Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog regular Glenn McAnanama sent in a flier from Columbia University police [PDF] alerting faculty, staff and students to a recent bike theft.

Video stills like the one at right appear to show a man -- pictured more clearly on the flier -- walking away with a bike after removing the front wheel. (Hal would probably give that lock job an "F.")

This is not a huge deal, but as Glenn points out, it's nice to see campus security treating bike theft as an actual crime worthy of its attention. "This is the second one of these [fliers] I've seen in as many weeks," he writes. "Imagine if NYPD were this concerned."

Of course, prevalence of bike theft also raises the issue of secure parking, or lack thereof, on campus. Any Columbia-affiliated folks care to weigh in?

Although there is undoubtedly an amazing streets renaissance going on in NYC, there still remain places in dire need of improvement. Every workday, heavily-used areas like the blocks surrounding Penn Station are overwhelmed with pedestrians making their way home via buses, subways, the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak. The sidewalks are so clogged by this "crush of humanity" that people are forced to walk in the streets. If you've never seen it, or if you're claustrophobic, get ready.

Open Planning Project Executive Director Mark Gorton recently went out to sample the atmosphere on a typical weekday evening and posits that we can do much better in how we choose to allocate street space. His words sum it up nicely:

The reason it's so crowded here is not because there's not enough space. It's because we give all of our space to the least spatially-efficient form of transportation available. 

Of course he is referring to the automobile -- especially the single-occupant vehicle. Oddly enough, I did a PSA over three years ago which aired during our New York City Streets Renaissance campaign launch. I filmed most of it in the same location. It still looks much the same, perhaps worse.

A reader sends this shot, taken at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 24th Street this afternoon. We're waiting to hear back from NYPD about whether anyone was hurt. Hopefully this will be one of the lucky cases where an out-of-control cab didn't harm anyone. And really, in the middle of Manhattan, just a short walk from Penn Station, it all boils down to pure chance. I wonder how fast a car has to travel to flip over like this. Does Ray Kelly know?

Reader Ian Dutton sends this dispatch from last night's candidate debate for the District 1 City Council seat representing Lower Manhattan, organized by the Downtown Express and the Villager. If you're a District 1 resident who values safer streets and a well-funded transit system, tough luck.

Last night at the Council District 1 candidates debate, in the "lightning round" (one-line answers), a question was "Grand St. bike lane: good or bad."

All the candidates came out strongly against it to the cheers of some in the crowd. Only PJ Kim, the last to comment, tempered his statement with, "but we must not demonize bikers." They all either flatly opposed congestion pricing or want carve-outs for residents (pandering, hmmm?) and opposed East River tolls.

On the congestion pricing question (about 1:31:00 into this audio file posted on the Lo-Down), Pete Gleason and Alan Gerson were the two to outright oppose the idea -- although the incumbent Gerson voted for pricing last year. Margaret Chin, the only candidate to express any support for bridge tolls (check the 1:32:00 mark), qualified her answer by saying that car-poolers should be exempt.

Any exemption for congestion pricing or bridge tolls, of course, opens the door to more exemptions. The first people who will take advantage? Exactly the same placard-holders whom District 1 candidates rightly blame for clogging downtown streets.

We're talking about a district that is absolutely pummeled by bridge traffic, where about 80 percent of the households don't own a car. Those who do own one earn nearly two-and-a half times those who don't, on average [PDF]. There was a great opportunity here for a savvy candidate to separate from the pack on livable streets issues. And yet, no one chose to grab it.

Will the third time be the charm for reliable bus arrival displays in Manhattan? NYCDOT and the MTA announced today that, yes, they will deliver a tracking system bus riders can count on.

Displays counting down the minutes until the next bus arrives have been installed at eight shelters serving the M34 and M16 routes on 34th Street. All eight are live and functional, according to a DOT spokesperson, so if you're taking a late lunch in Midtown, you can walk on over and check them out. You'll find them at the eastbound bus stops at Tenth, Ninth, Eighth and Park, and the westbound stops at First, Second, Third, and Lexington.

The displays are part of a pilot program provided at no cost by a Long Island company called Clever Devices. A report by Michael Grynbaum in the Times' City Room blog notes that Clever Devices installed a similar pilot for Chicago three years ago, a program called Bus Tracker that has since expanded to cover more all of the city's bus network. The Manhattan pilot uses GPS satellite tracking to determine the position of buses. Wait times based on those positions are then transmitted to LED displays mounted at the bus shelters.

Two prior contracts for real-time bus tracking have been scrapped by the MTA, most recently this January, because the systems could not deliver accurate information to riders. Long after cities like London, Paris and Bogota implemented similar technology, New York bus riders still have to guess whether the next bus will arrive when the posted schedule says it will. If this 34th Street pilot pans out, it will mean less exasperation for straphangers, and, perhaps, a little more credibility for the MTA.

