.

Station44025:

Alex, that’s also not true. Last Marist poll showed over 70% approval for bike lanes among hispanic and poor.

Streetsblog:

Alex, they’ve been enthusiastically building out the bike network in the South Bronx for years. Low income New Yorkers tend not to own cars and adding safe cycling facilities helps get around, in addition to a robust transit network.

Alex Nazaryan:

Look, the truth it, Manhattan cannot ever be Madison or Austin, so I think there’s just a little dissonance here. As much as it’s great that people are biking, I do ultimately feel that the city can only take so much.

Streetsblog:

Alex, Manhattan and most of the rest of NYC is a much more conducive environment for cycling than Madison or Austin. The destinations are much more closely together, so we’re making shorter trips. The more trips we make by bike instead of by car, the more space will open up on the roads.

Alex Nazaryan:

I just think a lot of people come to this city and want to remake it in their own image. And the truth is, it’s a city where millions upon millions of people come on a daily basis to make a living. It’s hard to fit bikes into the scenario

Naomi:

I am pedestrian, transit-rider and cyclist. The narrative that has been framed by the Daily seems awfully narrow-minded and seems to be missing a much larger issue: Equity. As most of our urban core’s working-class residents are not motorists – consideration, space and funding for other infrastructure is needed.

Naparstek:

Wow, Alexander: That’s just a crazy statement. First off, NYC is constantly being remade into the image of new immigrants. That is *the story* of NYC. That’s what this ciy is all about. The Lower East Side morphs from Jewish to Italian to Chinese… Etc Etc in every neighborhood. When NYC stops transforming, it stops being NYC.

Alex Nazaryan:

Napartsek: I take an issue with both your tone and your facts. I think there’s a sense of entitlement among the “creative classes” that was not present in, say, immigrants from Poland or wherever else. You can’t just move here and expect that all of Brooklyn is going to become a greenway.

Streetsblog (comment did not get published):

Alex, you continue to pound the theme that only transplants, Manhattanites, and the “creative class” support bike infrastructure, in the face of recent public opinion data showing strong support among low income New Yorkers and voters in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

mst:

what do bike lanes have to do with “creative classes”? Bike lanes are used by people of all walks of life

Alex Nazaryan:

Not in my experience

megadonn1

…Drivers have to pay insurance, registration fees, etc. why don’t we do the same for cyclist. Make them register their bikes. Compel them to carry insurance. License them to operate their bikes on city streets…

JBK:

@megadonn1 – there is no reason to compel cyclist insurance because the cost to the cyclist of such insurance would be almost zero – no insurance company would be able to make a profit doing so. This is because cyclists cannot cause the massive damage cars can.

Alex Nazaryan:

Um, bikes can kill people too.

Kristina Rodriguez-Fowle:

all cyclists dont wear spandex and have 100 dollar shoes just for cycling. I wear my pj’s, my helmet and some regular shoes and go do some grocery shopping…i obey laws, i am cautious, i am a wife and mother..my family bikes with me. we are regular people who are too broke to have a car or take taxi’s. We are aware of all that can go wrong…I know we are not the only ones..do we not deserve a way to get to the market safely and quickly?

Alex was cordial throughout the trip, and at the beginning of our commute even told me that he thinks a separated bike lane would work well on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. At the foot of the bridge on the Manhattan side, we observed, conservatively, at least 90 percent of cyclists choosing the detour route they were supposed to take.

This morning, the paper referred to this trip as “a return… to the Manhattan Bridge battleground between bicyclists and pedestrians.”

Here’s Doug’s video of the ride across the so-called “battleground” on the south side of the bridge. Try to stay awake:

Alex and the Daily News attributed this law-abiding behavior, bizarrely, to intervention straight from the transportation commissioner:

The morning’s drizzle held down the number of foot and pedal partisans, and the Department of Transportation further dampened the skirmishing by deploying hard-hatted peacekeepers to separate the warring factions.

