Enjoying car-free Bedford Ave. during Williamsburg Walks 2008. Photo: acsweet/Flickr

Starting tomorrow, Bedford Avenue from North 4th to North 9th Street will be open to pedestrians only on six Saturdays from noon to sunset. This year's Williamsburg Walks is a project of community residents along with Neighbors Allied for Good Growth and The L Magazine.

Every Sunday in June, Vanderbilt Avenue between Dean Street and Park Place will go car-free from noon to 5 p.m., thanks to the Vanderbilt Avenue Merchants District and the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council.  Says the PHNDC: "There will be music, art and gardening, face painting, sun and trees, shopping, eating and relaxing, biking and performances, and people watching. Plus a few surprises."

Word is there will be plenty more Summer Streets action this year. Stay tuned.

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.

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.

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

A tipster sends along these fresh shots of construction on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. The new pedestrian refuges give the street a geometry very similar to what we saw on Broadway in Williamsburg two weeks ago. Below, the remnants of old trolley tracks get unearthed. We're told the foreman says his crew is having a devil of a time working around the tangle of metal.

Pre-road diet photos of Vanderbilt Avenue can be found here.

The Department of Transportation's plan for pedestrian safety, traffic-calming and bike lane for Park Slope's 9th Street is causing quite a bit of anxiety. Some of this angst, clearly, has been generated due to DOT's failure to bring community stakeholders into the planning process that produced this redesign. But a lot of anxiety over the plan is being generated by misinformation and misunderstanding. Below is an attempt to address some of the questions and comments currently floating around out there. I hope that members of Community Board 6 will read this before casting their vote this evening:

Double-parking fines are not more expensive in a bike lane.
According to the New York City Dept. of Finance web site, the fine for double-parking is $115, bike lane or not. The technical differences between "Stopping," "Standing," and "Double-Parking" make no functional difference. 

The Prospect Park Alliance has not said it is opposed to this plan.
PPS President Tupper Thomas has said that she has concerns about how the 9th Street bike lane connects to Prospect Park's entrances. She doesn't want cyclists riding on the 9th Street pedestrian paths. She wants cyclists using the Park's 15th Street entrance.

DOT's 9th Street plan is not being dropped on the community from out of nowhere.
This plan is a direct response to long-standing community concerns. Ninth Street has long been known as a street with an unusually high number of car crashes. In March 2004 two fifth grade boys were killed by a truck at Third Avenue and 9th Street, generating a major public outcry. In the summer of 2004 a sedan went through the front door of Dizzy's restaurant on 8th Avenue and 9th Street. This incident initiated a public process during which area residents collected nearly 1,200 signatures urging DOT to address 9th Street's pedestrian safety and reckless driving problems. Rather than ignoring the request or installing some street signs and calling it a day, DOT put thought and creativity into the issues raised by the neighborhood and came up with a thorough, detailed plan that will significantly improve pedestrian safety, calm traffic and provide much needed facilities for bicycling.

The organizers of the Dizzy's petition drive do support DOT's plan.
Konrad Kaletsch, the 9th Street resident who organized the 1,200-signature petition drive for pedestrian safety and the owners of Dizzy's Diner, Matheo Pisciotta and Ben Hoen say that DOT's 9th Street plan is consistent with their petition's goal of improving pedestrian safety around the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 9th Street. "The petition was about making the intersection safer," Kaletsch told Streetsblog. "Clearly, a large number of people saw that as a concern. We floated a number of specific ideas for how to make that happen. Now we are looking at DOT's suggestions for how to make this intersection safer. Some of these ideas are different than what we put forward but this plan still fulfills our request to improve safety."

This plan is not likely to create new traffic congestion problems on 9th Street.
As noted on slide 10 of DOT's presentation, 9th Street is designed to be just as wide as Atlantic Avenue yet it carries less than half of the traffic. This creates "excess capacity" which leads to speeding, reckless driving and dangerous left-turns on 9th Street. DOT recently narrowed Vanderbilt Avenue down to one travel lane in each direction with a median in the middle. By most accounts, Prospect Heights residents are very pleased with the results. Vanderbilt carries 19,500 vehicles per day. Ninth Street carries 11,500 vehicles per day. If Vanderbilt can function as a two-lane street, 9th Street certainly can as well.

