Streetsblog New York City

Bartel Pritchard Square, at the southern end of the Prospect Park West bike lane, got some bike and pedestrian tweaks this morning, including this new crosswalk. Photo: Philip Winn

Bartel Pritchard Square, at the southwest corner of Prospect Park, received some tweaks this morning, including new and re-striped crosswalks enhancing access to the central space in the middle of the traffic circle. There are also markings to channel traffic as it enters the square, and the short stretch of bike lane between Prospect Park West and Prospect Park Southwest has been more clearly marked as two-way.

More tweaks are on the way, along with a bike lane on 15th Street, according to a DOT staffer at the site who spoke this morning with tipster Philip Winn.

Above, two views of the upgraded zebra crosswalk coming to Bartel Pritchard Square and Prospect Park Southwest. Photos: Philip Winn

Flatbush Avenue and Prospect Place, southeast corner. Photos: Ian Dutton

Thanks to Ian Dutton for these great shots from Flatbush Avenue, where pedestrians are being allotted more space on five side streets from Prospect Park to Atlantic Avenue.

The materials are designed to be temporary, but it’s remarkable what a little paint and plastic can accomplish. According to Ian, crossing distances at Prospect Place and Sterling Place have been reduced by 50 percent. Not bad for a few hours’ work.

Flatbush at Park Place and Carlton Avenue

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A conceptual before-and-after sketch of how the new neckdowns on Flatbush Avenue side streets will look. Image via North Flatbush BID

Ahead of a 2014 capital project that will shorten crossing distances for pedestrians on the stretch of Flatbush Avenue between Grand Army Plaza and Atlantic Avenue, DOT this week is installing temporary sidewalk extensions on side streets at five intersections.

Crews will be painting extensions on Bergen Street, St. Marks Avenue, Prospect Place, Sterling Place and St. Johns Place where those streets intersect with Flatbush, according to a DOT flier. The pedestrian areas don’t extend into the roadbed of Flatbush itself but should calm traffic turning onto the cross streets. The intersection of Carlton Avenue and Park Place will also see an expansion of pedestrian space. In addition to paint, plastic bollards will be installed to delineate the new pedestrian areas.

“Working with the North Flatbush BID, Community Boards, and elected officials, DOT has over the past several years fully repaved the roadway, added pedestrian countdown signals, limited turns for safety, and retimed the signal progression during off-peak hours,” said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6, in an email announcement. The temporary spaces “will set a footprint” for the 2014 improvements, which will include permanent sidewalk extensions and the reconstruction of four triangular parks, Hammerman said.

Efforts to make this stretch of Flatbush Avenue safer have been in the works for several years. More than 200 pedestrians and cyclists were injured, and two cyclists were killed, on Flatbush between Atlantic Avenue and Eighth Avenue from 1995 to 2009, according to Transportation Alternatives’ CrashStat.

Many residents and elected leaders from the neighborhoods near the Barclays Center in Prospect Heights are letting out a sigh of relief after steeling for gridlock this weekend. Sellout crowds for the arena’s first events — three Jay-Z concerts — did not completely overwhelm nearby neighborhoods with traffic, but the strain on local streets was still clear.

Traffic generated by the first events at the Barclays Center was not as heavy as expected, but there are still problems. Photo: Mark Bonifacio/Daily News

“It wasn’t as bad as we expected,” Danae Oratowski, chair of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, told Streetsblog.

Council Member Letitia James said her office was “pleasantly surprised that we did not receive as many complaints as I had anticipated.”

Despite the relative smoothness of the arena’s opening, there were rough spots. Early indications show that the share of event-goers taking transit may not be as high as predicted during the arena’s planning, while free curbside parking on local streets seems to be irresistible to many drivers looking to avoid paying at parking garages and lots. Sidewalk space fell short of what was needed to handle the number of pedestrians, especially when the concerts let out, which led police to close Atlantic Avenue to vehicles in order to accommodate crowds leaving the arena.