Forewarned that we were mounting a reconnaissance mission, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan dispatched forces.

As Doug points out…

…contractors from Skanska/Koch can often be found standing by the bike ramp on the Brooklyn side.  They are also found on the Manhattan side during many evening rush hours.  Sometimes they direct cyclists the detour and sometimes they’re just standing around having a smoke.  This is something I explained to Alex when I met him yesterday morning after we saw two men in reflective vests and hard hats standing by the barriers on the north side.  Teresa Toro, the community liaison for the bridge project, mentioned that perhaps DOT should send more people than just the two we saw there yesterday morning since human interaction is more effective than signs and plastic barriers in getting people to comply with rules.

Alex and I were at the foot of the bridge for a solid 20 minutes before we headed over to Manhattan. He could have asked these guys at any time what the deal is and whether workers are usually stationed there. I guess that’s not how the Daily News editorial board handles the task of gathering information.

Is the blurred-out form on this bike -- a favorite choice of the photo editors at the Daily News -- even a human being?

Last week, the opinion writers published this excellent takedown of the joint John Liu/Tom DiNapoli MTA audit which took the agency to task for $10.5 million in unnecessary construction spending a few days after the MTA board announced that its capital budget would have to take on nearly $7 billion in debt. The comptrollers were fiddling while the MTA’s finances burned. “One of the oldest PR tricks in the book,” the Daily News opined. Sharp, insightful, holding electeds accountable for playing the MTA blame game — it was great stuff.

Today came this bizarre attack on bike lanes and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, under the guise of a plea for cyclists to stick to the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. There’s a six-month construction detour while crews work on bridge cabling, and while that’s going on, cyclists are supposed to detour to the south side while pedestrians are supposed to take the north side.

In today’s piece, the Daily News fell back on lazy stereotypes. Cyclists “zoom along the pedestrian side of the bridge as if it were the last leg of the Tour de France” and “flip the bird at the working stiff from Brooklyn who’s trying to burn off a few calories on the way home from the daily grind.” On any given day, there are thousands of people biking to work on the Manhattan Bridge at a normal pace, some of whom are probably trying to burn off a few calories. Do they count as working stiffs?

The Daily News also failed to mention everyone who’s been biking on the south side, following the detour signs. I rode over the Manhattan Bridge this morning and took the south side. I came across many cyclists and several pedestrians along the way. It didn’t bother me much that people were walking on what is now the “bike side” of the bridge. This isn’t the Brooklyn Bridge — there’s room to maneuver. No birds were flipped by any party.

The north side is more constricted now that there are construction sheds on it, and if cyclists are passing pedestrians or other cyclists under a shed, it’s going to be an unpleasant squeeze. But whenever I glanced over at the north side this morning, I saw no one. I’m sure there are a few cyclists who continue to use it sometimes. Why? Maybe they’re scared to death to take the south side and end up on the Bowery, where vehicles parked in the new, makeshift bikeway thrust cyclists into harrowing truck and bus traffic.

In any case, the author of the Daily News piece has an open invite to take a few morning trips over the bridge by foot and on a bike. We’ll see how many bird-flipping cyclists we come across.

I mean, here it is, raw and unfiltered. Driving on city streets is miserable (“the doldrums of Midtown traffic”), and…

As a reporter who covers stories all over the city and suburbs, I often need a car. When heading uptown from the paper’s newsroom in Midtown, I regularly find myself using the park drives.

Kilgannon’s elegy to Central Park motoring is several shades more reasonable than another classic in the windshield perspective genre: John Cassidy’s infamously irrational anti-bike treatise from this March. Where Cassidy, an economics writer at the New Yorker, came across as an entitled boor, utterly clueless that streets should not be designed to maximize the convenience of his evening Jaguar excursions, Kilgannon writes with awareness and remorse. Enjoy it while you still can, he says to Central Park motorists, we don’t belong here.