This plan does not prevent drivers from loading and unloading their cars.
It is important to remember that the bike lanes and medians are just stripes on asphalt. As anyone can readily see, Park Slope's Fifth Avenue bike lanes do not prevent motorists from double-parking to load and unload or from making the occasional u-turn. Like the Third Street bike lane, there will be a 3-foot buffer between the bike lane and the travel lane. On 3rd Street, residents and trucks often park on the buffer to load and unload their cars. This is legal.

This plan does not represent a sudden imposition of cyclists on 9th Street.
Ninth Street has, for years, been a prominent route on the New York City Bike Map and Bicycle Master Plan. It is an important connector between Prospect Park and Red Hook and a number of north-south bike lanes. Park Slope has one of the highest rates of bike commutership in the city according to Transportation Alternatives. These lanes will be a great benefit to many residents of Community Board 6 and will likely encourage more Park Slopers to leave their cars at home and use bikes for local trips.

Putting bike lanes on 9th Street will make cycling safer.
A major study by New York City's Department of Transportation, Public Health and Police suggests that bike lanes -- even just stripes on asphalt -- make cyclists safer. Of the 225 bike fatalities over the past decade, only one took place within a marked bike lane.

The June 2005 cyclist fatality on Fifth Avenue was not caused by the bike lane.
On June 9, 2005 the community suffered a great loss when pro-bono lawyer Elizabeth Padilla was killed at Fifth Avenue and Park Place while biking to work. Some have suggested that the bicycle lane on Fifth Avenue was responsible for her death. In fact, the narrower stretch of Fifth Avenue from Carroll Street to Flatbush Avenue has no bike lane. After Padilla's death activists pushed the DOT hard to install shared-lane bike stencils along this stretch of the avenue. Elizabeth's family was involved in that effort and has expressed appreciation to those who are working to get more bike lanes built in New York City.

If 9th Street has a double-parking problem, there are good ways to solve it.
Ask DOT to put together a curbside management plan. Set aside loading zones in key spots. As in Midtown, set the prices so that they increase every hour, encouraging trucks to load and unload quickly and open up the space for the next vehicle.

The Park Slope Civic Council did not reject this plan.
This is the text of the Civic Council's motion: "The PSCC thanks DOT for its response to Park Slope's August 2004 call for traffic-calming and improved pedestrian safety around the intersection of 8th Avenue and 9th Street after a car crashed through the front door of Dizzy's Diner. However, we request that DOT table its proposal to install a median, left-turn bays and bicycle lanes on 9th Street until the community and the agency have the opportunity to meet and study the plan further. In particular, we urge the DOT to separate the traffic mitigation issues from the proposed bike lanes. We urge DOT to include community stakeholders in planning processes that bring about changes such as this."

This plan is fundamentally about pedestrian safety and traffic-calming.
With all of the attention being focused on the bike lane aspect of this plan it should be emphasized that this plan is fundamentally designed to provide our neighborhood with improved pedestrian safety and traffic-calming.

Additional Links:

• Updated Version of DOT's 9th Street Plan
• Ninth Street Corridor Crash Statistics
• Sketches Showing Current and Proposed Conditions
• Vanderbilt Avenue: The Model for DOT's 9th Street Proposal?
• Who Opposes A Plan for Safer, More Livable Streets and Why?
• Fax in Your Support to Community Board 6

Ninth Street is a very wide street for the number of vehicles that actually use it. Overly wide streets may tend to encourage speeding and create dangerous conditions. On 9th Street we often see these dangers where the left-turning vehicles have to cross two lanes of traffic while keeping an eye on pedestrians in the far-off crosswalk.
Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights had a very similar problem to 9th Street. So, in May 2006 DOT striped a 15-foot wide median with left-turn bays, reducing Vanderbilt to one travel lane in each direction and bringing left-turning cars closer to the crosswalk where the pedestrian conflicts occur.

