When Scott Stringer held his first transportation conference five years ago, streets like this didn't exist in NYC. Photo of First Avenue: NYC DOT

Times have changed since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer hosted a conference on transportation reform in 2006. Five years ago, New York City appeared to be on the verge of shaking off the traffic-first approach to street engineering that had dominated city transportation policy for decades. Whispers were in the air about a push to tame city traffic and fund the transit system by putting a price on congestion-plagued streets. Since then, plenty of innovation has come to NYC streets, while traffic congestion and transit funding remain core challenges.

Last Friday, Stringer’s office organized a sequel, providing an opportunity to take stock of the last five years and recalibrate the transportation reform agenda going forward.

As it happened, former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall made brief remarks at the outset of the event, hosted at John Jay College, in her capacity as a vice chancellor of CUNY. The moment was ripe with irony. Five years ago, then-commissioner Weinshall made a splash at the first Stringer transportation conference, calling for bus rapid transit, parking reform, safe routes to schools, and new public spaces. In the past two years, Weinshall’s dogged attempts to eradicate the Prospect Park West protected bike lane have, if nothing else, underscored why she had to leave the department before progress could be achieved on all the promises she made in 2006.

On Friday morning, the stage belonged to her successor, Janette Sadik-Khan, who highlighted DOT’s long list of achievements and innovations:

• Select Bus Service: Though the roll-out has been slower than originally anticipated and true bus rapid transit has eluded NYC DOT and the MTA, NYC now has three operating corridors of Select Bus Service, including 34th Street and First and Second Avenues in Manhattan and on Fordham Road in the Bronx, improving transit for tens of thousands of riders each day and attracting thousands more.
• Bicycling: In 2006, the city promised to add 200 new miles of bike lanes, a pledge that has since been fulfilled and surpassed. Now New York sets its sights not only on advancing the number of bike lane miles, but creating innovative street designs that lead the nation in making cycling accessible to a wide array of city residents.
• Parking: The DOT has piloted Park Smart, time-of-day variable pricing for parking spots in Park Slope and Greenwich Village and is on its way to expanding it into other parts of the city.
• Safe routes to schools: The city has a robust program to improve safety near 135 schools in all five boroughs.
• Public plazas: The big public space news of 2006 was that the city would add a ribbon of pedestrian space to the Times Square bowtie. No one could have predicted the city would add substantial public plazas at Times Square and Herald Square by reclaiming lanes from traffic.

For all the reasons to celebrate the progress on NYC streets, the conference also provided some sobering perspective on the state of the transit system.

Stringer focused on the high price of MTA capital construction – what former MTA Charman Jay Walder dubbed “the MTA premium” on construction costs compared to other world cities. New York suffers from a much higher cost per mile for expanding its subway network – nearly quadruple the cost of subway expansion in London and more than five times as expensive as in Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.

The borough president pointed to costly work rules and excessive regulation as causes. He also mentioned that not knowing the location of underground utility lines has slowed the Second Avenue Subway and driven up costs.

Stringer proposed an “underground census” that would help capital construction stay on time and under budget by using all our available technology to map the city’s entire subsurface infrastructure network. He claimed such a tool would have saved $80 million on the Second Avenue Subway project. Unfortunately, given the project’s multi-billion dollar pricetag, even $80 million amounts to a drop in the bucket.

Former Port Authority chief Chris Ward – always known as a frank pragmatist – could truly speak his mind, having left his post earlier this fall. He focused on the continued irrationality of New York’s road pricing and the failure to properly fund infrastructure, saying that the region is not going to get anywhere without tolling the East River bridges and developing a more general tolling structure that reflects when and how people use crossings. Crossing the Tappen Zee Bridge during the times of day when traffic moves freely should cost less than driving across the Brooklyn Bridge into the most congested part of the region. According to Ward, we need to assess user fees to reinvest in our infrastructure.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agreed. “Someday we’ll have to move to a system of congestion pricing or bridge tolls. It’s politically very hard but it makes extremely rational sense as a source of funding,” he said, while adding that right now is a very difficult time to be talking about taxes or new revenues.

Albany’s failure to enact congestion pricing or bridge tolls has put transit advocates in a very hard place. Without those revenue streams, the MTA will have to borrow vast sums to pay for its current capital program — a lose-lose proposition. While on the one hand increased borrowing means that the pressure on the fare is only going to go up in the future, on the other hand rejecting borrowing means cutbacks in the capital program that would send the system back to the days of frequent train breakdowns and crumbling stations, said Russianoff.

After several rounds of fare hikes and service cuts in the past five years, there is a consensus that transit funding is the primary transportation issue New York City needs to face. What will it take to celebrate progress on that challenge when the next borough president’s transportation conference rolls around in 2016?