In his eagerness to share one last drive on the loop with other motorists, however, Kilgannon hands out instructions that will probably confuse anyone who actually takes him up on the offer:

Say you find yourself slogging up Avenue of the Americas, which ends — as well it should, that confounded, car-congested corridor — at 59th Street, the southern border of Central Park.

If it’s between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on a weekday, you’re in luck: Drive right in, and you are beamed, Star Trek-style, from the doldrums of Midtown traffic into a bucolic, meandering, charming thoroughfare of trees and lawns and lakes.

It’s true that people are allowed to drive into the park during those hours, but only from that entrance at Sixth Avenue and 59th, and they can’t go north of 72nd Street unless it’s the p.m. rush. Try driving into the park at any other point during those times, and odds are pretty good that you’ll do it during car-free hours. Later on in the piece, Kilgannon lays out the full schedule of where you can drive on the park loop and when, which is still pretty complicated.

Shortly before I read the Kilgannon piece, we got a tip in the Streetsblog inbox that explains why the confusion needs to end. Reader Albert Ahronheim wrote:

About 2:15 pm today I was on my bike, slowly riding west on the 72nd Street cut-through (i.e., during car-free hours in that location), among let’s say dozens of cyclists, pedestrians, dog walkers, joggers, etc., when I heard a car coming up behind me.  Annoyed as usual by this all-too-often situation, I turned my head to find out what parks emergency I’d have to get out of the way of, and instead, there was an ordinary-looking car (i.e., not parks, police, ambulance, etc.) approaching me quite briskly.

I started edging a bit to the left (no hurry, as far as I’m concerned) when suddenly the driver gunned his engine and passed me quite closely on my right.  Suddenly the driver was heading directly for a woman on a bike riding down the hill from the 72nd Street entrance.  She screamed, very much like you hear in a horror movie, and fell off her bike when she swerved right-then-left to try to get out of the guy’s way, while he accelerated and swerved around her and continued on up the hill toward the 72nd street entrance.

I happened to have my voice recorder with me and I quickly spoke the guy’s license # into it, asked the woman if she was OK (she was), and rode off to chase the guy.  I caught up with him turning left at CPW and yelled at him that I had his license #.  I followed to the next light, hoping to see a policeman.  When there was none, I rode back to talk to the woman.  She was gone and no one there seemed to have witnessed the incident.

I rode on to the meeting I’d been on my way to (now late) and realized that the “safety” of my voice recorder had been on and I hadn’t actually recorded the license #.  I then took off the safety and recorded the number I remembered and cursed myself for no longer being 100 percent sure of it.

On my way home at 4:15 I saw a police van parked at the side of the 72nd Street cut-through near 5th Avenue and told a policewoman the story.  Although she seemed sympathetic, at first she mentioned the possible extenuating circumstances. “Maybe he was authorized to be driving in the park.” To which I replied that if he was authorized, he still shouldn’t be driving recklessly in the park.  She nodded her agreement but told me there was nothing they could do about it anyway because they hadn’t witnessed it themselves.  She said that if the woman had been hurt then it would have been a hit-and-run and they could then use the license number to look for the guy. I said to her that this is why there shouldn’t be any cars in the park at all, and she replied, “Yeah, it would make our jobs so much easier.” I said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that from other police, that they’d like the cars to be out of the park altogether,” and she nodded and said I was right.

Luckily no one was hurt.  Sad that this guy — a white man, gray short hair, about 70 — in his (sporty) very clean white car (I guess I’m a true livable streets advocate because I have no idea what make, model or year car it was) — sad that this guy won’t be called to account.  I do hope he’s shaking in his Corinthian leather bucket seat for a few days.

Not only are they “popular with burger-chomping tourists,” writes Cuozzo in Thursday’s column, such a draw are Times Square’s new public spaces that they threaten to turn Broadway north to Columbus Circle into a barren, commerce-free wasteland. Where pedestrians and cyclists see a calmer, safer street, Cuozzo sees desolation, a ruinous tampering of the urban fabric.

