Streetsblog New York City

A few readers have written to Streetsblog with anecdotal evidence that NYPD is ramping up its crack bicycle ticketing operation this January. (It seems to be triggered by the calendar; last year’s NYPD bike crackdown also got going in January.)

Police are certainly reviving their tough-on-cyclists PR campaign, bragging to the Post earlier this week about the 19th Precinct’s bike enforcement prowess on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, the message to motorists remains the same: If you’re sober and stay at the scene, you can do just about anything, like run over and kill a 12-year-old girl who stopped in a crosswalk to retrieve her backpack, and not face repercussions.

By leaking their cyclist summonsing stats to the Post, the police at least made it a little easier to highlight their skewed priorities. As reader Chris O’Leary pointed out this morning, the 19th Precinct issued 2,436 tickets for failing to stop at traffic signals in 2011 [PDF]. Apparently, nearly half of those tickets — 1,101, according to the Post — were handed out to cyclists.

Police are devoting all these resources to cyclist enforcement on streets where disproportionate numbers of New Yorkers get maimed by motor vehicles. Community District 8, which roughly overlaps the 19th Precinct on the Upper East Side, has the third-highest rate of injury-causing traffic crashes in the city.

Here’s what the precinct’s enforcement priorities look like out on the street, according to an account from reader Albert Ahronheim:

At about 1:50 on the afternoon of January 7, as I was walking on First Avenue by 81st Street, I noticed four police “three-wheeled scooters” and four police motorcycles completely straddling the bicycle lane, and eight police milling around, a couple of them writing, most just gabbing and laughing, while there were plenty of empty parking spaces they could have easily moved into. At least one cyclist I saw had to veer out into car traffic to get around what seemed to be a completely unnecessary blockage of basically a whole block. But a run-of-the-mill police blockage of the bike lane isn’t why I’m writing.

I was standing around trying to get up the nerve to ask eight cops to vacate the bike lane as long as whatever threat was over, when an elderly man with a walker, who’d been watching also, started talking to me. He told me that all these police were “just to give a ticket to a bicyclist.”  I asked him if he knew what the cyclist had been ticketed for, and he said he didn’t know — he just saw him ride away afterwards. The man with the walker told me, “I don’t care what he was doing, it takes so many cops just to give a cyclist a ticket?” When he mentioned all the real mayhem on the streets, I told him how NYPD routinely lets motorists kill without filing charges, and he wholeheartedly agreed that they’re failing to protect people.

So then I went up to one of the cops and politely asked what all the excitement was about. He paused, like he was trying to figure out how to tell me just enough to satisfy me, and said, “Uh, we just had somebody stopped — that’s about it.” Then I said, “It would be great if they’d not be blocking the bike lane if nothing is going on,” to which he politely replied, “We’ll be done in a few minutes and be out of your way.”  Only later did I realize that, since I wasn’t on a bicycle at the time and had just gone around a car and walked up to him from the curb, he must have thought I was a driver who needed to get through the bike lane and out of a parking space. After a couple more minutes they all drove away.

Manhattan Community Board 8 has a checkered history when it comes to bike-friendly policies. In the past few years, the Upper East Side CB voted repeatedly to support protected bike lanes, but also put out resolutions drenched with anti-bike vitriol on more than one occasion (most recently this June, when the subject was establishing shared bike-ped paths across Central Park).

Last night the board’s transportation committee heard from NYC DOT about the city’s bike-share plans, and apparently it was a drama-free affair.

Streetsblog reader Steve Vaccaro (also our attorney in the FOIL case seeking documents from opponents of the PPW bike lane) sends this recap:

On bike-share, a CB8 member who adamantly opposed the proposal for cross-park shared bike/ped paths four months ago expressed no hostility, asking if the bikes would have enough cargo room for all her things, and if DOT would consider including three-wheelers in the bike-share program to better accommodate seniors.

The co-chair of the transpo committee, Jonathan Horn, who also opposed the cross-park bike path reso at the full board, expressed no opposition to bike-share and helped explain that the CB would have an opportunity to select exactly where the stations would go, subject to the DOT’s overall density requirements and safety restrictions.

