A reader sent in this photo from Park Slope, where restaurateur Irene Lo Re has been railing against the Fifth Avenue bike lane.

It is in Aunt Suzie's window now, along with the sign for free bike air.

Is this just another salvo in AAA's war against people-friendly city streets -- or maybe a small token for taking up the cause? There's no way to be sure, but it might call for raising the profile of the Bike-Friendly Business awards.

Apparently not. Lo Re appeared in the Post today, up in arms about the Park Smart pilot on Fifth Avenue, accusing the city of "killing small businesses." Park Smart charges motorists higher rates to park during the midday peak, freeing up curb space so drivers don't spend so much time cruising for spots. Also appearing in the Post story were Joe Leopoldi, whose hardware store is not even located in the Park Smart zone, and Judi Pheiffer of Bob and Judi's Coolectibles. These are the same handful of merchants Lo Re mentioned by name when I asked her who was opposed to the bike lane.

Catering to the parking whims of drivers strikes me as a poor business strategy for merchants in walkable, transit-rich Park Slope. It sure didn't guarantee success for Tempo, a dining establishment on Fifth and Carroll. They closed their doors for good a few days after I took this photo right outside their entrance.

L-r: City Council candidates Ken Baer, Doug Biviano, Ken Diamondstone, Jo Anne Simon, Evan Thies.

It was an opportunity for the candidates to show how well they understand the most critical transportation problems facing New York City by rebutting Reina with a well-reasoned argument. Traffic generated by the free price on Brooklyn's three East River bridges overruns the 33rd District, which includes parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Park Slope. Congestion pricing, supported by outgoing rep David Yassky, should be as much a no-brainer here as it is in Lower Manhattan.

Only one candidate, Doug Biviano, a former campaign staffer for Kucinich 2008, came close to giving Reina what he asked for. "I'm not against congestion pricing," he said, "but I think we have to be careful about unintended consequences. Do we want to hit people with that toll? In this climate, I don’t think we want to. That would kill contractors."

Biviano was followed by Evan Thies, who played an active role in last year's campaign to pass congestion pricing as a consultant for Environment Defense and the Pratt Center. "I do absolutely support congestion pricing," he said to some applause. "Neighborhoods like this are disproportionately affected by the traffic that’s created by the lack of congestion pricing. Contractors in the outer boroughs supported congestion pricing, because instead of spending time in traffic, they’d be spending more time working for clients." Thies later named congestion pricing his top transportation priority and noted that the next City Council will need to take it up again in 2010 to fund the MTA Capital Plan.

Jo Anne Simon, an attorney who serves as Democratic district leader in the 52nd Assembly District, gave another strong statement in support of pricing. "The gratuitous traffic that comes over the bridges is just that, gratuitous," she said. "We’re a doormat. It’s costing us in infrastructure; it’s costing us in health. The challenge for us as policy makers is to convince people in the outer boroughs that congestion pricing benefits them too. It’s not just for Manhattan."

Ken Diamondstone and Ken Baer, the other two candidates at the forum, also endorsed congestion pricing. Baer took the more enthusiastic stance, noting that pricing revenues can help plug the MTA Capital Plan's $10 billion hole. Diamondstone said he "believes strongly" in the policy but thinks exceptions must be made for people with disabilities and, in a novel carve-out suggestion, musicians.

By this point in the debate, candidate Isaac Abraham was long gone.

Abraham, whose base is in Williamsburg's Satmar Hasidic community, left soon after taking a swipe at the Kent Avenue bike lane, about 30 minutes into the event. (He told the crowd of about 50 that he had a wedding to attend.) At least Abraham made an appearance, which is more than we can say for no-show Steve Levin, a protege of Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez. The day before the debate, Levin backed out of his commitment to attend.

On the question of truck traffic, the need to fund the Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnel was widely invoked by the candidates, but council members can't do much to advance a project that needs billions in federal cash to get built. The more intriguing responses came from Simon and Thies. Simon raised the prospect of truck tolls on the East River bridges (you can do it with E-ZPass transponders, she said), which would put a halt to the free counterclockwise route that sends trucks through downtown Brooklyn streets, while Thies proposed giving Traffic Enforcement Agents the authority to "bust trucks for traveling on non-truck routes."