Cuozzo quotes a handful of besieged business owners who, according to Cuozzo, have to this point kept silent out of fear of retaliation from Mayor Bloomberg. If their complaints sound vague, if not contradictory, that’s because even now they will only speak out in “guarded terms.” (Aside: As a former small business owner who has interviewed and interacted with countless other entrepreneurs, it is my experience that reluctance to complain about the government is about as common as enthusiasm for higher taxes.)

From the three businesses and one business group represented, Cuozzo elicits anecdotal stories of lost income purportedly due to the “confusing” nature of the new Broadway, where even the street trees, it seems, are scaring away pedestrians — not to mention hapless drivers who can no longer figure out how to park. All this concern for Midtown businesses from someone whose disdain for their primary customers — tourists — knows no bounds.

Per usual, Cuozzo has no data to point to, so any correlation between a drop in business and street design rests solely on supposition — though one restaurateur has an interesting theory:

Stephen Hanson is the president of B.R. Guest, the restaurant company that owns Ruby Foo’s at Broadway at 49th Street. He says, “It’s hurt our business there tremendously. There’s no walk-by traffic we used to have at night, because everybody’s in a mad dash to get to the central arcade area.”

Hanson says his Blue Fin at 47th Street has benefited from the Times Square plazas — but that their popularity, combined with the inhospitability of the bike/pedestrian lane to the north, sucked the energy out of Broadway above 47th Street — “anything for 10 blocks up is getting a vacuum effect,” he said.

Taking Hanson’s comments at face value, you’d think that in order to share in the success of Times Square, Broadway north of 47th Street needs more space for pedestrians and cyclists, not less.

We could go on, but engaging Cuozzo on his own terms allows him too much credit. Despite the wealth of knowledge gleaned from his 15-minute stroll, the facts (see them here) are that cycling on Broadway at 50th Street is up by 91 percent, while pedestrian injuries from Columbus Circle to 48th Street have dropped by 39 percent. Across the length of the revamped Broadway, pedestrian injuries are down 35 percent, and in Times Square 80 percent fewer pedestrians are walking in the roadway.

Perhaps because there haven’t actually been as many injuries and deaths lately, the Post can cavalierly pen a headline like “Murder on Broadway” — an irony in all probability lost on The Cuozz, who is no doubt preparing his next charge at the windmill.

Given enough time, the theory goes, a thousand monkeys banging away at a thousand typewriters will eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare. But Marcia Kramer and the crack news writers at CBS2 only needed a couple of hours, maybe less, to come up with last night’s masterpiece about the extension of the First and Second Avenue bike lanes.

Construction has barely started on this project and already Kramer’s got it covered. Annotated highlights below:

Residents said they’re wondering what officials were thinking when they installed the lanes on First and Second Avenues from 34th to 59th streets.

It’s an area already so congested at rush hour that cars can barely move, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Bruce Silberblatt said.

Brilliant! Start off by quoting someone who won’t tolerate the loss of one or two parking spaces if it means giving more room to pedestrians and cyclists. Don’t mention the fact that the local community board voted for this project two years in a row. This is the exemplary journalism we’ve come to expect from Marcia Kramer.

Silberblatt’s group, the Turtle Bay Association, took pictures showing how the First Avenue approach to the 59th Street Bridge was already congested.

“It was bedlam,” Silberblatt said. “Anybody trying to ride a bike is taking their life in their hands. It’s that dangerous.”

Classic Kramer jujitsu. This guy who hates the bike lane? He’s actually concerned about cyclists. So concerned, in fact, that he appears to believe no one should ever ride a bike. Whatever his point is, pay no mind to the cyclists and pedestrians who are already getting maimed and killed by preventable East Side traffic crashes in obscene numbers. Don’t cite the stats showing how traffic injuries dropped after the first segments of the East Side bike lanes were installed last year.

