Streetsblog New York City

Via Andy Shen at NYVelocity, here’s the video of this week’s press conference and rally at City Hall, where Council Members Ydanis Rodriguez and Brad Lander kicked off the push to set traffic signals in Central Park and Prospect Park to flashing yellow during car-free hours. It’s encouraging to hear some clear thinking from Council members about traffic enforcement, and great to see the big crowd that turned out on a cold, rainy Wednesday for this event.

The NYPD has handed out 230 tickets to cyclists for running red lights in Central Park so far this year. And while police have apologized for most of the “speeding” citations they hit cyclists with earlier this week, Central Park precinct commander Philip Wishnia has given no indication that the red light tickets will stop.

Rodriguez introduced the bill on Wednesday, and word is that you’ll see it pick up more co-sponsors starting next week.

Video: Kevin Scott

NYPD’s apparent bid to criminalize recreational cycling in Central Park took another surreal turn this morning. One week after hundreds of people asked police to stop the irrational barrage of red light tickets for cyclists in the park, NYPD has apparently doubled down on its bike enforcement blitz. Cycling message boards lit up today with stories from an early morning sweep that caught about half a dozen people training in the park, where cops dished out hefty fines (reportedly as high as $350) for going faster than 15 mph.

The NYPD habit of picking off easy traffic enforcement targets under dubious pretenses, while leaving real problems unaddressed, seems to be holding steady. Gothamist’s John del Signore has some highlights:

Dave Jordan of the Century Road Club Association tells us that at least six or seven cyclists received speeding tickets this morning for biking over 15 mph (not the actual speed limit), and cyclist Dave Chomowicz, who took this photo, says, “They had a radar gun out. One or two riders in the picture and two of my teammates were ticketed, and some triathletes got tickets. I believe one of the cyclists was going 20 mph. I took the picture at 6:45 this morning and came back to the park for a while, after cars started coming in and the speed trap was gone. Cars were going far in excess of 15 mph. I saw cars going through red lights.”

Jordan believes six or seven cyclists were ticketed for speeding, and tells us one was slapped with fines totaling $350. “These are athletes and responsible people,” says Jordan. “The people they want are people who are doing this in the middle of the day on the weekends when the park is crowded and you want to do something with your kids and there’s some guy f-bombing as he’s biking around. The law states that we should yield to pedestrians. To enforce lights that have no purpose when there are no cars in the park just doesn’t make sense.”

The 15 mph rule, which doesn’t hold on city streets and apparently applies only to bikes inside the park, has been especially bewildering. The Central Park Conservancy website says the official speed limit for bikes and cars in the park is 25 mph. Some signs inside the park, impossible to read from the roadway, do indicate a 15 mph cap for cyclists. (Athletes can easily run faster than 15 mph, by the way, which is slower than the average speed of every Olympic medalist in the men’s 1,500 meter race going back to 1960.) The same signs imply that bicyclists don’t have to stop for full red light cycles, but should simply yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. Regardless, the rules only seem to apply if you’re on two wheels and you’re an easy mark. Central Park’s red light-running cabbies and speeding drivers can carry on.

In other news, NYPD issued no charges to either of the two drivers involved in yesterday’s noon-time Jackson Heights smash-up, in which one car careened into 82-year-old bystander Margaret Choborka, inflicting fatal head trauma.

A crowd of 300 people, outraged at a police ticket blitz that threatens to effectively eliminate Central Park as a place of recreation for cyclists, ran into an unyielding blue wall at last night’s meeting of the Central Park Precinct’s community council. The precinct commander, Captain Philip Wishnia, offered no hope that his precinct’s enforcement of red-light laws at each of the loop road’s 47 traffic lights will abate, nor any assurances that his officers will exercise meaningful discretion.

Both Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer made brief statements at the meeting, urging exploration of a proposal to change the traffic lights to blinking yellow when cars are not in the park. Brewer, however, grasped the essence of the problem. Noting that she has had a bill before the council since 2006 calling for a trial closing of the park to cars, Brewer said, “Let’s get cars out of the park and change the current policy.”

Wishnia initially tried to claim that the precinct’s sudden crackdown is in response to a “dramatic increase in incidents over the years,” an assertion that he failed to substantiate. When speaker after speaker challenged the claim, Wishnia would eventually fall back on the explanation that he is simply being instructed by higher-ups to enforce the law and has no flexibility. He suggested audience members talk to their legislators if they want a change.

Here are some further highlights, if you can call them that (many thanks to audience members Steve Vaccaro and Lisa Sladkus for their notes):

• Wishnia said that 230 summonses have been issued to cyclists so far this year, compared to 160 speeding summonses issued to drivers all of last year and 62 the prior year. Wishnia maintained the summonses given to cyclists are “not a lot” and that it “doesn’t amount to zero tolerance enforcement.”
• “We cyclists don’t understand how routine speeding by motorists in the park is condoned and even encouraged in this way, but you can’t allow a cyclist to ride through a red light in a deserted intersection in the park,” said Vaccaro. “How can an officer have the discretion to ignore one, but not the other?”
• Wishnia responded: “My officers have discretion. Not everyone who went through a light got a summons.” But when a cyclist asked under what circumstances he could go through a red light without getting a ticket, Wishnia replied, “I won’t tell you what your window of opportunity is.”