It wasn't the only question on which Simon and Thies distinguished themselves. While the two Kens showed a solid commitment to street safety measures like automated enforcement and traffic-calming infrastructure, Simon and Thies consistently displayed a broader and more current grasp of transportation issues.

Responding to a question about improving streets for walking, biking and transit, Thies was the only candidate to broach the politically difficult subject of off-street parking reform. "I'd like to prevent garages from being built in developments near subway stops," he said. "It’s bad urban planning, it brings traffic." Simon, meanwhile, made the evening's sole statement on bike-share, a project that she said "needs to be pursued."

Aside from Abraham's early turn at the mic, fireworks over bike lanes failed to transpire. One audience member did mention that she fears cyclists while driving at night, and asked the candidates if they would push legislation requiring cyclist registration and helmet use. To read what they had to say, check out "Audience Question #1" over at TA's candidate survey blog.

L-r: Brad Lander, Dave Pechefsky, Gary Reilly, Josh Skaller, and Bob Zuckerman.

The race to succeed Bill de Blasio in the 39th District is crowded, with seven candidates participating in the debate (an eighth, Democrat John Heyer, was a no-show). After last night, it's clear that a strong livable streets candidate won't emerge from the Republican primary. GOP candidates Joe Nardiello and George Smith voiced support for bike infrastructure but neither could articulate a coherent strategy for curbing auto use and mitigating traffic. (Nardiello on congestion pricing: "Penalties are not the solution.")

The other five debaters -- Democrats Brad Lander, Gary Reilly, Josh Skaller, and Bob Zuckerman, and Green Party candidate Dave Pechefsky -- generally agreed that the city should reduce driving and foster walking, biking, and transit. How, and to what extent? I'll try to give a sense of their positions and ideas as concisely as possible.

Among this group, Zuckerman seemed the most gun-shy about getting people out of their cars. When asked to identify the district's most pressing transportation need, "I would use the word congestion," he said. His main strategy: Residential parking permits, proposing a borough-wide permit zone for on-street parking, with a $100 annual fee. As a hypothetical revenue-raiser, that's nothing to sneeze at. As a feasible proposition for busting congestion, I'm not so sure.

In general, RPP was a common proposal, while more effective and politically risky strategies to manage parking received fewer mentions. Lander and Reilly both lauded the DOT's PARK Smart pilot in Park Slope -- which charges higher rates for on-street spaces during peak hours -- and suggested ramping it up. Thankfully, no one from the Dem/Green contingent proposed building additional parking structures to ease congestion. (Skaller: "I do agree with the basic notion that if you create parking, more cars will come. So the solution must lie elsewhere.")

Reilly was the only candidate to identify the city's off-street parking requirements as a major cause of traffic and congestion. "We need to eliminate that archaic part of the zoning law that requires car parking," he said. Pechefsky picked up on a different aspect of the city's off-street parking boom. "Riding down Ninth Street is an invitation to get hit by someone driving to Lowe’s," he said, referring to the big box home improvement store that sits right by the Gowanus Canal. "We need another economic development model." 

The most full-throated endorsement of congestion pricing, meanwhile, came from Lander. "I want to encourage people to stick, long-term, with congestion pricing," he said, noting that RPP would not pack the same punch. "I think we need to be in the forefront of advocating for that to happen. If we want enough money to run transit, and cut congestion and the traffic that runs through our neighborhood, we need congestion pricing." Council members can push for that reform, he said, by helping to build the coalitions necessary to sway Albany legislators.

One of the more pronounced and interesting distinctions between the candidates arose when they were asked about making Prospect Park car-free, an idea that the departing de Blasio has endorsed. Pechefsky and Reilly fell squarely in the "do it now" camp. Lander, Skaller, and Zuckerman urged a gradualist approach, suggesting variations on a strategy of winning over skeptics in Windsor Terrace and Kensington, who fear that a car-free park would send more traffic through their streets. "I think that the perception and the reality are probably two different things," said Skaller. "I think it's a very attainable goal, to have a car-free park. But in order to get there, we need a full buy-in from all communities, and we need to show people that it will work for them."

The area of greatest unanimity was probably traffic enforcement. Several candidates concurred that the enforcement of traffic laws is woefully insufficient and pledged to work with the NYPD to make it a higher priority. Reilly took the additional step of recommending more red light cams, which must be approved by Albany.