We'll post some pics of the new displays soon. If you snap a picture of one, you can email it to tips@streetsblog.org or tag it "streetsblog" on Flickr.

This image of Fifth Avenue unearthed by the Times' Jennifer 8. Lee (nice headline!) is a fascinating relic from the dawn of the motoring age. The new geometry pictured here nicked 15 feet of sidewalk from pedestrians to make room for two traffic lanes. In one fell swoop, the balance of space shifted dramatically: Two 30-foot sidewalks and a 40-foot roadway became 22½-foot sidewalks and a 55-foot roadway. The insets show the sort of "imperfections" slated for elimination on the auto-friendly Fifth Avenue: terraces, stoops, gardens -- the type of amenities that make streets more than simply thoroughfares to pass through.

Which got me wondering: A hundred years from now, how will we interpret images like this?

The Manhattan DA's office is filing charges of criminal mischief against a cyclist, Ray Bengen, because he allegedly caused property damage to a multi-ton SUV in the process of getting doored by the driver. Too ridiculous to be true? Sadly, no. Here's how it happened.

Bengen, 63, was riding down the Ninth Avenue bike lane on May 21 when he encountered the Ford Excursion you see in this photo (curb weight: 7,190 lbs). A long-time city cyclist, Bengen had a green light and wasn't quite sure what to make of the vehicle in front of him. The car wasn't moving and its brake lights were off.

The bike lane on this stretch of Ninth Avenue is part of the city's first on-street protected bike path. At the 20th Street intersection, where Bengen came across the car, there's a left-turn bay for vehicles and an exclusive green phase for cyclists. The Excursion, as you can see below, was in the bike lane, not the left-turn bay.

Bengen rode slowly by on the left. Then he sensed the car start to move as he was passing. Alarmed, he slapped the side of the car with his palm in an effort to alert the driver as to his presence. A witness, who Bengen says has agreed to testify in court, snapped three pictures of what happened next. We'll let Bengen describe it:

The driver then went berserk. Talk about road rage. He threw open his door forcing me and my bike to the ground giving me some awful bruising down my leg. As I was now on the ground yelling at him that he's in a bike lane and was just about to run me over, he started to scream at me "Don't even think about it, don't even think about it." I'm still not sure what he meant by that. With me lying on the ground quite shaken, he suddenly stopped his assault and did something very unexpected. He moved away from me, picked up my bike where it was nearly underneath his truck. He then stood it up on its kickstand, and got back in the truck and drove away left into 20th street.

If the episode had ended then and there, one might assume that the driver, who remains unidentified, had counted to ten and wrestled his anger under control. But it looks like the guy may hold a grudge.

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...

After this fall's local elections, there's going to be a change at the top of the Manhattan District Attorney's office for the first time in a generation. The retirement of long-time DA Robert Morgenthau signals a welcome opportunity to get tougher on traffic crime and approach deadly driving as a serious threat to public safety. So tomorrow's debate on traffic justice is a big deal: In a first for New York City, the three Democratic candidates running to succeed Morgenthau will discuss "their views on vehicular crimes and the role of the District Attorney's office in protecting New Yorkers from reckless and dangerous drivers."

To hear what the candidates have to say, head over to the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (55 Fifth Avenue at 12th Street) tomorrow morning. The debate gets underway at 8:30 a.m., with Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek introducing the event and Jonathan Oberman, director of Cardozo's Criminal Defense Clinic, moderating the candidates' discussion.

Mark your calendars for the morning of Wednesday, June 3. That's when the three declared candidates running for Manhattan District Attorney -- Richard Aborn, Leslie Crocker Snyder, and Cyrus Vance -- will sit down for a round table debate on traffic justice. Organized by Transportation Alternatives and the Criminal Justice Society of the Benjamin Cardozo Law School, the event will get each candidate on the record about vehicular crime and how the district attorney's office can protect New Yorkers from dangerous drivers.

As we report on Streetsblog all too often, New York City's district attorneys appear reluctant to prosecute dangerous and deadly drivers. And when they do, sentences are seldom commensurate with the pain inflicted on victims' families.

In addition to deterring reckless driving, a tougher stance on traffic crime from the DA's office is essential for improving police investigations of harmful crashes. With the departure of Robert Morgenthau from the position after 35 years of public service, the next Manhattan DA will have the chance to make the borough's bustling streets safer for everyone who uses them.

"This is a significant event and we are hopeful that whoever the new DA is, he or she will take a serious and new approach towards prosecuting dangerous drivers in New York City," said TA General Counsel Peter Goldwasser in an email. "We believe that by agreeing to participate in this debate, each candidate is already signaling a new sense of respect and understanding towards the importance of the issue and the prominent role the office of the District Attorney can play."

The debate, which is free and open to the public, gets underway on June 3 at 8:30 a.m. in Cardozo's Moot Court Room (55 Fifth Avenue at 12th Street).