A Second Avenue bike lane is next to the Israeli consulate, leaving many wondering what would happen if a man on a bike were a terrorist.

Very true. What would happen if a man who is a terrorist, who is riding a bike on Second Avenue, and who has a broadsword strapped to his rear rack, were to unsheathe his weapon and extend it sideways at arm’s length as he pedals next to the sidewalk? How many Israeli diplomats would be disemboweled or beheaded? Many are wondering.

Just kidding. Of course Kramer is referring to Al Qaeda’s well-known plan to disguise explosives by surgically implanting them in terrorists’ bodies. Such bombs can only be sewn into the flesh of cyclists.

Kidding again. Let’s get real. What Kramer’s really getting at is that Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahri, will not assume the leadership of Al Qaeda as previously reported. The Second Avenue bike lane is taking over instead.

In the end, it may simply be about who the streets are for, what percentage of people who use the streets are bicyclists, and what percentage are driving automobiles.

“It’s a tough number to pinpoint, but where we’ve already installed the new bike path, we see somewhere around 10 percent of the traffic is bike traffic,” Benson said.

Wait, what? Allocating space according to who uses the street? Heresy! The sidewalks of Manhattan would be 40 feet wide. Major crosstown streets would turn into busways. Avenues would have only one or two traffic lanes. On-street parking would cease to exist.

Opponents might argue that the 90 percent who use cars and buses should rule the road, especially in an area with such high levels of congestion.

Okay, right on. Opponents finally get a word in edgewise. Cars rule. The solution to congestion is to fill up as much space with traffic as you possibly can. A return to form for Marcia Kramer.

Except, if you actually gave 10 percent of NYC street space to cyclists, you’d have to build a lot more bike lanes.

There's more than 1,500,000,000 square feet of street space in New York City. According to Streetsblog's estimates, less than one half of one percent of NYC's street network has been allocated to bikes, buses, and pedestrians under Janette Sadik-Khan.

Despite the city’s efforts to become more bike friendly, male cyclists in New York continue to outnumber female cyclists three to one, just as they have steadily over the past two decades.

No doubt the gender gap in NYC is real and substantial, but it seems to be getting smaller. For some reason, though, Haughney neglected to mention compelling evidence that the number of female cyclists in NYC is growing faster than the number of male cyclists.

In an online response to the Times story, NYC DOT cited a 2010 Department of City Planning study that includes detailed, year-over-year breakdowns of bike counts performed on several Manhattan routes [PDF]. From 2001 to 2008, the ratio of men to women riding in on-street bike lanes declined from a little more than six-to-one to a little less than five-to-one, with most of the change happening after 2005. Counting weekday cyclists on greenways, DCP found that the gender gap narrowed from about 1.9 men for every woman in 2002, to about 1.7 in 2008, with most of the change happening between 2006 and 2008.

Census data, presumably the basis for the Times’ three-to-one male-to-female ratio, also paint a more nuanced picture than Times readers will come away with. According to a 2010 study by Rutgers University professor John Pucher [PDF], NYC’s percentage of female bike commuters dipped from 25 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2000, before rebounding back up to 24 percent in 2008. So there has been some fluctuation in the past two decades, including a distinct uptick in the percent of women commuter cyclists over the last decade.

The Times does cite experts, including Pucher, who assert that safer bike networks attract a higher percentage of female cyclists. What never surfaces in the article is the widely held view that the best way to enhance perceptions of safety is to separate cyclists from traffic.

By the end of the piece, the question of how to make streets feel safe for cycling still feels shrouded in mystery. But the answers are not that elusive.

Researchers like Pucher, Harvard’s Anne Lusk, and Portland State University’s Jennifer Dill have all come to the conclusion that the share of female cyclists is higher where separation from traffic is more pronounced. Their positions are consistent with DCP’s finding that the gender gap on NYC’s greenways is substantially smaller than it is on painted bike lanes.