As for bikes? Well, woe to the candidate who comes out with an anti-bike message at a TA debate. If these pols follow through on what they said last night, you don't have to worry about the 39th District producing a council member who'll rail against protected lanes and stand in the way of a more robust bike network.

One of the more intriguing races is shaping up in the 39th Council District, which includes parts of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Kensington, and Borough Park. This is the seat being vacated by Bill de Blasio -- who opposed congestion pricing last year and came out in favor of bridge tolls late in the game during the MTA funding debate this spring. The district is heavily transit-dependent, mostly car-free [PDF], and situated in prime New York City "bike belt" territory. This election should put a strong, smart voice for progressive transportation policy in City Hall.

If you live in the 39th and care about green transportation and livable streets, you'll want to come out tomorrow night for the candidate debate Transportation Alternatives has put together. TA director Paul White will moderate the event, featuring the seven council candidates, who will discuss their views on "the bike network, congestion pricing, pedestrian safety, the MTA and livable streets issues of all stripes."

The more people attend, the more the candidates will appreciate that these issues matter to their potential constituents. Here are the details:

• When: Tuesday, August 18, 7:00 - 8:30pm
• Where: PS 321, 180 7th Avenue (between 1st and 2nd Street)
• Who: City Council candidates for District 39 (John Heyer, Brad Lander, Joe Nardiello, David Pechefsky, Gary Reilly, Josh Skaller, Bob Zuckerman)

DOT contractors are putting down new bike lane markings on Park Slope's Fifth Avenue this afternoon. In addition to refurbishing the original bike lane laid down in 2004 and the sharrows installed in 2006, the crews are adding reinforcements, like the chevron markings through the intersections pictured below.

It would be entirely fitting if these improvements were DOT's response to the recent complaints from a small number of merchants and the idiotic editorial that ran in the Brooklyn Paper claiming that these pavement markings -- and the cyclists who use them -- are somehow interfering with deliveries and parking on the avenue. But this is probably just regularly scheduled maintenance. Winter snow plows really do a number on these bike lanes.

Many Fifth Avenue merchants do see cyclists as customers, not obstacles. Photo: Ben Fried.

Basically, I heard many variations on the theme voiced by Bonnie's Grill proprietor Mike Naber: Delivery drivers were getting lots of tickets and fines "before the bike lane." In the interest of providing some measure of balance to local press reports that blame dips in retail sales on bike infrastructure or bus lanes, here's a sampling of what people told me.

Emily Isaac, owner of Trois Pommes Patisserie, receives about 10 deliveries per week. If the bike lane is causing her suppliers problems, they're keeping quiet about it. "I haven't heard a word or noticed anything," she said. When I asked if she'd be willing to adjust her schedule if it meant she could receive deliveries at the curb during specific times, she said "Yes." She also said that replacing one on-street car-parking spot on her block with space for bike parking would suit her just fine.

At 'Snice, a cafe at the corner of 3rd Street, owner Mike Walter gets three deliveries per day, on average. He thinks the suppliers have given up on trying to find curbside spots, and he has other concerns besides the bike lane. "I'm sure the double-parked trucks hurt bus service," he said. (The B63, which runs on Fifth Avenue, is the slowest bus line in Brooklyn.) "As far as the delivery guys, no one's complained to me that because of the bike riders they're getting tickets."

Between Carroll Street and Flatbush Avenue, Fifth Avenue is too narrow to accommodate a striped bike lane. It has sharrows instead. Revealingly, the merchants on this part of the strip also report that their suppliers receive parking tickets with regularity. So turning Fifth Avenue's Class 2 bike facility into sharrows, as CB6 district manager Craig Hammerman has suggested [PDF], would not accomplish much besides making the street more dangerous.

It's pretty clear that what's going on here is not a bike lane problem, but a delivery problem. Muslh Alomri, a manager at the Associated market on Fifth and Union (he's got sharrows, not a bike lane), would like nothing more than to have a bigger delivery zone in front of his store. The space he has now is equivalent to two parking spots. When the big rigs come to deliver milk, about five or six times a week, the back of the truck sticks out into the bus stop, and the truck driver gets a ticket. Alomri wants to expand the delivery zone to occupy three car parking spaces, but says he's been rebuffed by the city.