Former deputy mayor Norman Steisel and former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall both leaned on contacts at NYC's major dailies to amplify their message and give coverage a slant that benefited their campaign to get rid of the PPW bike lane.

One of the defining elements of the Prospect Park West bike lane saga was the inordinate amount of media attention it received. For months, this one short stretch of pavement in Brooklyn ignited coverage from just about every New York City broadsheet, tabloid, evening news broadcast, and glossy magazine. Everyone kept talking about it — even the British press.

NBBL could count on New York Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo and CBS 2 political correspondent Marcia Kramer to advance their agenda.

To be fair, it had all the elements of a great story, like a former transportation commissioner attacking her successor, and a United States senator meddling in a hyper-local issue in his backyard. But most of the time, that’s not what the coverage was about. The outlets that covered the bike lane the most — especially the tabloid opinion pages and CBS 2 News — had a knack for amplifying the arguments of bike lane opponents while glossing over the political maneuvering and ignoring facts that ran counter to the story NBBL wanted to tell.

Documents obtained by Streetsblog via freedom of information request reveal that leading bike lane opponents Iris Weinshall and Norman Steisel used their connections in the local press to shape coverage (months before NBBL hired a PR firm to work the media in a more conventional manner). What’s remarkable isn’t so much that they tried to spin the press, but how successful they were. Time after time, papers printed material that made NBBL happy, even when it warped what really happened or was easily disproved.

NBBL Had Friends at NYC’s Three Major Dailies

Weinshall, the former DOT commissioner and wife of Senator Chuck Schumer, and Steisel, the former deputy mayor under David Dinkins, repeatedly used their media connections to shape coverage of the bike lane dispute.

After bike lane supporters and NBBL held dueling rallies on October 21, 2010, for example, Weinshall reached out to New York Daily News transit reporter Pete Donohue. He informed her that the paper’s Brooklyn bureau had covered the rally. “Ok…. but they are pro bike….. not objective!” complained Weinshall.

After predicting that both sides would be represented in the paper’s coverage, Donohue offered to help Weinshall. “I’ll email my editor to make sure there’s a few kicks at the freewheelers in there!” he wrote. Despite the fact that the pro-bike lane rally outnumbered the opponents 5 to 1, the only participant quoted the next day opposed the bike lane. Donohue has not returned Streetsblog’s inquiry about whether he really intervened on Weinshall’s behalf or was simply humoring her.

(Update: Donohue denies doing a favor for Weinshall and says he deleted Streetsblog’s email seeking comment without opening it because the subject line (“Prospect Park West Bike Lane Coverage”) was vague and didn’t pertain to his beat. “Of course I didn’t suggest slanting an article favorable to Iris,” he said. “To suggest that I was part of some grand conspiracy against bike lanes is silly and I would have told you so.”)

Weinshall also helped bike lane opponents get a letter to the editor questioning the safety benefits of the PPW redesign published in the New York Times. On December 17, 2010, Steisel emailed NBBL leaders, worried that he hadn’t heard any response from the Times about their letter. Weinshall offered to call someone at the newspaper to promote it.

“Called my contact at New York Times… she said she would see what she could do,” Weinshall reported the following day. Two days later, the Times told Steisel that his letter had been accepted.

Steisel also marshaled connections to the city’s press corps in support of his cause. Based on the documents Streetsblog obtained, his most valuable contact was on the Daily News editorial board.

“Just spoke with mike aronson guy who wrote editorial,” wrote Steisel in an e-mail last December, right after James Vacca’s transportation committee held a bike policy hearing, instigated in part by NBBL, that put him front and center. “His asst bev calling me, probably mon, to go over materials i sent, docs that he said upon his quick perusal looked intriguingly promising for their further opining.”

The following day, the Daily News published an editorial twisting an exchange from the hearing between Vacca and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The DOT chief had told Vacca that the agency measured a 63 percent increase in cycling in recent years, but didn’t have a measurement of the total number of daily NYC bike riders. This is wholly unremarkable given that NYC bike traffic is measured much the same way as motor vehicle traffic — by tallying vehicles at specific locations, which provides a basis for year-over-year comparison but not a single citywide traffic count. However, with an assist from Vacca’s showboating performance at the hearing (“I would think that question is one you could answer now”), the paper’s opinion writers managed to turn Sadik-Khan’s reply into an indictment of DOT data collection.

Later that month, Steisel told NBBL leaders that the Daily News would “continue beating the drum” for them. And in fact the Daily News editorial page proceeded to publish much more “further opining,” writing at least four other pieces that echoed NBBL talking points about bike lanes and berated the city over the Prospect Park West redesign.

