Streetsblog New York City

The Bikes Belong Foundation has chosen six cities to fast track physically protected bikeway designs that make cycling safer and more accessible to a wide range of people.

Photo: NYC DOT/Bikes Belong

Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco and Washington D.C. will receive a leg up from Bikes Belong’s new “Green Lane Project.” The two-year, intensive technical assistance program is intended to help these cities develop protected on-street bike lanes and make this type of bike infrastructure a mainstream street design in the U.S.

The program attracted a total of 42 applicants, said project director Martha Roskowski, from “established leaders such as Minneapolis and Boulder” to relative newcomers like Wichita, Miami, and Pittsburgh.

“They are a range of sizes, spread across the country, and at various stages in terms of developing networks for bicycles,” said Roskowski. “What they share is a strong commitment to rethinking how city streets are used and making room for bicycles.”

Bikes Belong expects cities across the nation to benefit from the program, whether or not they were selected. The idea is to help build technical expertise on the design and implementation of protected bike lanes, and to collect data on how they perform.

Protected bike lanes are widely employed in countries that have achieved high rates of cycling, such as the Netherlands. In America they were pioneered by the New York City Department of Transportation in 2007, and have since been implemented in Washington, D.C., Portland, and Chicago.

Protected lanes have been shown to be safer than ordinary bike lanes and more likely to encourage people to take up cycling. But they are considered “experimental” treatments in the gospel of traffic engineering, the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which has stymied their adoption throughout the United States.

“The selected cities have ambitious goals and a vision for bicycling supported by their elected officials and communities,” said Bikes Belong President Tim Blumenthal. “They are poised to get projects on the ground quickly and will serve as excellent examples for other interested cities.”

The Green Lane Project represents a more focused iteration of the Bikes Belong Foundation’s Bicycling Design Best Practices Program, which has been dedicated to hosting workshops and taking city officials and engineers on study tours to leading U.S. and European cities.

When the First Avenue project is complete, car owners will park on the right side of that thermoplast buffer, and cyclists will ride on the left. Photo: Liz Patek

Reader Liz Patek sends these shots of the new road markings on First Avenue in the 60s. The protected bike lane that Manhattan Community Board 8 approved last summer is going in.

Until now there was no bike infrastructure at all on First Avenue between 60th Street and 72nd Street. Filling that gap is DOT’s top construction priority as the agency builds out plans for protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuges on First and Second Avenue up to 125th Street. Farther uptown, work on the East Harlem bike lanes will begin on Second Avenue between 100th and 125th Street. Construction was originally supposed to start this spring — it’s not clear if that timetable still holds after the local community board waffled on the project before committing to it again.

This is one of those moments where you have to sit back and take stock. Five years ago, the idea of merely striping thermoplast on lightly-trafficked crosstown streets ran into a buzz-saw at Community Board 8. Now, after a lot of hard work by advocates, volunteers, city officials, and community board members, streets engineered for safety are coming to vital transportation corridors in a new part of town. Congrats to everyone involved.

Approaching a mixing zone-in-progress. Photo: Liz Patek

Upgrading the Plaza Street bike lane would provide safer connections between the many bike lanes feeding into Grand Army Plaza.

Is the NBBL era finally behind us? First, Senator Chuck Schumer himself was spotted riding in the Prospect Park West bike lane. Now, the Department of Transportation is reviving a plan, shelved at the height of the NBBL-aided media circus about cycling, to build a two-way bike lane on Plaza Street.

DOT first proposed the two-way Plaza Street lane in 2010, as part of a larger set of improvements to Grand Army Plaza. The package got an enthusiastic reception from a joint meeting of Community Boards 6, 8 and 9, and most of the pedestrian and bike improvements in the plan went forward in 2011, but the Plaza Street lane didn’t make it.

The plan for a protected Plaza Street lane happened to be under discussion at the height of the political assault on the nearby Prospect Park West lane. DOT moved ahead with the Grand Army Plaza proposal last April, without the Plaza Street bike lane, promising to revisit the discussion at an unspecified later date. At the time, Streetsblog called it the “NBBL Effect.”

As first reported by Brownstoner, that later date is now. DOT will present local community boards with multiple options for providing two-way bike access on Plaza Street later this month, said a department spokesperson. “We have continued to work with the community on ways to improve bike access and look forward to presenting options at next month’s meeting,” DOT said in a statement.

The Brooklyn Paper reports that both protected and unprotected options will be on the table. Craig Hammerman, district manager for Community Board 6, hasn’t seen the plans yet, but guessed that any proposal from DOT will differ at least slightly from what was put forward two years ago.

The two-way bike lane would be an important hub in the area’s bike network, allowing cyclists to travel safely and easily between the various bike lanes that extend from Grand Army Plaza in every direction.

You might remember a wave of news stories that broke around this time last year with headlines like: “Columbus Avenue Business Owners Say Bike Lanes Driving Down Bottom Line,” or “Lack of Parking Destroying Columbus Avenue Business,” or “Study: Street Redesign Hurting Upper West Side Businesses.”