You may be asking: Don't his customers have to carry stuff away? Doesn't he need car parking nearby? In fact, said Alomri: "Most of my customers are walking customers. Maybe one out of a hundred comes in a car."

Just about every New York City neighborhood has to deal with the consequences of dirt cheap on-street parking. When you practically give away spaces at rock-bottom prices, it guarantees double parking and endless cruising for spots by bargain hunting drivers. Which is bad news for all the bus riders, cyclists, and delivery drivers who have to contend with the clogged curbs, extra traffic, and lane-blocking vehicles that result.

For the past month, Fifth Avenue in Park Slope has been experimenting with DOT's PARK Smart program, which adjusts the price of metered spaces during peak hours and promises to eliminate some of the curbside dysfunction. A few Park Slope business owners also see their neighborhood's PARK Smart pilot as a good opportunity to eliminate something else: the Fifth Avenue bike lane.

This January, at the same time that DOT and Brooklyn CB6 were discussing the launch of PARK Smart, the Fifth Avenue BID approached the community board about doing away with the Class 2 bike lane that runs from Carroll Street to 24th Street.

The contention from BID director Irene LoRe, proprietor of the restaurant Aunt Suzie's, is that the bike lane interferes with deliveries and customer access. Even though parked cars, not two stripes of thermoplast, are what prevent delivery trucks from parking legally. And despite the fact that, according to several Fifth Avenue merchants who were unaware of the BID's request, tickets for double parking were just as common before the bike lane arrived (about five years ago).

Nevertheless, CB6 District Manager Craig Hammerman told Streetsblog last month that he thinks the BID has a point. "Previously the trucks could double park; now that there’s a bike lane, you can't load or unload," he said, agreeing with the notion that the lane is causing headaches for business owners and delivery drivers. "The idea is to share the roads. We'd love to see some sort of compromise."

What sort of compromise, exactly?

Hammerman provided us with a letter [PDF] he sent earlier this year to LoRe and Judi Pheiffer, another local business owner. In it, he proposes converting the existing bike lane to a Class 3 route. That means cyclists would get sharrows instead -- road markings that don't carry the same visual weight or staying power as dedicated lanes. "It would seem to me," Hammerman wrote, that converting the bike lane to sharrows "would eliminate the existing conflict between the bicycles and the merchant delivery trucks."

Or it would simply expose thousands of people to more danger and risk. The proposed scenario wouldn't do anything to help delivery drivers find curbside spots, but it would force cyclists to kiss their dedicated space goodbye. In DOT's latest survey of Fifth Avenue bike traffic, conducted on a weekday in October, 865 cyclists were counted between 8th Street and 9th Street in one twelve-hour period. There's no indication that the agency will roll back this widely used safety measure, but it's worth noting that bike infrastructure has come under fire in a seemingly unrelated discussion of meter pricing.

In a phone call with Streetsblog, BID director Irene LoRe laid out her belief that customers and suppliers are collecting more parking tickets because of the bike lane. "You can get a ticket for blocking the bike lane," she said, claiming that parking enforcement is increasing costs for retail merchants on Fifth. "Eventually a [supplier] is going to put it into their price." (Note, however, that parking in a bike lane -- violation 48 -- doesn't even have a check-box on the New York City parking summons.)

LoRe expressed tentative support for PARK Smart but didn't agree with the proposition that parking dysfunction should be cured with a combination of market-rate meter prices and coordinated delivery zones. "Believe me," she said, "if you start creating loading zones, you're going to take away all the parking spots you created with PARK Smart." While LoRe said she would welcome bike infrastructure on another street (she suggested a protected path on Fourth Avenue), it became clear during the course of our conversation that she does not see bicyclists as potential customers, and that restaurants, in her words, "depend on customers coming by car."

We know from studies of Prince Street in Manhattan and Bloor Street in Toronto that businesses in many urban neighborhoods have more to gain from attracting pedestrians and cyclists than from providing cheap parking. Park Slope is not the same as SoHo, of course, but it is dense, walkable, easily accessible by transit, and full of people who ride bikes.

Plenty of merchants along Fifth Avenue don't share LoRe's take on the situation. Mike Naber, who's run Bonnie's Grill for 10 years, said his delivery guys do get about six tickets per week, but that the enforcement has little to do with the lane striping. "It was like that before the bike lane," he said. (We'll have more from other Fifth Avenue merchants in a future post.)