Providing more physical separation for cyclists is, basically, DOT’s chief innovation in the realm of bike policy under Janette Sadik-Khan. The major bikeway projects of the past three years — protected on-street lanes like those on Kent Avenue, Allen Street, and Prospect Park West — are all designed to make cycling more accessible to a wider range of people.

When DCP conducted bike counts for its study, none of the on-street lanes were protected. Since then, some of the routes have been upgraded from painted lanes to protected lanes. So here’s a prediction: Count cyclists at locations like Eighth Avenue and 26th Street, or Broadway and 28th Street, or Second Avenue and Seventh Street — all places where DCP has data on male and female cycling rates — and the gender gap won’t look as wide as it used to.

Since they can’t argue with the results — making more room for cyclists and pedestrians has reduced injuries and saved lives, the city’s new public spaces are popular, and neighborhoods are clamoring for more — Michael Grynbaum and co-author David Chen, or their editors, have set their sights on process. By introducing pedestrian plazas, among other initiatives, as pilot programs, they say the Bloomberg administration has subverted the very principles on which our nation was founded:

The pilot has emerged as the mayor’s signature policy weapon. Admirers see an innovative way around red tape. Critics see a blunt tool that undermines democracy by minimizing the public’s role in scrutinizing the ideas of government.

As evidence, the article offers up the Times Square pedestrian plazas, installed “with minimal involvement by the Design Commission.” That the plazas were championed by the Times Square Alliance, vetted in dozens of meetings with various constituencies, and approved by Community Board 5, well, that just doesn’t cut it. Those surveys showing the new Times Square an unequivocal hit with the public? Of no consequence. To the Times, the Design Commission, an obscure appointed body inside the mayor’s administration that meets behind closed doors to review public projects, is apparently the sine qua non of democratic oversight.

Here’s the kicker: Minimal involvement or no, the Design Commission signed off on both the pilot version of the Times Square plazas and the permanent version, which leads one to question why they were included in this article to begin with. In light of past Times Square coverage from the Times, this paragraph stands out:

In the end, the plazas failed to speed traffic as much as the administration had hoped, but the city made the program permanent, citing fewer accidents involving pedestrians and more foot traffic for businesses.

In other words, fewer people were being hurt and killed, and business is up, but the mayor made the plazas permanent anyway.

There is also the requisite sideways swipe at DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, whose department has “begun more than a dozen trial programs in recent years, like allowing pop-up sidewalk cafes or painting bike lanes green.”

You’ve got to wonder about the timing of this piece — framing bike lanes as a “trial program” mere days after it became clear that opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane need to prove that DOT installed the project as a “pilot” in order to prevent their case from being thrown out of court. It’s hard to see the rationale for including bike lanes under the umbrella of “minimizing the public’s role in scrutinizing the ideas of government” when every protected bike lane going back to the first segment on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue has been approved in community board votes.

We could go on. The intense scrutiny bike lanes and public plazas have received from the City Council, the fact that the city is allowing pop-up cafes only in neighborhoods where the community board approves them, the failure of the reporters to cite any “critics” to support the “blunt tool” conceit. The bottom line is that the Times would have readers believe that the city’s new public spaces are being imposed by fiat, when they are in fact going through the usual review process and then some.

But hell, where’s the story in that.

Twenty-First Ave. and 62nd St., Borough Park, Brooklyn: What happened here? Image: Google Maps

1. How fast was the BMW traveling when Aileen and her bicycle first came into view?
2. How fast was the driver going when he struck her?
3. How far from the point of first impact did Aileen’s body come to rest?
4. Was the 26-year-old driver alone, or were there others in the car?
5. Was she hurrying for some reason, or distracted?
6. Has the driver’s smartphone been impounded and checked to see if she was phoning or texting at the time of the crash?
7. Is the area of Borough Park in which the crash took place residential, as it appears from an Internet view?
8. How long and far from the collision might a driver who had been visually scanning the road have seen Aileen?
9. Which party was traveling on 21st Avenue, which appears wider and perhaps more prone to fast driving than the cross street, 62nd Street?
10. Does the driver have a record of moving violations?
11. Whose testimony was the basis of the NYPD statement that Aileen ran a red light?
12. Did anyone other than the driver witness the crash? Has the NYPD taken their evidence?