1. In February, the paper ran a piece demanding that Sadik-Khan “reveal where she proposes to put the next batch of cycling corridors.” The paper ignored the fact that DOT already presents bike lane projects to community boards. The piece also contained several factual errors. But it was perfectly aligned with Steisel’s agenda: to hamper bike projects under the guise of calling for additional planning. The next week, Steisel sent a letter to Vacca trying to win support for the idea of a “citywide planning process” that would entangle bike projects in red tape.
2. In March, immediately after NBBL filed their lawsuit against the city, the Daily News ran an opinion piece lifting allegations directly from the complaint and accusing DOT of using “shaky math” to evaluate the bike lane. If the paper had bothered with the pesky matter of checking facts, they might have discovered that DOT measured the effect of the redesign the way street safety experts say it should be done, and that NBBL based its attacks on a dataset that NBBL themselves cherrypicked and manipulated.
3. When Brooklyn CB 6 unanimously approved a DOT plan to add concrete pedestrian refuges to PPW this April, the Daily News made it out to be a desperate attempt to avoid “open revolt” against the bike lane. The paper failed to mention the survey released earlier the same month that found a 3-2 margin of support for the redesign among local residents.
4. When the lawsuit was dismissed in August, the Daily News spun the decision as vindication for NBBL and repeated the group’s major talking points one more time for good measure.

In the past year, the Daily News editorial page ran several other pieces attacking Sadik-Khan and signature NYC DOT projects for buses, bikes, and pedestrians, including multiple opinions undermining 34th Street transit improvements and an epic four-part series blaming Sadik-Khan for bike-ped conflicts arising from construction work on the Manhattan Bridge.

Steisel’s other tabloid press contact was none other than New York Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo. Cuozzo has authored several diatribes against new pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, and Steisel apparently had his ear.

In the same December 30, 2010 email in which Steisel said the Daily News would “continue beating the drum” for NBBL, he described an exchange with Cuozzo. The message implied that Steisel fed information to Cuozzo for a column antagonizing the city for plowing bike lanes after the Christmas blizzard. In the email, Steisel says NBBL “may have unintentionally overstated the amt of snow clearing” and that Cuozzo “modified his initial submission” in response.

Marcia Kramer, “Honorary Member of NBBL”

Photo: CityFile

Marcia Kramer can keep a straight face while arguing that the Second Avenue bike lane exposes the Israeli consulate to the risk of terrorist attacks. It’s no secret that she’s long since stopped striving for objectivity.

Even so, it’s striking to see just how political CBS 2′s “chief political correspondent” really is. According to communications obtained by Streetsblog, she really wants to see the city’s bike lanes, plazas and pedestrian refuge islands gone and is teeing up politicians to achieve her goals.

In January, Kramer was preparing a story on the Prospect Park West bike lane, her third in one year. She reached out to NBBL president Louise Hainline for an interview and after they worked out some logistics, Hainline thanked Kramer for her continued support.

In response, Kramer revealed the motivation behind her sloppy, error-riddled reporting. “Press attention will force a public hearing especially after the snow debacle,” she wrote. Advocacy journalism at its finest.

Kramer’s efforts earned her some lofty accolades. “Thanks from all in NBBL for helping us fight the evil empire,” wrote Hainline after Kramer’s Prospect Park West piece aired. “We’re making you an honorary member of NBBL (in secret — I know you have to preserve your status as an objective reporter).”

For a few months in the beginning of 2011, hardly a day went by without some political figure or media pundit inveighing against bike lanes and the Department of Transportation. The attackers ran the gamut from Staten Island Republicans to Democrats holding citywide office, from tabloid editorial boards to columnists for highbrow glossy mags. The story swirling in the middle of it all surrounded a bike lane about a mile long on Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West, which had the backing of most local residents but irritated some powerful neighbors.

PPW bike lane opponents including former deputy mayor Norman Steisel, left, met with Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in February. A month later De Blasio sent a letter to NYC DOT criticizing the agency's evaluation of bike, bus, and pedestrian projects.

Even the most rational observer had to question, at times, whether the multi-pronged attack on the city’s bike policy was really a coincidence. And it turns out that in fact, the self-proclaimed “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” had several previously unreported connections to the bikelash of 2011, according to email communications obtained by Streetsblog via freedom of information request.

Former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall and former NYC personnel director Bob Linn tried to trade on their contacts inside the Bloomberg administration to undermine the PPW bike lane and NYC DOT.

In some cases, NBBL joined up with other bike lane foes after observing them from afar. In others, they had a direct hand in ginning up bad press for bike lanes and DOT. Sometimes they got what they wanted out of their political and media connections. Other times their gambits seemingly went nowhere. And on occasion their efforts completely backfired. We’ll explore these connections in two posts: This one deals with their political and professional contacts, and the next one with their media contacts.

