Domenic Recchia: There’s a Place For Bike Lanes, But I’m Not Telling Where
Domenic Recchia says he's not against bike lanes, but here's a helpful tip: When you kill what would be your district's first east-west bike lane and refuse to suggest an alternative, you're against bike lanes. Photo: Tracy Collins via Brownstoner.
“I’m not against bike lanes,” City Council Member Domenic Recchia told the New York Times after forcing DOT to scrap plans for a four-mile painted bike lane along Bay Ridge Parkway two weeks ago. “I believe there’s a place for them.”
I’d like to believe Recchia. After all, there are currently no on-street bike lanes headed east-west between his district and that of Vincent Gentile, Recchia’s partner in crime. To repeat, in all of Sunset Park, Borough Park, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst and Gravesend, there’s not one east-west lane that runs for more than a couple of blocks. I’m sure, therefore, that as soon as Recchia proposes his alternate location, DOT will jump at the opportunity.
Since Recchia scuttled the Bay Ridge Parkway plan, Streetsblog has reached out repeatedly to his office to ask the self-identified bike lane supporter where he’d propose a lane instead. He wouldn’t. All he would say, in full, is: “Bike lanes should be sited based on community input. If my community requests a bike lane, I will be happy to entertain a proposal.”
Perhaps Recchia wouldn’t offer an alternative because articulating what exactly was wrong with the Bay Ridge Parkway lane would be nearly impossible without having to drop the pro-bike pretense.
After all, a DOT presentation on the proposed bike lane [PDF] promised that striping it wouldn’t require taking away a single travel lane or a single parking space. Where space was tighter, the bike lane was to be sacrificed, with sharrows replacing it.
It couldn’t be that the bike lanes would overly constrict motor vehicles. Even with the addition of five-foot bike lanes, moving traffic would have 11-foot lanes in each direction. To put that in perspective, 12-foot lanes are the standard for interstate highways. On Bay Ridge Parkway, an urban street with only one lane in each direction, all that excess room for cars just causes dangerous speeding.