Better curbside management holds the promise of vastly improved streets -- pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders stand to benefit enormously from properly priced parking and coordinated deliveries. So do many businesses, but myths and misconceptions still abound.

Image: NYCDOT

Eric McClure of Park Slope Neighbors files this report.

Last night, the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6 unanimously endorsed a plan by the Department of Transportation to calm traffic on Prospect Park West through a major street redesign.

The plan features the implementation of New York City's first on-street, two-way, physically separated bike lane, which will run alongside Prospect Park on the east side of Prospect Park West, and will be protected by a four-foot striped buffer and a parking lane. In order to accommodate the new bike lane, Prospect Park West will be reduced from three south-bound travel lanes to two, and the remaining lanes will be narrowed to ten feet each.

The planned changes address two major issues: the need for northbound bicycle access on Prospect Park West, for which there has been strong demand, according to DOT Bicycle Program Coordinator Josh Benson; and a major problem with speeding, which has been a longtime concern of residents and neighborhood activists.

Preston Johnson, DOT's project manager for the Prospect Park West redesign, highlighted the problems caused by the street's current configuration. At nearly 50 feet wide and with three travel lanes, the street encourages high speeds and reckless driving, forces pedestrians to make long crossings, and lacks dedicated cycling space, despite a high volume of bicycle traffic. Prospect Park West's existing vehicle volume, which peaks at about 1,100 cars per hour, can easily be accommodated by two lanes, Johnson said.

In field surveys last month, DOT found that more than 70 percent of the cars on Prospect Park West were exceeding the 30 mph speed limit, and at least 15 percent were traveling at 40 mph or faster. From 2005 to 2007, there were 58 reported crashes on Prospect Park West.

In addition to the the two-way bike lane and buffer, the street redesign will include concrete pedestrian refuge islands, which will significantly shorten the crossings at intersections, and extensive new landscaping under the DOT's Greenstreets program. Parking spaces will be maintained along Prospect Park West with the exception of approximately two spaces at each signalized intersection.

The plan was enthusiastically received by the CB 6 transportation committee and an audience of about three dozen people. Board members raised some concerns about the lack of dedicated signalization for cyclists, especially those riding northbound. In a unanimously approved motion introduced by transportation co-chair Joanne Foulke, the committee asked DOT to include north- and southbound signals for cyclists, some daylighting measures, and dedicated drop-off zones in the final redesign. Roger Melzer, a 30-year Prospect Park West resident, was the only person to speak against the plan, saying that he feared the loss of a travel lane would create a "nightmare" of double-parking near the 9th Street park entrance.

Said Jeff Prant, a Park Slope resident, Transportation Alternatives board member and long-time advocate for livable streets, "I never thought I'd see the day when a proposal to remove an entire lane of traffic would encounter virtually no objection."

The Board chairs would not entertain a question from a resident regarding the possibility of converting Prospect Park West to two-way traffic, in conjunction with a similar reconfiguration of Eighth Avenue, asking that the discussion be limited to the proposal on the table. DOT's Benson, however, said that he thought such a change would create problems with additional signal movements at Grand Army Plaza, but he didn't rule out the possibility of further design changes over the long term.

According to DOT, the Department of Design and Construction will likely begin implementing the Prospect Park West redesign in September, and the full build out would take a few months.

In addition to the Prospect Park West changes, DOT announced that it is planning to permanently close the 3rd Street park entrance to vehicles beginning next month. In conjunction with the closure, DOT will stripe new bike and pedestrian lanes into and out of the park at 3rd Street, with the intent of reducing conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians. DOT will also permanently close the vehicle exit at 16th Street and Prospect Park South, so that all cars entering the park at Grand Army Plaza will exit at Park Circle. The park's West Drive is open just two hours each weekday, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

DOT also presented a plan for a traffic-calming redesign on Baltic Street between Hoyt and Bond Streets, a very wide block that has been plagued by speeding. The plan involves the installation of a landscaped 10-foot median, three lanes of parallel parking (two on either side of the eastbound south side of Baltic and one on the westbound side), and pedestrian refuges at the intersections with Hoyt and Bond. DOT cited the redesign of the north end of Carlton Avenue as an example. DOT also plans to implement a Class III bike lane on this stretch of Baltic Street, with "sharrows" to indicate shared road space for cars and bikes.