Read more…

Fifth Ave. and 65th St., where a tow truck driver killed an 86-year-old pedestrian while she was in the crosswalk yesterday. Image: Google.

A tow truck driver struck and killed an 86-year-old woman walking on the Upper East Side yesterday morning. The driver was turning left from Fifth Avenue onto 65th Street at 9:30 a.m. when he hit the victim, who was walking north in the crosswalk, according to the NYPD.

An NYPD spokesperson said that “no criminality is suspected at this time” but that the investigation is still ongoing. Police did not have any further information about who had the right of way, but the known circumstances strongly suggest that the driver failed to yield to the victim while she had a walk signal.

The Second Avenue bike lane in the East Village. Photo: DNAInfo

Last night, the full board of Manhattan Community Board 8 voted in favor of building a protected bike lane on First Avenue between 60th Street and 96th Street.

Once construction is finished, the lane will be one segment of a complete street running from Houston to 125th with Select Bus Service, protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands (though the cyclist protection and pedestrian islands disappear near the Queensboro Bridge). On the Upper East Side, the Second Avenue lane will be on hold until subway construction is complete, but the First Avenue lane could be in place as early as this fall. In East Harlem, construction will start on Second Avenue next spring.

CB 8 approved the project by a vote of 20-11-1. That total masks the closeness of the vote, however. According to community board member Scott Falk, with two people left to vote the total stood at 16-13-1. Since resolutions need more than half of all voters to support them to pass, had both those two people voted no, the resolution would have failed. Neither did, though, and once the resolution had passed, two nays switched their votes to join the winning side.

The biggest issue was how the bike lane would affect local businesses’ ability to make deliveries, said Falk. “This was going to force triple parking, as they put it.” That argument was ultimately defeated by an appeal to the life-saving effects of protected bike lanes. Said Falk, “This isn’t about bicycles. It’s about safety by design.”

The transportation committee of CB 8 voted to upgrade the buffered bike lane on First Avenue, here blocked by a line of trucks, to a parking protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly via Flickr.

On the Upper East Side, community board members are willing to vote for safer streets, so long as they can vent about cyclists beforehand.

After a discussion that emphasized bad bike behavior, the transportation committee of Community Board 8 voted 9-2, with one abstention, to support the construction of a protected bike lane on First Avenue from 60th Street to 96th Street.

Above 72nd Street, First Avenue already has a buffered bike lane. Upgrading to a protected lane requires only that DOT flip the lanes for bikes and parking, while maintaining existing lanes for drivers. Between 60th and 72nd, though, there isn’t any bike lane at all. Filling that gap between the shared lane through Midtown and the buffered lane further north would be DOT’s top construction priority, said Ryan Russo, DOT assistant commissioner for traffic management. Construction could start as early as this fall.

DOT is neither building nor presenting plans for a new bike lane on Second Avenue, and won’t until Second Avenue Subway construction is complete years from now. Even in the few blocks below the construction zone, where DOT had originally planned to paint a shared lane, Russo said the combination of subway and water tunnel construction meant that no changes would be made.

To some extent, the limited scope of the redesign contributed to the committee’s endorsement. “I see 72nd to 96th Street as a no-brainer,” said committee co-chair Jonathan Horn. “There’s already a bike lane there. We’re trading a few parking spaces to get pedestrian islands which shorten the crossing for seniors and other people.” A 2009 resolution from the community board said that if bike lanes were to be built on the Upper East Side, they should be protected lanes.

Even so, for many committee members, the idea of drawing more cyclists to the neighborhood was tough to tolerate. “Unless you enforce the laws and make the penalties enough to deter people from doing what they’re currently doing, you should not be encouraging bicycling,” said board member Elizabeth Ashby.

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After over a year of protests from residents and electeds clamoring for safer streets, next week DOT will present its proposal for extending the First and Second Avenue bike lanes north to 125th Street. The presentations will mark the second time around the community board circuit for bike-ped safety plans on those streets, which were approved by local CBs in 2010 but put on hold soon after.