The picture that emerges of NBBL’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contrasts starkly with the process that led up to the installation of the PPW bike lane. While the neighborhood advocates and civic groups who supported the bike lane gathered signatures and helped shepherd the project through the community board process, the opponents traded on their extensive Rolodexes and high-level connections to undermine the bike lane in a secretive and sophisticated campaign.

Two major NBBL players should be familiar if you’ve been following the story: Iris Weinshall, former DOT commissioner and wife of United States Senator Chuck Schumer; and Norman Steisel, sanitation commissioner for Ed Koch and first deputy mayor under David Dinkins. The constellation of former city bureaucrats who put their government contacts to use opposing the Prospect Park West bike lane also includes Bob Linn, city personnel director under Koch, and Connie Christensen, a former arts commissioner.

Note: Streetsblog has already covered NBBL connections to Senator Chuck Schumer, former deputy mayor and Gibson Dunn partner Randy Mastro, City Council Transportation Committee Chair Jimmy Vacca, and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. They are for the most part not included in this piece.

NBBL Spoke With the Public Advocate, City Council Members, Borough Presidents and City Hall About PPW Lane

NBBL leaders Steisel, Louise Hainline, and Lois Carswell, as well as their attorney, Jim Walden, attended a meeting with Public Advocate Bill de Blasio on February 9 (Weinshall was out of town). The meeting was “to discuss bike strategy” according to a confirmation message from de Blasio scheduler Ellyn Canfield Nealon. De Blasio’s office has not returned an inquiry about who called the meeting and what was discussed.

One month after that meeting, however, de Blasio sent a letter to Janette Sadik-Khan calling DOT’s evaluations of its own projects, including of the PPW lane, “rubber stamps.” Impugning the integrity of DOT’s project evaluations echoes a major theme in the NBBL lawsuit. The Post picked up de Blasio’s letter a week later, when DOT publicly abandoned plans for the 34th Street separated busway.

In a more unusual alliance (between the wife of a prominent Democrat and a local Republican politician), Weinshall spoke with Staten Island City Council Member James Oddo on multiple occasions about obstructing bike lanes.

After the bike lane on Staten Island’s Father Capodanno Boulevard was removed in November 2010, Weinshall got in touch with both Oddo and Borough President James Molinaro to learn how they prevailed upon City Hall to take the lane out.

“It would be nice to know how the bp and councilman got it done, whether it was bareknuckles politics or analytic research of impacts etc or a combination,” Steisel wrote on the 23rd.

“I know him well… will call him and Oddo,” responded Weinshall.

Steisel then suggested that Randy Mastro, the one-time Giuliani deputy mayor who had arranged to give NBBL Gibson Dunn’s pro bono services, could serve as a go-between for the Democrat-heavy NBBL to the Republican Molinaro.

In January, Weinshall spoke with Oddo again, and Oddo looped her in immediately when he proposed requiring environmental review for all new bike lanes.

One of Weinshall’s most direct, though ultimately less effective, connections was to Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, who was communications director for Chuck Schumer during his first Senate run. Marty Markowitz routinely forwarded constituent letters regarding Prospect Park West to Weinshall. When she came across one she particularly liked, she forwarded it along to a Wolfson aide. “Putting it on his desk now,” was the reply, seven minutes later. Weinshall later invited Wolfson to tour the bike lane with her, an invitation Wolfson accepted.

The NBBL entreaties seem to have backfired, however. Wolfson ultimately emerged as one of the city’s top defenders of bicycle infrastructure.

NBBL Targeted Contacts at City Planning, Landmarks Commission, and Public Design Commission as Potential Allies

Bike lane opponents Norman Steisel, Bob Linn, and Connie Christensen called on extensive contacts from their time in government, seeking to enlist senior staff at city agencies in their cause. For the most part these entreaties seem to have dead-ended, but they illustrate a key component of NBBL’s strategy: to foment a kind of civil war within the Bloomberg administration, pitting high-level officials against NYC DOT.

Last summer, Steisel reached out to his former boss Ed Koch about the PPW bike lane and received some assistance from Koch’s former chief of staff, Diane Coffey. “On confidential basis to you, I had lunch with mayor Koch on a number of issues,” reported Steisel to NBBL on August 10, 2010. “Also attending was his close confident Dianne Coffey who told me she introduced Bob Linn to [Planning Commissioner] Amanda Burden who in turn sent someone out to check situation in field, a visit Diane thought has occurred, as well as to do additional analyses.”

Linn, who served as the city’s chief labor negotiator and personnel director under Koch, replied that he had been in touch with Burden, but had not received a report. By that time, Linn had also spoken to Landmarks Commissioner Bob Tierney and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, widely acknowledged as Bloomberg’s most trusted lieutenant. Tierney and Harris both have close connections to the Koch administration themselves. Tierney served as counsel to Mayor Koch while Harris worked for Koch both when he served in Congress and in City Hall.