Not on the agenda: restoring two-way traffic on Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue, which neighborhood advocates have been calling for in addition to the protected bike path. Converting Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue from one- to two-way flow would further reduce speeding and relieve some of the neighborhood's most problematic bottlenecks.

Renderings of the plan, the first on-street path of its kind for New York City, are not yet available. To get a glimpse of what the new path will look like, head over to John Jay High School on Seventh Avenue between 4th and 5th Street in Park Slope. The meeting gets started at 6:30.

How fast do cars travel on Prospect Park West? Criminally fast. All the time. Members of Park Slope Neighbors clocked cars routinely exceeding the 30 mph speed limit -- including one sociopath racing at 65 mph -- during a ten-minute stretch earlier this month. Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue form a one-way pair funneling drivers to and from the free East River bridges and the Prospect Expressway, a configuration that makes for hazardous conditions. Last summer a school bus driver struck and killed cyclist Jonathan Millstein on Eighth Avenue. A few weeks ago a 57-year-old pedestrian was nearly killed a couple of blocks away from the Millstein incident. Parents are afraid to walk with their children across the corridor's dysfunctional intersections. NYPD enforcement is sorely lacking.

In addition to turning these beautiful and historic neighborhood streets into mini-highways, the current design of Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue helps to create a never-ending bottleneck on Union Street below Grand Army Plaza. Because the avenues are one-way, virtually every motorist heading from Park Slope to Grand Army Plaza gets funneled on to Union Street.

Recent adjustments to signal timing haven't solved the speeding problem, so the Neighbors are asking DOT to improve safety by restoring the avenues to two-way traffic flow. You can sign a petition to DOT that also calls for a two-way protected bike path on Prospect Park West and full traffic-calming on both avenues. Here's an intriguing piece of background on the campaign:

This would actually be a "restoration" project, as 8th Avenue was changed from two-way travel to its current one-way northbound configuration on June 10th, 1930 by order of the NYPD -- because they felt there was too much northbound traffic on 8th Avenue's one northbound lane. Rather than switching Prospect Park West to two-way travel (we believe it, too, was originally a two-way street, but have been unable to find conclusive evidence to that effect) to accommodate that traffic, they saddled Park Slope with nearly eight decades of bad road design, which is why we're asking DOT to "Reverse the Curse" and restore the original traffic pattern.

A workshop participant diagrammed these traffic-calming proposals for Bartel Pritchard Square.

On February 7, Brooklyn's Park Slope Civic Council put on a workshop to introduce people to the livable streets "toolkit" and gather ideas for improving the public realm in the neighborhood. As their final report [PDF] explains, "The workshop was aimed explicitly at ordinary citizens, not transportation or planning professionals or members of advocacy groups."

The workshop brought together 50 people from the neighborhood, who mapped out an inventory of 120 "hotspots" of particular concern. Speeding quickly came to the forefront as a detriment to pedestrian safety and quality of life, with Eighth Avenue, Prospect Park West, and Union Street targeted as problem areas.

After completing the report, the Civic Council submitted it to DOT and other city agencies. One immediate benefit has been the improved line of communication between the Civic Council's Livable Streets Committee and the 78th Precinct. Lauri Schindler -- who organized the workshop -- tells us that police often receive mixed messages from communities about how to enforce speeding and other traffic laws. The feedback captured in the report, she explains, opened some eyes: "They were glad to see enforcement issues as considered key in livable streets."

The Civic Council is looking forward to sharing their techniques with other neighborhoods. "Eighth Avenue is a unique location but speeding is not unique," says Schindler. "We want to work with other communities on these shared issues."

If you're interested in mapping the livability of your streets, check out the final report, available on StreetsWiki as well as the Civic Council's site.

My second thought was, "It's not like you didn't know this could happen."

As readers of this Conscious Commuter column will remember, my very first day on a Xootr scooter -- about a year ago -- began with a near back-breaking accident. I realized then that scooters, despite being amazingly fun and really practical transportation devices for short distances, are inherently unstable, especially if you are six foot seven. They are tippy. Although they roll along easily, and are easily steered, small movements up top can tip them backward, forward or to the side. In addition, their tiny wheels can be stopped dead by a small piece of debris or a rock in the road, causing a major spill.