Every one of these questions is answerable, although none were answered in the press accounts, which nevertheless drip with the customary “victim guilty, case closed” quality of articles about bicyclist fatalities. All of these questions, I submit, are relevant to finding fault — a process that, though painful, is essential, as it is in every serious-injury or fatal traffic crash, to the arduous task of reforming traffic engineering, enforcement, jurisprudence and behavior.

The foundation of any meaningful investigation of the crash that killed Aileen is found in the first three questions. Driving faster than 30 mph on ordinary streets such as the two that intersected here is both prohibited by law and a statistical separator between surviving being struck by a car, and not. Higher driving speeds also increase crash likelihood by making visual scanning less effective, shortening drivers’ reaction-time window, lengthening stopping distance, and impeding detection of the vehicle by other road users.

Presumably the NYPD Accident Investigation Squad, the unit charged with analyzing fatal crashes in NYC, has by now measured skid marks, other road markings, damage to the BMW and bicycle, and the locations where Aileen and her clothing, iPod, etc. came to rest. From these metrics, the AIS may have already calculated, at least approximately, the driver’s speeds prior to and during the collision. Yet there is almost zero chance that these data from Aileen’s crash will enter the public record. The NYPD guards AIS reports virtually as state secrets. In 2000, when my organization Right Of Way was researching our “Only Good Cyclist” report on fatal NYC auto-cyclist crashes [PDF], prying loose AIS reports for a mere 14 crashes required multiple iterations of our Freedom of Information request, plus a dozen subsequent calls and letters. Several similar requests proffered later were rejected.

Questions 4 and 5 go to the driver’s state of mind and, while purely circumstantial, may suggest a possible motive to speed or otherwise drive carelessly. Though neither hands-free phoning nor texting while driving is illegal in New York State (the latter is a secondary not primary driving offense), the driver’s quality of attention is still a critical parameter, which justifies Question 6.

Question 7 draws on the legal obligation of drivers to observe a standard of due care. (Section 1146 of the State Vehicle & Traffic Law directs “Drivers [to] exercise due care to avoid colliding with any bicyclist, pedestrian or domestic animal upon any roadway.”) By law, then, operating a motor vehicle in a residential neighborhood requires being on alert for people walking, running, playing, cycling, etc. Question 8, another for the Accident Investigation Squad, seeks to determine if a lawful driver (speed limit, due care, etc.) could have averted striking a cyclist who had ridden through a red light.

Questions 9 and 10 return to the subject of the driver’s cognition and conduct, while questions 11 and 12 seek to address the vexing and perhaps unresolvable issue: Who had a green light and who ran a red — Aileen or the driver? I suspect that this question will never be settled. Self-interest requires the driver to claim that he had right of way. And while any eyewitnesses should be tracked down and interviewed, bystander accounts aren’t always reliable, and it’s not unreasonable to worry that cultural biases about drivers and bicyclists could inadvertently color their accounts. At the least, though, if the only reported account is the driver’s, its bias should be acknowledged and its testimony disregarded.

No answers will bring back Aileen, whose tragically abbreviated life was so vibrant and promising. But determining the circumstances of her fatal crash as definitively as possible is important to the public discourse and, ultimately, public policy, that determines whether our streets will be dangerous or livable. Between the Post’s “Tragic teen struck and killed was biking against light: cops” and an alternative headline, “Joyrider in BMW was speeding when he rammed teen on bike,” lies a world of difference. For now, we don’t know which applies. Without data that the NYPD may have but won’t give out, we probably never will.