Linn’s contacts with Burden, Tierney, and Harris were apparently fruitless for NBBL. Linn gradually dropped out of active participation in the group, and after August, 2010 he appears to have stopped replying to Steisel and Hainline when they tried to follow up with him.

The other agency NBBL courted was the Public Design Commission. The PDC must approve the design of most permanent works of art, architecture or landscape architecture proposed for city-owned property, and NBBL had hoped to get them to nix the PPW bike lane. NBBL member Connie Christensen, a lawyer and one-time member of the city’s Art Commission (the precursor of the PDC), reached out to her former colleagues, urging them to stake a stand against the aesthetics of the bike lane. Christensen ended up writing an op-ed for a publication targeted at former commission members. She also spoke with Libby Ryan, who sits on the Landmarks Commission, and offered to team up with Linn to lobby Amanda Burden.

Weinshall Enlisted Engineer Philip Habib to Help NBBL

Streetsblog has previously reported that Iris Weinshall and Louise Hainline, both CUNY executives, tried to enlist CUNY professor Robert “Buzz” Paaswell to assist them. He wasn’t the only transportation expert to whom Weinshall reached out.

Transportation consultant Philip Habib agreed to meet with Hainline at Weinshall’s request in the summer of 2010. Habib’s firm has performed transportation planning for major projects including the World Trade Center reconstruction, Donald Trump’s Riverside South developments and the Time Warner Center. His primary suggestion to Hainline, on July 1, 2010, was to sue the city over the bike lane. He appears to have been the first to recommend this course of action; no NBBL communications mention legal action prior to July.

Weinshall also relied on another CUNY-employed transportation expert for assistance. Judy Bergtraum served as Weinshall’s deputy at both DOT and at CUNY, and Weinshall routinely consulted her former first deputy commissioner about Prospect Park West. In a typical conversation last November, Weinshall asked Bergtraum whether bike lanes needed to go through ULURP, the city’s land use review process. “Any word on ULURP of bike lanes?” wrote Weinshall. “No not yet,” responded Bergtraum. “I am meeting with philip habib this afternoon… i will ask him.” This conversation took place during the afternoon on the Monday before Thanksgiving, over CUNY e-mail accounts.

Weinshall also turned to Bergtraum when she had questions about the statute of limitations on Article 78 lawsuits (the type of lawsuit NBBL eventually filed against the city) or whether the city’s bicycle master plan had gone through environmental review when first written. Bergtraum’s involvement in the Prospect Park West fight extended beyond factual inquiries; Weinshall also informed Bergtraum when this reporter reached out to Weinshall for comment.

In the next installment we’ll take a closer look at NBBL’s media connections. Stay tuned.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a frequent cyclist, walks his bike by the Prospect Park West bike lane, which he told bike lane opponents he does not like. Image: Brooklyn Spoke.

Throughout the Prospect Park West bike lane saga, intense speculation has surrounded New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer. Both his wife, Iris Weinshall, and his daughter, Jessica Schumer, played leading roles in the fight against the redesign, but Schumer’s office remained studiously silent throughout. “I am not commenting,” Schumer repeatedly told the New York Times when asked about the bike lane this March; in later press conferences, his staff barred reporters from asking about it.

Despite his public attempt to remain neutral, Schumer told opponents of the bike lane that he personally opposed it, according to correspondence obtained by Streetsblog via freedom of information request.

Members of the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” also attempted to use the senator’s political power and network of contacts to their advantage. They exploited his connections to get access to top political consultants and hoped to use his clout to pressure local elected officials. David Seifman at the Post has reported that Schumer asked City Council members what they would do about the bike lane. Schumer may also have discussed the project with Mayor Bloomberg himself, according to a message from one leading bike lane opponent.

Schumer apparently revealed his opposition to the bike lane to NBBL leader Louise Hainline, who lives in the penthouse of the same Prospect Park West apartment building the senator calls home. “Schumer can’t help much with this issue, but I have seen him and he doesn’t like the lane,” wrote Hainline to two bike lane opponents on June 29, 2010. Though Hainline said Schumer “can’t help much,” NBBL repeatedly attempted to use his connections and clout to aid their efforts.

Bike lane opponents sought to wield the senator’s political influence to pressure local elected officials. Specifically, Hainline believed that she could leverage her Schumer connection to win the backing of City Council Member Steve Levin.

In an e-mail to a personal friend on December 24, 2010, Hainline reported on her recent meetings with members of the City Council. She came away believing Council Member Brad Lander wouldn’t turn against the lane, but that Levin might. Wrote Hainline: “Stephen Levin is a protégée of Vito Lopez, who if you are reading the papers is in some hot water, so Levin’s looking for some god father, and may want Vacca or Schumer to protect him, maybe both.”