Photo: Civitas

The Columbus Avenue bike lane, with its 28 pedestrian refuges and parking-protected space for cycling, was a recent addition to the streetscape, and some merchants said they were having a harder time with deliveries. A few claimed the loss of some parking spots was repelling customers from one of the most walkable, transit-accessible places on Earth. Filtered through the New York media megaphone, the story turned into a bike lane-induced cataclysm for merchants.

Here we are a year later, and this piece of news in the Commercial Observer seems worth amplifying: “Columbus Avenue BID Boasts 100 Percent Retail Occupancy.”

The bike lane extends five blocks into the area covered by the Columbus Avenue BID, or about a third of its territory. According to the Observer, retail occupancy in the BID usually hovers around 94 percent. We don’t have retail occupancy rates for the whole length of the project, and it’s too early to say if the bike lane is making retail space more attractive, but there sure doesn’t seem to be any cataclysm. (From a safety perspective, there’s no doubt that the bike lane improved Columbus: DOT reported last year that traffic injuries declined 27 percent after installation.)

Will there be follow-up coverage from Tony Aiello and company?

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

One of the year’s most exciting street safety projects is on track to get better. Thanks to a recent set of recommendations from Community Board 4, the extension of the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues will include additional sidewalk expansions and on-street bike parking. Though DOT didn’t adopt all of the board’s ideas — most notably, the agency is leaving a gap in the physical protection for cyclists in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal — on the West Side, the community board’s requests are helping to build a better bike lane.

The Eighth and Ninth Avenue project, which will extended protected bike lanes from the low 30s to 42nd Street this spring and then up to 59th Street in the fall, was first approved by CB 4 last October. The chaotic Midtown streets badly need the redesign: Between 2005 and 2011, 14 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes on these blocks. In addition to the new bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the project is expected to improve safety by narrowing each travel lane by two feet.

While the community board wholeheartedly endorsed the project, it had a number of recommendations to make Eighth and Ninth Avenues even better places for walking and biking. Some of those have been incorporated into the project and are now set to become a reality.

In three locations, pedestrians packed into cramped Midtown sidewalks are going to get a little bit of breathing room. Sidewalk extensions will be added to the west side of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets, the northeast corner of Ninth and 41st, and the southwest corner of Eighth and 57th, according to a draft of letter from the board to DOT, which the board shared with Streetsblog.

Even more sidewalk space could be cleared up by adding on-street bike racks in former parking spaces, or bike corrals. Believing that bicycles locked to poles and scaffolding were taking away too much pedestrian space, the board requested the corrals last fall. DOT said that the bike parking could be installed in 2013 (though the board wants them now), and would most likely be placed next to bike-share stations. The city’s first bike corral was just installed last summer.

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This is the third in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Previous installments covered pedestrian improvements and the city’s new bus rapid transit system.

An Ecobici station in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. This station was full of bikes, but a nearby station was nearly empty. Photo: Noah Kazis

Mexico City never had much of a reputation as a bicycle city. Traffic is terribly congested and extremely dangerous — drivers don’t even have to take an eye exam to get a license — and until recently, the air was thick with smog no one hoped to inhale too deeply.

Under the leadership of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, however, Mexico City is taking a multi-pronged approach toward becoming bike-friendly, making changes to its streets, its laws and its culture. Most important has been the introduction of a new bike-share system, Ecobici, that’s expanding rapidly.

In 2007, when Ebrard began a concerted effort to improve cycling, half of all trips were less than eight kilometers long, yet only one percent of trips were made by bike. The city resolved to boost cycling to five percent of all trips in just five years. Mexico City has made big strides under Ebrard but will probably need more time to hit the initial five-year target. Today bicycle mode-share is between two and three percent of trips, according to ITDP.

At the center of the city’s effort is Ecobici, which launched two years ago. A public bike-sharing system funded mainly by the government, Ecobici offers 1,200 bikes at 90 stations, making it comparable in scope to Washington, DC’s Capital Bikeshare but far smaller, for the time being, than systems in London and Paris.

As of today the system can only be found in the trendy Condesa neighborhood, which is often compared to New York City’s Soho. Even limited to one neighborhood, however, demand is sky-high. To ensure quality service for the 30,000 current members, Ecobici has had to set up a waiting list for new subscribers. Otherwise there just wouldn’t be enough bikes to go around, explained Ivan De La Lanza, coordinator of Mexico City’s bicycle mobility strategy. Each bike is already being taken out an average of 10 times per day.

Though Ecobici is only available in a single neighborhood, a full 40 percent of new cyclists in the city use the system, said De La Lanza. It also may be encouraging others to get on their bikes more. According to Good magazine, the use of personal bikes rose 50 percent in the year that Ecobici opened.