Read more…

When NYPD announced that it was going to step up its bike enforcement at the beginning of the year, the best-case scenario went like this: Police would give out more tickets for risky, anti-social behavior like wrong-way biking, and the streets would seem a little more orderly as cycling continues its upward trajectory in NYC.

But the Wall Street Journal reported this week that a big hotspot in the bike crackdown isn’t “the streets” at all, really, but rather Central Park. NYPD has handed out ten times the number of bike tickets in the park this year compared to all of 2010. And the policy doesn’t seem to be singling out riders who are racing full tilt past pedestrians with the right of way. Cyclists whose only transgression is not sitting for the full red cycle at traffic lights in the park — even when the crossing is clear and car-free hours are in effect — are getting hit with $270 fines.

The ticket blitz has upended a longstanding social compact between cyclists, pedestrians, and cops in the park, which applied a common sense “yield to peds” rule during car-free hours. Now, with traffic-control devices designed for cars setting the enforcement agenda, riding in the park doesn’t seem so relaxing or recreational.

Why the sudden change? Randy Cohen, author of the Ethicist column in the Times (and star of a few Streetfilms), reports on an enlightening conversation he recently had with a Central Park police officer:

I just returned from riding in the (blissfully warm, if swampy) park, where I had an amiable chat with a police officer who couldn’t have been friendlier. When I asked about the current bikes and lights policy, he smiled ruefully — with what I took to be professional embarrassment — and said that the policy is to enforce the traffic laws. When I asked if the long established practice — during car free hours, yield to pedestrians who have the light, but if there are none, roll one — wasn’t better, he agreed that, in his words “there’s a difference between law and common sense.” I asked when, if ever, things would return to how they’d been for the past thirty years, he smiled and said: “You’ll have to ask the mayor next time you see him.” Again, this officer was entirely reasonable and courteous. But there you have it, the further impression that the mayor created this situation and only he can change it.

In what’s shaping up to be a yearly tradition, car-free hours in Central Park have been cut back for the holiday season. Each weekday this month, on the southeast corner of the park drive, the park’s pedestrians, joggers, cyclists, and dog-walkers have three fewer hours of quiet and safety.

The stretch of the park drive between Sixth Avenue and Central Park South and E. 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue is already open to cars more than any other part of the park. Year-round, it’s open to cars from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m on weekdays. But between November 29 and December 30 this year, drivers have an extra three hours each day to use Central Park as a shortcut to the Upper East Side.

That means 2010 will actually be the second annual step backwards from the goal of a car-free Central Park. During the 2009 holiday season, the same stretch of road was opened to traffic until 9:00 p.m. For the two years before that, DOT had actually done away with the practice of imposing holiday hours to move more cars through the park.

Last year, Streetsblog reported that the decision to open up the park for longer wasn’t made by DOT, the agency in charge of the city’s streets, but rather by the NYPD.

This year, the changes aren’t posted where vehicle hours are listed on either the Parks Department or Central Park websites, and the reduction in car-free time isn’t included in DOT’s annual holiday traffic plan [PDF]. The DOT press office referred our initial request to NYPD. We’re awaiting a response from the police.

At least this year, the city put up sufficiently visible signage alerting those on foot or a bike that they’re headed into traffic at hours when there normally isn’t any. Last year, the only signs were laminated 8½ by 11-inch flyers stuck to signpoles. One reader wrote in to say that the same flyers are back, and they’re just as hard to notice. This time, however, park users without an engine also merited the same electronic signs that alerted drivers of their extra hours.

Streetsblog contributor Ken Coughlin snapped these shots of a rear-end collision between a yellow taxi and a livery cab in Central Park. The crash happened on West Drive at about 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Fortunately, no cyclists or runners or moms with kids were involved, but as long as the city's most iconic public space remains open as a motor vehicle thruway, people who use it will always have to worry about the next driver coming up behind them. Odds are one in four of those drivers is speeding by at least 10 mph. And if one of those speeders hits someone, the chance of death resulting from the collision is at least 85 percent.

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show last Wednesday to talk about the agency's plans to, as Lehrer put it, "spread the Times Square model." When Lehrer invited listeners to call in with their ideas for other streets that should be made car-free zones, "Steve from Manhattan" asked why the Central Park loop wasn't being closed to traffic, calling it "obvious" and a "no-brainer." In her response, the commissioner said that Central Park's loop road already is closed to traffic "98 percent of the time."

If this were true, it would invite the question why it's such a big deal to finish the job, but in fact Sadik-Khan's statistic is simply false. Worse, she's clearly been using this inaccurate figure for quite some time, because she also cited it in a conversation I had with her back in October 2008.