None of this is matters much if you are three and a half feet tall. My four-year-old son Max has no problem, and seems to recover easily from near catastrophic accidents. And if he does go down, it's not that big a deal. But when I went down, it was a much bigger deal.

I thought of all this as I lay on the icy asphalt last Friday morning, in 18-degree weather, waiting for the ambulance to come.

My son Max performed admirably in the crisis. We had been on our way to his school, our usual morning routine: him on his Razor scooter, me on my much larger Xootr. We weren't far from our building, an old converted warehouse in Prospect Heights, when I hit a patch of ice that I failed to notice while rounding a curve. I went down.

Max turned around and came back to see what was wrong. At first he thought I was joking. But then I told him, "Go to the front door of our building, ring our bell, and tell Mama that Papa is hurt and needs her help." He proceeded to do all that. My wife came out and found me. After some consultation, she called the ambulance. It came in about 10 minutes, I would say.

Meanwhile, various people were milling around me. I was beginning to shiver uncontrollably from the cold, and possibly the shock of the accident. People were helpful. Someone collected the contents of my bag. My wife found some neighbors, a couple she barely knew, to walk my son to school. Life is good that way.

Me, I am left to contemplate how you get what you foresee. While I hadn't foreseen a broken hip exactly, I knew I was risking some sort of bad injury by continuing to scooter. But I simply ignored my own foresight. I didn't want to stop. Scootering was fun. It was also a very efficient means of travel for a short distance, say less than two miles. And it was something that I did with my son, together.

Would I do it all again? Will I scooter again? Talk to me in a couple of months, but I'd like to think the answer is "Yes." You have to get back on that old horse and everything. I will certainly be more careful, but I would like to think that scootering would continue to be some part of my life.

As I write this, I'm in bed, my home for the next six weeks. I have three metal pins in my hip which connect the neck of my femur bone to its head. I must keep all weight off of that leg for six weeks. I got out of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope on Wednesday after five days there. While at home, I'm working on my patience, and humility.

I have learned that the 57 year old man is my next door neighbor on 1st Street below 8th Ave. He commutes to work via the IRT. So he would have been walking north on 8th Ave at that time. I learned that he was walking with his daughter and the car was going up Carroll Street very fast. Apparently the car had the green light. Maybe talking with his daughter distracted him? He is in critical condition, but he is not dead.

I came upon the scene around 11:30, and it was still taped off. There was an SUV parked haphazardly on the corner, and its windshield had obviously seen the impact of a human head. I thought it must have been a cyclist: the hood was creased, showing the ascent to the windshield, and the glass had a perfectly concave depression where the head hit.

I asked a detective taking pictures if a cyclist had been hit, and he said no. Then a youngish couple walked over to the car. You could tell by their attitude that they were somehow involved. I asked them, "Is everybody okay?" The man wouldn't make eye contact, and the woman gave me a frozen, tight smile and walked on. I soon learned they were the driver and passenger, and I was told that an old man was hit by them in the intersection. Now, how fast do you have to be going to hit a stationary object that it nearly goes through your windshield? (There was, in fact, an open crescent in the glass.)

I hung around and tried to figure out how it happened. The investigation seemed pretty involved; many 78th Precinct cops and detectives. I asked a beat cop there if the driver would be charged with homicide. "The only way is if the driver is intoxicated," he said. I made a disapproving snort. Then he said out of nowhere, "You see the cyclists around here? They all run red lights all the time. Run right through them."

What I didn't say was, "What the fuck does that have to do with vehicular manslaughter?"

Other than NY1 coverage from Monday, Streetsblog can find no media reports of this collision. If anyone knows of others, please link from comments.

According to accounts surfacing on Brownstoner, witnesses say the sun may have obscured the driver's vision. Is that now a mitigating factor when an SUV is driven fast enough to kill?

No charges have been filed at this time. NYPD provided no further details, saying the investigation is ongoing.

Courtesy of Brownstoner, here's a recent shot of sidewalk construction between Flatbush Avenue and Hanson Place, near the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The short passage -- or slip ramp, as DOT calls it -- allowing cars to turn onto Hanson from Flatbush and Fourth Avenue is now closed to car traffic. This is especially good news for transit riders, who now have fewer vehicle conflicts to worry about as they walk to and from the Atlantic Terminal entrance.