Before contractors have even been selected to run NYC’s bike-share system, the Times has duly reported that the project is “plagued by questions of its viability.” To bolster the argument, reporter Christine Haughney quotes no transportation planners and cites no experts on the economics of bike-sharing. Instead she lets perennial SoHo crank Sean Sweeney set the tone for a piece full of speculation and mistakes.

To create the perception of a “plague” of uncertainty, Haughney first turns to star source Sweeney, faithful opponent of bike lanes, public space amenities, and car-free streets. Sweeney actually raises a legitimate concern — whether bike-share stations will occupy curb space or sidewalk space. But Haughney never mentions Sweeney’s history of reflexive opposition to change (he recently leaped into action to prevent pop-up cafes from adding more seating and pedestrian space to SoHo sidewalks), and she never explains why the question of station placement constitutes a threat to the system’s viability, rather than just one of several planning details that will be addressed as the project proceeds.

On the financial side, Haughney dwells on the absence of bids for the NYC bike-share contract from Cemusa, Clear Channel and J.C. Decaux. What she never mentions is that all three companies are in the business of outdoor advertising — their bike-share systems are basically means to generate more ad revenue. The two finalists — Alta Bicycle Share and B-Cycle — are actually in the bike-sharing business. NYC’s proposed bike-share model depends much more on memberships and user fees than advertising, so it makes sense that the ad companies stayed home.

Together with the Public Bike System Company, which is part of the Alta bid, B-Cycle and Alta are increasingly dominant in the North American bike-share market, supplying and operating systems in Denver, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and soon Boston. (Disclosure: a division of Streetsblog’s parent organization, OpenPlans, is part of the B-Cycle bid.) These companies are based on what experts call a “mobility-driven” business model — they are interested in gaining bike-share customers and thus in making their systems as useful as possible.

Compare that to a company like Clear Channel, whose advertising-driven business model basically led it to stop trying to expand its D.C. bike-sharing venture, known as SmartBike, beyond an initial trial phase, because it had already secured ad space it could profit from. SmartBike didn’t last long. Now Alta and the Public Bike System Company operate Washington’s continually expanding and in-demand successor, Capital Bikeshare. Haughney reports only that Clear Channel “started the Washington program but later abandoned it.”

The rest of the Times piece draws heavily on the financial status of the Montreal-based Public Bike System Company, which recently received $108 million in long-term financing subsidized by the Montreal government. But Haughney’s write-up plays fast and loose with the facts, stating that Alta Bicycle Share “has run into financial problems in Montreal.”

Alta is demanding a correction from the Times. In a letter to the editor, the company writes:

Alta Bicycle Share has no financial problems, and has no involvement in the Montreal bicycle share system. In addition, as stated in the article, Public Bike System Company’s (provider of equipment to Alta) financial issues have been resolved.

If the Times wants to write about Bloomberg administration transportation boondoggles, there’s no shortage of fodder out there, but whoever assigns stories is looking in the wrong place. The folly of lavishing tax giveaways on stadium parking garages, for instance, is becoming apparent for all to see, but you’d never know it if you only get your news from the Times.

The city’s new East River ferry service, which will operate with $9.3 million in subsidies over three years, will require more of a financial commitment from the city than bike-share is projected to, and follows in the footsteps of many failed attempts to sustain waterborne transit on similar routes. Yet the Times ferry coverage has been positively bullish.

There’s an interesting story to be written about what it will take to operate a profitable bike-share system in New York, as the city has set out to do. Why did the Bloomberg Administration opt for a profit-making system rather than a larger, subsidized one? What would a successful system look like, and what will be the challenges to implementing it? How would New Yorkers use such a system?

None of those questions were answered in the Times this weekend. To write such a story, you would have to speak to transportation experts and people who want to get around the city by bike, which Times transportation reporters and their editors seem loath to do.