Many in Prospect Heights will tell you that the Vanderbilt median has helped to calm traffic, make left-turns less dangerous, and foster a safer, more pleasant pedestrian environment. In the future DOT says that it hopes to turn the striped median into a raised, planted median kind of like Park Avenue in Manhattan.

DOT's success on Vanderbilt Avenue is, I believe, the basis for the 9th Street proposal. But no one at DOT is talking very much and these planning processes are done in secret, so who really knows?

Here are some Vanderbilt Avenue before and after photos:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

The view up Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, looking northward. Before Frank Gehry and After. Renderings by Jonathan Cohn, BrooklynViews

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Forest City Ratner's "Atlantic Yards" project in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn was released today. It can be found here on the Empire State Development Corporation's web site.

The release of this detailed, 15-inch thick document starts the sixty-day clock running on the public input process. The Public Hearing on the DEIS has been scheduled for Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at New York City Technical College (Klitgord Auditorium), 285 Jay Street, Brooklyn.

Since this project is circumventing New York City Council and public processes, this hearing may very well be the only opportunity for the public to have a voice on this $4.2 billion, 22-acre development proposal that includes a 19,000-seat arena and 17 high rise buildings.

You may note that the ESDC has scheduled the public hearing for the absolute deadest, dog days of summer. Not surprisingly, Candace Carponter at Develop -- Don't Destroy Brooklyn has something to say about that:

"Releasing this hugely important document and holding a hearing in the heat of summer when community experts and residents are preoccupied with family obligations, vacations, and child care is another sign of this public agency's complete disregard for the public it is supposed to serve. There is simply no reason that the ESDC could not have waited a few weeks to release the DEIS for public review-by both project supporters and opponents- to afford the affected communities a meaningful opportunity to respond."

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods is holding three "DEIS Handbook" workshops to help members of the public understand and participate in the limited public input process.

Tuesday, July 18, 7 pm, Park Slope Methodist Church, 493 8th Street at 6th Avenue.
Thursday, July 20, 7 pm, St. Francis College, Callahan Center, 182 Remsen Street.
Tuesday, July 25, 7 pm, Duryea Presbyterian Church, 362 Sterling Place.

Yesterday, Oder questioned the Empire State Development Corporation's decision to exclude the East River bridge crossings from its public environmental review process.

One huge challenge for the Atlantic Yards project--or any other major development at the crossroads of Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth avenues--involves transportation, and the solution involves citywide issues, not merely project-related fixes. That's why the decision by the Empire State Development Corporation to exclude the East River crossings from the Final Scope of Analysis--the prelude to a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Atlantic Yards project--was so shortsighted, especially since a good chunk of Nets fans are expected to come from New Jersey.

And today, Oder ponders the mystery of how much "interim surface parking" will be included in Forest City's plans for blocks that are not scheduled to be developed for at least another decade.

Missing from Forest City Ratner's latest brochure and the AtlanticYards.com web site is any mention of the two huge interim surface parking lots planned for the Atlantic Yards site, in the north central and southeast blocks of the site, blocks that are later slated for towers and landscaped open space. How big? How many spaces? For whom? For how long? We don't know yet.

Oder's got the questions. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the answers yet:

No one's willing to say much for now.

The plan calls for a new:

• Eastbound bike lane on Willoughby Street between Fort Greene Park and Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick
• Northbound bike lane on Carlton Avenue between Flatbush and Flushing Avenues.
• Southbound bike lane/route on Cumberland Street between Flushing Avenue and Atlantic Avenue.
• Traffic calming on Carlton Avenue between Park and Myrtle Avenues.
• Southbound "reverse-flow" protected bike lane on Carlton Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Streets

Details of the plan can be found in the DOT's press release.

These DOT improvements are commonsense, and input from community members and people who regularly bike on these streets and in this neighborhood will help fine tune the plan.

Meeting details:
Brooklyn Community Board 2 Transportation Committee
Pratt Higgins Hall Auditorium
65 St. James Place (& Lafayette)
Wednesday, June 14, 6pm

If you cannot attend the meeting you can send comment to the DOT's Brooklyn Office:

Borough Commissioner Joseph Palmieri
NYC DOT
16 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11241
Fax: (718) 222-7256