Last November, Council Member Melissa Mark Viverito, backed by State Senator Jose Serrano and Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, helped deliver 2,500 handwritten letters to City Hall asking for protected bike lanes up to 125th Street. Photo: Noah Kazis

Presentations will be made on Tuesday the 6th and Wednesday the 7th to the transportation committees of Community Boards 11 and 8, respectively. If you walk or bike on the East Side, these will be can’t-miss meetings. Votes in favor of the project next week would lead to construction next year.

Between 1998 and 2008, nearly 4,900 pedestrians and cyclists were injured or killed on First and Second between Houston and 125th, according to the New York State Department of Transportation. Almost three-fourths of the incidents occurred between 34th and 125th streets.

Some background: In 2010 the city unveiled a comprehensive plan for improved bus, pedestrian and cyclist facilities on First and Second from Houston to 125th Street, including protected bike lanes on Second between 100th and 125th, and on First between 34th and 49th and between 57th and 125th, with a buffered lane in the gap. CB 6, CB 8, and CB 11 all voted for redesigns including protected bike lanes that spring.

Residents and officials — particularly in East Harlem, with its high cyclist count and hazardous conditions for walking and biking — were incensed when they later learned that work north of 34th Street would be delayed indefinitely. This April, progress was accompanied by further uncertainty when DOT announced plans to extend bike lanes on First and Second up to 57th Street in 2011.

Now that it looks like the rest of the project is moving forward, it’s crucial that supporters make their voices heard — particularly in District 8, where the concept of reallocating street space can always be contentious. Times and locations for the meetings are here and here. We’ll have more next week.

Manhattan Community Board 8 voted Wednesday night in favor of a car-free Central Park trial this summer, joining an increasingly long list of community boards in support of the proposal. My unofficial tally of the roll call had the final vote at 36-8 in favor.

The car-free park trial has picked up committee votes at no fewer than seven community boards, as well as full board votes from CB 7, CB 5, and CB 9 (we’ll have more on the CB 9 vote later today). So far, the proposal seems to be on track to pick up an overwhelming show of public support from the districts surrounding the park, which will be needed to have a shot at overcoming Mayor Bloomberg’s opposition.

The CB 8 vote, which comes from a district bordering the park on the Upper East Side, is notable because the board has reverted to displaying one of the more virulently anti-bike stances in the city, and any proposal perceived to benefit cyclists must overcome a certain level of ingrained resistance.

Board member Michelle Birnbaum is probably the most consistently vocal opponent of bike and pedestrian improvements on CB 8. At a recent transportation committee meeting, she objected to the installation of marked crosswalks and pedestrian signals at an approach to the East River esplanade that crosses underneath the FDR Drive at 96th Street, saying that devices like advance-stop bars would cause traffic to back up too far on the highway service road, and that the city can’t put “plazas and umbrellas” everywhere.

Birnbaum was the only CB 8 member to speak against the car-free park proposal Wednesday night, which was introduced by transportation committee co-chair Jonathan Horn as “another proposal about Central Park and bicycles,” following the board’s vote against shared bike-ped paths across the park (more on that below).

Some highlights from Birnbaum’s unsuccessful attempt to sway the board against the car-free trial:

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Residents of the Upper East Side, fed up with reckless drivers and reeling from recent pedestrian deaths, took advantage of an opportunity to make their case directly to NYPD this week.

At a Monday night meeting of the 19th Precinct community council, reports DNAinfo, locals spoke of being afraid to cross the street, and asked why new vulnerable user laws were not being applied in the cases of Jason King and Laurence Renard.

“Careless drivers are killing people in this neighborhood on a monthly basis,” said Erin Lamberty. “If we’re going to teach drivers to slow down and use care, we need to charge VTL Section 1146 [the section incorporating Elle's Law and Hayley and Diego's Law] in every case of negligent injury or death of a pedestrian or cyclist.”

Yesterday it was reported that, following an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the urging of Assembly Member Micah Kellner and state Senator Liz Krueger, the dump truck driver who backed over King last December in pursuit of a parking spot has been charged with violating Section 1146.

At the precinct meeting, Vance pointed out that Section 1146 is enforced by the NYPD and the Department of Motor Vehicles by way of traffic summonses and does not fall under the purview of the district attorney, except in cases of repeat offenders. Although the district attorney investigates crashes that kill or seriously injure, the ultimate decision to charge under Section 1146 is made by NYPD. “If you had found criminal misconduct it wouldn’t be Elle’s Law that we would use,” Vance said. “It would be vehicular manslaughter or vehicular misconduct.”