After the concerts ended on Friday and Saturday, NYPD barriers proved to be ineffective crowd control, as sidewalks filled up near the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street and along Atlantic Avenue. Presently, there is no crosswalk for people leaving the arena’s mid-block Atlantic Avenue exit. “The sidewalks are too small to accommodate the crowd,” said James.

Traffic management around the arena was supplemented by additional NYPD personnel for opening weekend. “One of the reasons it worked so well is that there were vast numbers of police officers on the streets,” Oratowski said. “I don’t know if that’s really a sustainable plan for the future.”

Not that the traffic management provided by police necessarily improved matters either. NYPD officers waved many drivers through red lights, leading to conflicts with crossing pedestrians and cyclists who had a green light. Safety apparently wasn’t the top priority. 78th Precinct Captain Michael Ameri told the Patch, ”I’m in a good mood because traffic is moving well.”

A large portion of concertgoers got to the event by subway. Turnstile exits at the recently rechristened “Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center” station increased 6,754 in the four hours before the show compared to other Fridays in September, according to MTA data analyzed by WNYC. If all of those additional riders were going to the Barclays Center, they would make up approximately one in three concert attendees at the sold-out 19,000-seat arena.

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Bike racks set up for MS 51's annual Bike-To-School Day are filled with students' wheels.

Based on this picture of rows of temporary bike racks, all filled, it looks like MS 51′s Bike-To-School Day was a big hit (photo via Lara Lebeiko of Bicycle Habitat, which provided volunteers for the event). Escorted rides, or “bike buses,” took students from Sunset Park, Carroll Gardens and Windsor Terrace/Kensington to the Park Slope school and back. During the day, a bike skills and safety course helped teach the students how to ride on their own.

MS 51 has been holding a Bike-To-School Day event since 2010. Check out Streetfilms’ coverage of the school’s first year of festivities here.

But even a coordinated effort to promote biking to school didn’t eliminate one of the most persistent perils on the route to MS 51. In the morning, Fifth Avenue is a mess of double-parked parents dropping off their kids out in front of school. The bike lane in front of the school is routinely impassible, and today was no exception, as the below photo from Streetsblog reader Car Free Nation illustrates.

It’s great to see a city school promoting cycling to its students. To keep them riding, though, it looks like the city needs some traffic enforcement.

Double-parked cars block the Fifth Avenue bike lane before school starts.

DOT construction crews were out today building concrete pedestrian islands along the Prospect Park West bike lane. Image: OasisNY via Flickr.

Somehow we doubt it’s going to make Iris Weinshall, Norm Steisel and Louise Hainline feel any better (what with the threat of another lawsuit), but construction is now underway on pedestrian islands along the Prospect Park West bike lane.

Image: NYC DOT via Brooklyn Paper

Once complete, the islands will provide easier crossings for pedestrians — who have already benefited from shorter crossing distances and calmer traffic — and additional beautification and greenery to the street.

Those improvements, which were unanimously approved by the local community board, should allay the concerns of those who criticized the lane for its aesthetic impact on the street and its supposed deleterious effect on pedestrian safety (claims that, again, were baseless to begin with). Renderings show street trees planted in the islands, which would help protect cyclists in the two-way lane.

It’s also a bit more difficult to rip concrete out of the ground than to take away a bike lane made only of paint.

For more construction shots, head below the fold or to this Flickr album.

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Image: NYC DOT (PDF)

NYC DOT presented plans last night for an un-protected two-way bike lane on Plaza Street, which would enhance a critical hub in the Brooklyn bike network by defining space for contraflow riding, but fall short of providing safe cycling infrastructure for all ages. The transportation committee of Community Board 6 voted in favor of the project as a first step toward implementing a fully protected bikeway, along the lines of what DOT first presented for Plaza Street in 2010. Update: The Community Board 8 transportation committee endorsed the plan unanimously, “requesting that DOT continue to look into further pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures,” said vice-chair Rob Witherwax.