A map hanging in Ecobici headquarters shows the current extent of the system along with two expansions planned for this year. Photo: Noah Kazis

This year, the system is set for not one but two major expansions. In June, the service area will spread east, into the Roma neighborhood and Mexico City’s historical downtown. Then in November, Ecobici will move west, surrounding the Bosque Chapultepec — Mexico City’s equivalent of Central Park — and expanding into the business-oriented Polanco area. Membership is expected to skyrocket to between 73,000 and 100,000 users, according to Ecobici official Oscar Montiel.

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East Harlem’s Community Board 11 last night approved, again, plans to build protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands on First and Second Avenues. The vote comes after a lengthy public debate in which the community fought for the lanes and the board approved them, only to take back its support after local businesses protested.

First Avenue at 117th St. in 2010. Photo: James Garcia

The final vote was 21-14 in favor, with two abstentions, according to board member Brodie Enoch. That total makes opposition to the bike lanes appear slightly larger than it was in practice, he said.

“Some of the people who voted against the bike lanes aren’t against bike lanes per se,” Enoch explained. “Some people voiced their displeasure that there isn’t preferential treatment in the community for the jobs that will be given to people who work on the bike lanes.”

The Department of Transportation does not hire those workers on a project-by-project basis, making local hiring unfeasible.

The board’s support for cycling in general was evidenced by a resolution amendment that passed unanimously. It requests that East Harlem, and especially the neighborhood’s transit stops, be the first areas for any expansion of the city’s bike-share system. “We don’t want to get left out of that,” said Enoch.

Construction on the protected bike lanes was supposed to start on Second Avenue this spring, but the fight over the lanes has likely pushed back the installation date.

The full board of East Harlem's CB 11 votes tomorrow night on whether to bring protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands to First and Second Avenue, as seen here downtown. Photo: NYC DOT

After a long and circuitous path, the fate of protected bike lanes on East Harlem’s First and Second Avenues may be decided in a community board vote Tuesday night.

First the city promised protected lanes and pedestrian refuge islands to the neighborhood along with Select Bus Service. Then it walked back that commitment, limiting new bicycle and pedestrian facilities to downtown segments of First and Second. The neighborhood mobilized, going so far as to rally on the steps of City Hall with City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito and State Senator José Serrano, eventually winning back an offer of the safety improvements. Community Board 11 quickly endorsed the plan in a vote of 47-3, only to rescind its approval when local businesses complained.

Now, after some consensus-building in a working group suggested by Borough President Scott Stringer, CB 11′s transportation committee has again endorsed the bike lanes unanimously. If the full board votes for the street improvements another time tomorrow night, the Department of Transportation will move forward with installation of the parking-protected lanes in East Harlem.

East Harlem is a neighborhood badly in need of this kind of pedestrian and bicycle-friendly redesign. It has some of the highest levels of cycling in the city despite woefully inadequate bike infrastructure. Public health officials have rallied around the proposed protected lanes, hoping that they get more people riding and walking in a neighborhood that struggles with high asthma and diabetes rates.

Community Board 11 will meet tomorrow night, March 20, at 6:30 p.m. The meeting will be held in the auditorium of P.S. 30, at 144-176 E. 128th Street (between Lexington and 3rd Avenue).

Photo: @PSteely

Looks like protected bike infrastructure is growing on Chuck Schumer. High-powered backchannel NIMBY assault notwithstanding, New York’s senior senator apparently does enjoy riding the bike lane in his front yard, as you can see in this Sunday morning photo courtesy of fellow PPW resident Paul Steely White.

So, when will the rest of Streetsblog’s 2011 April Fools Day post come true?

Caption submissions welcome in the comments. Winner will be selected and posted tomorrow.

The transportation committee of CB 11 voted again to bring the complete street design for First Avenue, shown here in the East Village, to East Harlem. Photo: NYC DOT

Protected bike lanes once again won big support in East Harlem. After Community Board 11 first endorsed protected lanes for First Avenue and Second Avenue by a vote of 47-3, then rescinded that support in the face of business opposition, the board’s transportation committee has put the complete street redesign back on the path to construction with a 7-0 vote of support, with one abstention.

“We’re certainly much more confident now with the project that we were in the past,” said committee chair Peggy Morales.

Two committee members who had been skeptical of the protected bike lanes said they’d been persuaded by two meetings of a working group convened at the suggestion of Borough President Scott Stringer. Supporters and opponents of the lanes sat down together with seven different city agencies to walk through exactly what protected bike lanes will mean for the neighborhood.

Frances Mastrota said that she’d been worried that the bike lanes would eliminate parking spaces and hurt local businesses, but was persuaded by Department of Health officials explaining that promoting walking, through pedestrian refuge islands, and cycling, would improve public health in a neighborhood that struggles with asthma and diabetes. Judith Febrarro, who still had a few concerns, voted for the lanes, reassured by the Fire Department that its trucks could use the lanes in an emergency and by the Sanitation Department that snow plowing would work with a floating parking lane.

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