Deputy Inspector Matthew Whelan, meanwhile, said crash investigations are handled by NYPD Highway Patrol, not officers of the precinct. Steve Vaccaro, who heads Transportation Alternatives’ East Side committee, said he hoped to clear up confusion regarding the new laws through a joint meeting with the 19th Precinct and Highway Patrol.

East Siders may not be getting the answers they want yet, but if nothing else, you can bet their presence on Monday was duly noted. Community council meetings — every precinct has one most every month — offer citizens a rare direct audience with NYPD decision-makers and other higher-ups (like Vance, whose presence was a surprise to attendees). In my experience, council members and state legislators are often in attendance. I have also seen that people who show up for these meetings get results.

Another benefit: Normally, police hear a lot of complaints about cyclist transgressions and requests for more bike enforcement at these meetings. The street safety advocates who appeared on Monday were able to focus the attention of the officers — and the regular participants in the community council — on the dangers posed by deadly driving.

A template to prioritize walking, biking, and transit at the intersection of Third Avenue and 117th Street. Image: Transportation Alternatives

Earlier this week, Laurence Renard was killed as she crossed First Avenue when a dump truck driver turned into her path from 90th Street, hitting her from behind. Renard was one of at least six pedestrians and cyclists who have lost their lives in traffic crashes on East Side streets since last August.

People are seriously hurt and killed with terrible frequency on the East Side of Manhattan: 148 pedestrians and cyclists died on its streets between 1995 and 2008, and more than 15,000 were injured. The area is rife with wide streets and intersections that invite speeding and reckless driving. At the same time, the East Side is home to high percentages of walk-to-work commuters, car-free households, and senior citizens. East Siders lead walkable lifestyles and make many trips by foot or bike, but their streets are extremely dangerous.

Last night, more than 100 people gathered at St. Mark’s Church on East 10th Street for the unveiling of Transportation Alternatives’ East Side Action Plan [PDF], which outlines a broad vision for making this part of Manhattan safer and more livable.

In a series of public workshops, more than 600 East Siders helped TA put together recommendations to redesign their streets and put walking, biking, and transit first. The Action Plan came out of those workshops to serve as “a tool for local East Side experts to use as citizen planners, so they can educate their communities and generate the local support needed to engage decision makers around design and policy change,” said TA’s Julia De Martini Day. Dozens of community groups from Chinatown to Harlem have signed on to the campaign.

With political attacks on pedestrian and bicycle improvements fresh in everyone’s mind, the kick-off event last night was something of a rallying cry for the coalition. New Yorkers who want safer streets have to organize and mobilize as effectively as possible, a point that former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa brought home when he told the audience that the allocation of street space “is a political decision, not a technical decision.”

Read more…

Photo: DNAinfo/Jennifer Glickel

A dump truck driver hit and killed a 21-year-old man on the Upper East Side this morning at 6:06 a.m. The driver was traveling north on Madison Avenue when he realized he had passed his destination near 81st Street, according to the NYPD. He then put the truck in reverse, said police, and began to back up. The truck then hit the victim, who was crossing Madison, and killed him.

According to a report on DNAinfo, the pedestrian was in the crosswalk when the truck driver backed into him and dragged him for thirty feet before stopping. All this took place across the street from an elementary school.

DNAinfo reports that a summons may be issued, but the police apparently do not intend to file charges. The NYPD told Streetsblog that “no criminality is suspected at this time.”

The recently enacted Elle’s Law was passed in order to keep drivers who recklessly endanger and injure pedestrians from getting back behind the wheel. Three-year-old Elle Vandenberghe was left severely brain-damaged last year when an Upper East Side driver spotted a parking space and backed up through the crosswalk where the toddler was walking. In addition to using Elle’s Law or filing a steeper charge like criminal negligence, another option for police and prosecutors would be to charge the driver with careless driving under Hayley and Diego’s Law, which also passed this year in an attempt to hold drivers accountable for injuring pedestrians or cyclists. We have a call in with Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s office to see if he’ll use the legal tools at his disposal.