It’s not clear whether Hainline’s plan for Levin was based on her recent conversation with him or was simply wishful thinking. Levin has not taken a public position on the bike lane, even when asked about it directly.

No written evidence of Schumer’s direct lobbying on the bike lane has surfaced, but one email is quite suggestive. On December 3, 2010, bike lane opponent and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel wrote to Weinshall: “Also heard abt a purported conversation betwn the mayor and our sr. senator you might find of interest.” In all the documents obtained by Streetsblog, the extent of Steisel and Weinshall’s communications was limited to the Prospect Park West bike lane, suggesting that the conversation “of interest” between Schumer and Bloomberg was likely about the same topic.

Weinshall, Hainline, and Jessica Schumer also tried to enlist a veteran of Chuck Schumer’s press shop. On July 12, 2010, Jessica Schumer reported on the latest ally her family had recruited in their fight against the bike lane: one of the state’s top media consultants. “My mom talked with Risa Heller on Saturday night – she used to do my dad’s press and then went on to work for the governor and now does PR work,” she wrote. “She said she would be willing to help us out a little – so I can get in touch with her if you would like.” Hainline said that she’d be interested, and Schumer agreed to contact Heller.

A few days later, Hainline proposed smearing Transportation Alternatives and Streetsblog for receiving funding from Mark Gorton, who at the time was enmeshed in a lawsuit with the record industry over his Limewire file-sharing software. “I’ll take a look at it this weekend,” Jessica Schumer told Hainline, copying Weinshall, “and will see what risa thinks of that angle as well.”

Nine days after Jessica Schumer first reached out to Heller, Hainline told two NBBL members: “We also have some advice from a media person who cannot be public but was recommending a press conference when we file the suit.”

Heller was the only media professional mentioned in the NBBL communications obtained by Streetsblog during this period, but she specifically denied that this email referred to her. “Iris reached out to me and as much as I love her I declined to get involved,” Heller told Streetsblog.

Schumer’s current staff appear to be keeping a close eye on reports that link him to the bike lane opposition. Of note is an email from Weinshall to two of Schumer’s top staffers, Martin Brennan and Mike Lynch. Brennan is Schumer’s New York state director, Lynch his chief of staff. The content of the email was of little consequence — a friend sent a clip from a Streetsblog article about the Schumer family to Weinshall, who forwarded it on to Brennan, Lynch and Jessica Schumer — but it was sent to their Senate email addresses, suggesting official business.

There remains much that we don’t know about Schumer’s involvement in the fight against the bike lane. We don’t know whether he played a role in convincing Gibson Dunn partner Randy Mastro to provide ample legal resources at no cost for the lawsuit backed by his wife and daughter. We don’t know what the senator said about the bike lane to City Council members or to Mayor Bloomberg. There is solid evidence, however, that Chuck Schumer, like the rest of his family, opposed the Prospect Park West bike lane, and that his political stature was vital to the fight against it.

This is the second installment in a series of posts examining the tactics employed by opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign. Read the first post.

When they filed their lawsuit this March, opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign had little chance of succeeding in court. As NYU Law Professor Roderick Hills, Jr. told Streetsblog in March, “I take this complaint to be largely public relations, with no more law behind it than is minimally necessary to avoid sanctions for frivolity.” It turns out that some of the most prominent members of the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” were perfectly aware of the holes in their case too.

Bike Lane Opponents Knew PPW Was Not Landmarked But Argued Otherwise in Suit

One of the central legal arguments in the Prospect Park West lawsuit asserted that the redesign should have gone through the city’s landmarks and environmental review processes. “Because Prospect Park West touches not one but two sites that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, New York State and City law demands careful study of various environmental impacts,” stated the lawsuit, referring to the street’s location between the Park Slope historic district and Prospect Park itself.

The city’s lawyers pointed out that each side of the street is landmarked, but not the roadway itself.

Before they filed suit, NBBL president Louise Hainline and her fellow litigant, former deputy mayor Norman Steisel, explicitly acknowledged the merits of what would become the legal argument of their opponents. They knew the bike lane was not landmarked.

On August 2, 2010, Steisel wrote to Hainline with a suggestion [PDF]. If a distinguished architect or city planner could complain about the aesthetics of the lane to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Art Commission and City Planning Commission, Steisel suggested, First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris might be persuaded to turn against it.

“Unfortunately, the lane is not in the Landmark District,” Hainline conceded later that evening.

Steisel agreed, but he recommended that NBBL push the issue anyway. “Doesn’t matter that landmarks has no jurisdiction they are kindered spirits along with art comm and cpc types,” Steisel wrote. “Bottom line need authorstive voice to say bloomberg legacy will be besmirched by altering this historic street.”

