Streetsblog New York City

Today’s Jim Dwyer column in the New York Times is a nice little encapsulation of everything that can go wrong when NYC’s press corps turns its attention to matters of transportation.

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:

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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.

There’s a University of Maryland study making the rounds today that links pedestrian fatalities with the wearing of headphones — a three-fold increase over the last seven years. Judging from the breathless headlines, the causation is clear. “Study Shows Sharp Rise in Accidents Involving Tuned-Out Pedestrians,” reads the Chicago Tribune. “Fatal Distraction,” says MSNBC. “Music to Die For,” sneers the Post.

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.

For the second time in the past few weeks, a New York City media outlet has allowed Milk Burger owner Erik Mayor to claim that protected bike lanes in East Harlem will increase asthma rates. Earlier this month it was the Daily News, and over the weekend NY1 gave some airtime to Mayor too.

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?

Time after time, when a person loses his or her life while walking or biking in the city, the narrative unfolds according to script. Pedestrian or cyclist killed. Driver remained at the scene. No charges filed. Not only is it rare to hear of a driver held to even the minimum standard of care by police and prosecutors, more often than not NYPD would have the public believe that if anyone is to blame, it’s the victim.

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.

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Here’s the profile of New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan that aired on “Rock Center with Brian Williams” last night. The show reaches more than four million people, which isn’t enough to win its time slot but adds up to a lot more eyeballs than the print circulation of any NYC daily paper. In all likelihood, it reached a bigger American audience than any other piece of media content about reclaiming city streets for public space and more efficient modes of transportation. So how did NBC’s Harry Smith and his producers do with the assignment?

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.

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The Arts Section of today’s Times leads with a gorgeous meditation on cycling in New York that is so unabashedly positive, it’ll take your breath away. At least it took mine. In my 50 years as a Times reader — nearly 40 of them as a daily bicycle rider — I can’t recall any essay on cycling as the quintessential urban experience as lyrical and unapologetic as this one.

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.

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While it’s common for the media to find a fallen New York cyclist responsible for his own death, the egregiously sloppy coverage of the crash that killed Nicolas Djandji makes plain just how eager reporters and editors are to blame the victim.

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.

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.

We’ll overlook the number of contortions performed by the Daily News to make today’s report on the success of red light cameras look like a “he said she said” story. It’s simply not a surprise when the city press corps assigns comparable weight to the wishes of motorists to break the law with impunity and the right of pedestrians and cyclists — and, in this case, other drivers — to reach their destinations in one piece.

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.