Here are the facts: Because different sections of the loop are open to traffic for different lengths of time, the actual percentage depends on where you are on the loop and also on what you define as "the time" (for example, is it every hour of every day or only the hours when people are actually in the park?). Given this, the actual percentage of time that cars are banned ranges from a low of 25 percent to a high of 94 percent, depending where you are on the loop.

Let's assume that "the time" means every hour of every day. With the West Drive now open to traffic for only two hours on weekday mornings, it's closed to traffic 94 percent of "the time," which is the likely source of Sadik-Khan's "98 percent." But as any recreational user of Central Park knows, the six-mile loop has an East Drive as well, which is open to traffic far longer. The East Drive north of 72nd Street is open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and the half-mile segment between the Sixth Avenue entrance and the E. 72nd Street exit permits vehicular access from morning until night, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This means the section north of 72nd is closed to traffic 88 percent of "the time" and the southern section is closed only 64 percent of "the time."

The percentage of car-free time drops if we limit "the time" to weekday hours when people are actually likely to be in the park, and exclude weekends (when cars have been banned for 43 years), the overnight curfew (when no one is allowed in the park anyway), and the period from 10 p.m. to the curfews' start at 1 a.m. If "the time" is instead defined as weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the West Drive is closed to traffic 87 percent of the time, the northern part of the East Drive is closed 77 percent of the time, and the southern section is closed only one quarter of the time.

Whatever the percentages are, the fact remains that the drives are open to traffic during the precise hours when non-motorized use is highest: Read more...

After introducing some yuletide sanity two winters ago, the city is back to sending a schizophrenic message to New Yorkers this holiday season: Please use mass transit, but if you choose to drive, we've made it easier by increasing the hours when cars are permitted on a section of Central Park's loop road. Only this time it's the NYPD, not the Department of Transportation, behind the double message.

According to a well-placed source with knowledge of the situation, the NYPD issued a directive this year that cars be allowed to use the loop's southeast corner as a cut-through for an additional two hours, until 9 p.m., on weekdays. The expansion runs until "January 2010," according to notices. The NYPD has not returned inquiries about the reason for the change or why it is setting traffic policy.

The road in question is the southeast corner of the Central Park loop, a half-mile stretch that allows drivers to go from Sixth Avenue to the Upper East Side by cutting across a corner of the park. Two years ago Streetsblog reported that the DOT had quietly done away with "holiday hours" on Central Park's loop road, ending the annual suspension of car-free time that had been used to accommodate motorists during the holidays. The change was a huge success in that the only people who seemed to notice were the park's recreational users, who were delighted. Holiday hours didn't resurface last winter, and the annual holiday traffic plan that DOT produced for 2009 contains no mention of the change [PDF]. (The DOT and Parks Department press offices both directed inquiries to the NYPD.)

Park users may have thought holiday traffic hours were gone for good, but they were wrong.

Read more...

The city's ongoing effort to have it both ways in Central Park resulted in another near-tragedy last week.

Brian Dooda was riding his bike in the park when he got into an altercation with the driver of an SUV. It seems Dooda was not riding in the "recreational lane" that the city has thoughtfully provided for those who have the quaint notion that Central Park is a place to escape the urban din. Instead, Dooda was out in one of the traffic lanes, "keeping a steady pace of 25 mph" as he later reported on the New York Cycle Club's message board.

Going the legal speed limit in Central Park apparently wasn't good enough for the SUV driver, who shared his displeasure with Dooda by cutting across his path, reportedly missing Dooda's front wheel by inches. Dooda caught up to the driver at a light. What allegedly unfolded is vividly described on Dooda's NYCC post, but in abbreviated form Dooda says the driver intentionally drove into him twice, with Dooda ending up on the car's hood and being driven some 200 feet while pleading for his life. Dooda says he finally fell off, essentially unharmed, and the driver sped away. There were witnesses, the license plate number was taken down, and Dooda has filed a report with the police.

Accounts of the incident on Gothamist and Gawker have elicited the usual quotient of "all cyclists deserve to die because a messenger hit me once" comments. Others piled on with their own "I told you so's" following the revelation that the SUV driver was a Fox News writer named Don Broderick (who apparently is using the "he hit me first" defense).

But all this finger-pointing and name-calling misses a larger issue. As most of us know, recreational users of Central Park have been unhappily sharing the park's loop road with car traffic for decades. This was the road that the park's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, intended to be an integral part of the park experience and to never serve as a traffic thoroughfare. They won the competition to design Central Park precisely because they devised an ingenious way of allowing traffic to cross the park unnoticed via the four transverses.

Read more...

With help from Transportation Alternatives, a group of mothers and families known as Mobilized Moms led a  car-free Central Park rally on Tuesday. Streetfilms' Robin Urban Smith says about 50 supporters, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and City Council Member Gale Brewer, came out in support of the Moms, who marched from Central Park West and 72nd Street to the Naumburg Bandshell.

The group plans to collect kids' artwork from the event, along with written correspondence, for a book to send to Mayor Bloomberg in hopes that a car-free trial period might finally be instituted.