The following month, Hainline again stated that the street itself wasn’t landmarked. In a September 10, 2010 email to NBBL members, she forwarded a news clip about the expansion of the Park Slope historic district. “I thought these were particularly interesting,” said Hainline [PDF], “and in the first one, especially ironic due to the street between the park and PPW not being apparently under Landmarks jurisdiction/protection.”

NBBL Members Knew Time Might Run Out to File Their Lawsuit, and They Waited Anyway

When Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Bert Bunyan threw out NBBL’s lawsuit, he cited a procedural issue. Article 78 lawsuits, the kind NBBL filed, carry a four month statute of limitations. Since the bike lane was installed in June 2010, opponents had until November to file suit, but they waited until March 2011 to do so. The bike lane opponents claimed that time had not run out because the project was a “trial,” and so the clock hadn’t started ticking in the summer.

“The city is trying to avoid litigation on a technicality, which is based on a lie,” NBBL attorney Jim Walden told the New York Post in typically bombastic fashion this July. “After having told the public and various elected officials the bike lane was a trial project, the city now makes the incredible claim the lane was permanent all along, and that our suit was filed too late.”

Bunyan ruled against Walden, however, saying the project was in fact permanent and that the statute of limitations had passed. Again, prominent bike lane opponents knew about this weakness in their lawsuit ahead of time.

Jessica Schumer, a Yale Law School graduate studying for the bar exam at the time, advised NBBL in the summer of 2010, after which she moved to Washington D.C. to take a job with Larry Summers. Schumer sounded the alarm about the statute of limitations issue on July 1, 2010 [PDF]. “The NY court’s are very strict in their applicaiton of statute of limitations in Article 78 proceedings,” she wrote in an e-mail to her mother, Iris Weinshall, Louise Hainline, and a number of other NBBL members. “We need a lawyer to start drafting the motion ASAP.”

Schumer said she believed DOT was being ambiguous about calling the bike lane temporary or permanent. Filing the lawsuit immediately would clarify things, she argued. If the street redesign was permanent, NBBL wouldn’t miss their chance to sue; if it was not permanent, the Article 78 would trigger a response from DOT that would remove all doubt. (DOT’s Josh Benson had already set the record straight, however, when he publicly stated at a Community Board 6 hearing in April, 2010, that the bike lane was not a trial.) Schumer’s advice was sound and it seemed like NBBL had nothing to lose by suing the city right away. It was good legal advice, but for reasons that remain unclear, NBBL chose to wait until March to sue instead, and their suit was thrown out as a result.

In fact, Hainline herself expressed doubts about whether DOT had actually designated the bike lane a trial. On August 25, 2010, Hainline e-mailed Carlo Scissura [PDF], Borough President Marty Markowitz’s chief of staff, asking him for help with the matter. “Can you fill me in on what was said or not said by DOT about the matter of this installation being a trial? I’ve look at everything I can find Sadik-Khan or her people have said about this bike lane and can’t find anything that indicates they publically said the installation was only a trial.”

Hainline said she’d heard City Council members Brad Lander and Steve Levin refer to it as a trial, and wanted confirmation from Scissura. “Do you or Marty know what if DOT has actually said anything publically about the trial, what it would consist of and/or when it would be over? At this point, all we have is second or third hand accounts of the existence of some kind of trial.” Markowitz ultimately alleged in a sworn affidavit that Sadik-Khan told him the bike lane was a trial — testimony that earned a strong rebuke from Judge Bunyan for its lack of detail.

Other than Markowitz’s threadbare affidavit, neither Hainline nor her lawyers could cite any evidence that DOT had called the lane a temporary project.

The Public Relations Battle: Gibson Dunn Used NBBL to Drum Up Clients Who Would Maximize Suit’s PR Potential

Even though the NBBL lawsuit was destined to be dismissed if it wasn’t filed within four months of the PPW redesign’s installation, bike lane opponents and their lawyers put off the filing and instead focused on ways to enhance appearances. In a display of the importance of PR to the NBBL legal gambit, Gibson Dunn’s attorneys tried to recruit local businesses to sign on as plaintiffs along with NBBL and its spin-off, “Seniors for Safety.” “Our attorneys want to try to include some local businesses in any Article 78 they eventually file,” Hainline wrote to NBBL member Linda Brookoff on January 8, 2011 [PDF] — months after Gibson Dunn had allowed the deadline for filing to pass.

Hainline explained further in an e-mail to four other NBBL members [PDF]: ”To clarify what our attorneys asked, they feel that our action would be strengthened by showing that it’s not just a few NIMBY ‘old rich folks’ (my words, not theirs) who are opposed to the bike lane. They felt that support from others, particularly members of the business community negatively affected by the lane, would broaden our chances as an article 78 would need to go in front of a politically-connected/appointed judge, who might choose to dodge a decision unless it seemed to involve more than just our group’s dislike of the impact/aesthetics.”