The upgrade to the Plaza Street bike lane will help connect several important spokes in the Brooklyn bike network but won't provide physical protection.

Plaza Street currently has a one-way buffered lane; with other bike routes extending from Grand Army Plaza in every direction, the new contraflow lane will be a significant upgrade in terms of connecting gaps in the bike network.

Without physical protection, though, the project won’t pack the same punch as the nearby Prospect Park West bike lane, the gold standard for safe, all-ages cycling infrastructure in NYC. As more than one parent pointed out at the meeting, biking is an increasingly popular transportation option for kids and families getting to Prospect Park, and incursion by vehicle traffic and double parkers will limit the safety of the Plaza Street lane for young riders. The project, which doesn’t touch the number of parking spaces on Plaza Street, also won’t provide new walking connections to the Grand Army Plaza berms, which are currently sealed off to pedestrians by parked cars at several cross streets.

“I commend the Department of Transportation for putting forth this new design, which will greatly improve cycling connections around Grand Army Plaza, shaving several minutes off travel times by creating more direct access to adjacent bike lanes,” said Eric McClure of Park Slope Neighbors, who’s also a member of the CB 6 transportation committee. “Given the frequency with which impatient and, frankly, law-breaking drivers encroach on the existing Plaza Street bike lanes, however, I hope that DOT will continue to look at ways to better protect cyclists, including some sort of physical separation.”

The DOT presentation isn’t online as of this writing (update: now it’s online — check out the PDF), but here’s how the street would be laid out, starting from the berm-side:

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A quick reminder: Tonight’s meeting of the Brooklyn Community Board 6 transportation committee is an important one, with DOT presenting its proposal for a two-way bike lane on Plaza Street. The public is invited to participate in the meeting, so if you want to weigh in on this upgrade to the Brooklyn bike network and whether it should be protected from traffic with a row of parked cars, tonight’s your chance.

Also on the agenda tonight is a proposal to fill in a one-block gap in the Third Street bike lane between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue, and — in what seems to be an increasingly common item in the DOT toolkit — on-street bike parking for the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue by Park Place.

The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. at 1 Prospect Park West, in the Turner Room.

The NYPD has never hesitated to park in the city's bike lanes (this van was parked on the Bowery last summer). Photo: Ben Fried

We at Streetsblog aren’t big fans of sidewalk bike riding. As we’ve said before, if the police truly must take time away from targeting the most dangerous traffic crimes, like motorist speeding and failure-to-yield, sidewalk riding is the kind of infraction for them to worry about. Pedestrian space is scarce enough in New York City.

But that doesn’t excuse this story of entrepreneurial police work out of Park Slope.

Last Friday, at least two separate cyclists were ticketed for traveling a couple car lengths on the sidewalk of 3rd Street, between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Why were they on the sidewalk? To get around the police car blocking the bike lane, the vehicle of the very same officer doing the ticketing.

Makalé Faber-Cullen was riding home from work at around 6:00 p.m. when she hit a traffic jam on 3rd. A police car was parked in the bike lane. Cars had enough room to go around it, but not easily, and Faber-Cullen said she didn’t feel safe entering the queue of tightly-packed drivers. “There really wasn’t a passage through,” she explained, “so I went on the sidewalk for maybe 20 or 30 feet, just to go around the police car. I got back on the bike lane right after that.”

After re-entering the bike lane, however, the police officer called out to her, asked for her ID, and slapped her with a summons for riding on the sidewalk. Faber-Cullen said she’d felt a bit sheepish about making the mistake of not walking her bike the short distance, until she caught up with a family of three — two parents and a three-year-old — also on their bikes, and started speaking with the father.

“He said he’d been gotten by the same officer five minutes ago,” said Faber-Cullen. “It was infuriating.”

Pulling over a cyclist for riding on the sidewalk is one thing. Parking in the bike lane and waiting until someone inevitably goes the wrong way around? That’s another story. There wasn’t any public safety problem until the officer arrived on the scene.

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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.