As part of its menu of changes for the area, DOT also converted Hanson Place to two-way traffic flow, a switch that the Brooklyn Paper alarmingly depicts as "wreaking havoc on pedestrians and drivers." Judging by the reaction on Brownstoner, however, pedestrians are clearly grateful for the new conditions.

Earlier this week Transportation Alternatives announced the winners of its "21st Century Street" design competition, selecting three entries from more than a hundred submissions re-imagining the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn.

Juror Michelle de la Uz, director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, listed safety and the pedestrian environment as her top concerns. "That intersection has been the site of significant injuries to pedestrians, and it's screaming for a re-design for all the different users," she said. "What's going on at that intersection is representative of the whole stretch. When you go to Sunset Park, there are four, soon to be five schools along Fourth Avenue. Public safety has to be a priority instead of just moving traffic."

The jury split top honors among three designs:

• Streets for Everyone, by New York-based Rogers Marvel Architects, which features a center median bike path on both streets (shown above in section; plan shown here)
  
• Shared Space, by Steven Nutter of Somerville, Massachusetts (section, plan)
  
• Streets Come Alive, by Philadelphia's Team LEVON, which takes the prize for most pedestrian space (section, plan)

T.A. wants to see the competition's best ideas factor into the city's long-term plans. "A lot of the City's current work is about triage -- bringing paint and asphalt to streets that really need immediate safety fixes," says Wiley Norvell. "The design competition was about leapfrogging ahead of the current generation of street designs to provide much more active and dynamic public spaces. We hope the DOT and City Planning take note of what's been generated."

Lots of drawings after the jump.

Team LEVON's "Streets Come Alive"

Michael Nutter's "Shared Space"

Honorable mention went to Brooklyn's own Mark Anders, whose proposal was well received for deftly allocating space between multiple modes. T.A. staff selected as their favorite "HUMUS = HUMAN," which crams in as much vegetation as possible, capturing copious amounts of stormwater in the process.

Mark Anders' design, shown in plan

"HUMUS = HUMAN"

In one of the wilder entries, Streetsblog technical director Nick Grossman and graphic designer Carly Clark teamed up with landscape architect Wayken Shaw on "The Underpass," which places two basketball courts beneath the F train tracks that cross over Fourth Avenue.

"The Underpass"

Jan Gehl and Enrique Penalosa often talk about the important role that public space plays in a healthy, functioning democracy. I was reminded of that last night as joyous Brooklynites took to the streets for spontaneous celebration following Barack Obama's election victory. This was the scene at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn last night around 1:15 a.m.

By that time I'm guessing there were about 350 people out there chanting "O-BA-MA" and "Yes We Can!" People were cheering and high-fiving the drivers of horn-honking taxis and garbage trucks. Things were festive, conflict-free and traffic was managing to squeeze its way through the intersection without any real problem. Until....

...the NYPD showed up. In their apparently never-ending quest to keep the city safe for vehicular throughput, the cops seemed intent on turning a peaceful, Park Slopey neighborhood celebration into a mini-riot (likewise, over in Williamsburg). If the goal was to keep the streets clear for traffic, the genius officer, above right, didn't help matters when he stopped a limo driver in the middle of the street and wrote him a summons. Another officer cranked up his most obnoxious siren and slowly drove his cruiser into the throng in an apparent attempt to push people back on to the sidewalk. This had the effect of dispersing people into the middle of the intersection and putting an angry edge on the crowd. 

Finally, someone at the precinct used his brain and decided to just cork the four intersections around Fifth and Union, diverting the small amount of late night motor traffic around what had become a kind of spontaneous town square. By 1:30 a.m. the neighborhood's outpouring of democratic fervor was spent and the intersection was once again safe for gypsy cabs and private carting trucks.

Now the good news: DOT is considering changes for the area -- especially the pedestrian crossings -- and the agency's ideas will get a public airing tonight at a presentation to Community Board 2. Community groups are encouraging Brooklynites to show up and share their suggestions. Here are the details:

DOT presentation to CB2 Transportation Committee
Tuesday, October 21, at 6 p.m.
St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights

Photo: Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn

Graphic of crashes and fatalities near Atlantic Terminal, 1995-2005: CrashStat