Of course, adding business groups to the suit wouldn’t have in any way affected the actual legal questions at hand. The environmental impact laws NBBL tried to invoke against the redesign do not list local commercial impacts as a concern, and the city’s decision would have been no more “arbitrary or capricious” had business groups opposed it. A theoretical “Businesses For Better Bike Lanes” organization would, however, have added some political and rhetorical firepower to the opponents’ arsenal.

Given the fatal decision to delay the lawsuit while exploiting its PR potential, it appears that the Gibson Dunn strategy revolved around maximizing political, not legal, efficacy.

Last week, opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign moved to appeal Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Bert Bunyan’s decision to reject their complaint against the city. If the community board’s approval of the bike lane and the data showing its effect on speeding and safety didn’t persuade them not to sue in the first place, a judicial decision wasn’t going to persuade them now. The longer the litigation drags on, the more time they’ll have to muddy the truth (to borrow a phrase from the Brooklyn Paper).

Since the case is still in the courts, though, we’ve also got more time to get a clearer look at the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes.” Based on email correspondence obtained via freedom of information request, we now have a better sense of NBBL’s methods — how they’ve exploited their connections to politicians, media personalities, city bureaucrats, and various New York City power players in their attempt to erase the new bike lane in their neighborhood.

Let’s begin with the connection that set the lawsuit on its path to becoming a media spectacle: NBBL’s access to Gibson Dunn partner Randy Mastro.

Actually, first let’s pause to appreciate a classic NBBL exercise in muddying the truth. In the run-up to suing the city, you may recall that NBBL adopted the posture of reluctant litigants. “Much has been said about a potential legal action; we hope not to be forced to bring one,” said their attorney, Gibson Dunn partner Jim Walden, shortly before filing the suit. At the time, in late February, NBBL and Walden had been grabbing headlines for a few weeks, talking about litigation as a supposed last resort.

In fact, his firm had been planning a lawsuit with former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall and the leaders of NBBL for more than seven months. Gibson Dunn provided this service “pro bono.” The person who first offered the use of the firm’s resources to assist Weinshall was Mastro, who co-chairs Gibson Dunn’s litigation arm.

Weinshall and Mastro were not strangers. Both served in Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration – Mastro as chief of staff and later first deputy mayor, Weinshall as a high-ranking official in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and then as DOT commissioner.

Randy Mastro offered pro bono legal representation to Iris Weinshall and Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes immediately after the bike lane was installed. Mastro photo: New York Post

On July 3, 2010, Weinshall emailed her daughter, Jessica Schumer, a recent graduate of Yale Law School who campaigned vigorously against the bike lane that summer. “Spoke with Randy mastro he said he would help you with the article 78!” she wrote [PDF]. (An “Article 78″ refers to the type of lawsuit opponents eventually filed in their bid to tarnish DOT and erase the bike lane.)

DOT had just finished installing the bike lane the month before. Practically before the paint was dry, Weinshall had enlisted a lawyer who runs one of the nation’s top litigation practices — a man who represents the world’s corporate behemoths in court — to help wage her local NIMBY battle.

Schumer herself connected with Mastro two weeks later. “Just got off the phone with randy mastro and I’m pretty sure we have pro-bono representation from a top nyc law firm (gibson dunn),” she wrote in a message [PDF] to NBBL president Louise Hainline and another member of the group, Lisa Napolitano.

Then on July 22, Hainline wrote to fellow bike lane opponent Lois Carswell [PDF] to inform her that “the Randy Mastro connection has gotten us two attorney’s at Randy’s firm” as well as “many interns or first year attorneys.”

When law firms donate their time and energy to clients who are not poor (Hainline and Carswell own some of the most desirable real estate in Brooklyn), it’s considered ethical practice for a committee to decide if the case is appropriate for pro bono work. Gibson Dunn has not responded to inquiries about whether their pro bono committee voted on giving NBBL free legal services.

We don’t know exactly why Mastro agreed to help Weinshall. Neither of them would comment for this piece. We do know, however, that Weinshall was concerned about that information leaking out. On February 6, 2011, after Hainline mentioned that NPR’s Andrea Bernstein had been asking about Mastro, Weinshall wrote a short email in response. It said simply: “We should never say how we got Randy!”

Photo: Gibson Dunn

We’ve written a few posts about the ways Walden and NBBL cherry-picked data about the PPW redesign to suit their conclusions. But it turns out that Walden gave misleading statements about even more basic information — like whom he’s represented as part of his “pro bono” work to eradicate the Prospect Park West bike lane.

In March, soon after the lawsuit was filed, Walden was interviewed by Brian Lehrer on WNYC. At one point Lehrer asked why Walden took the case “pro bono,” given the privileged social status of NBBL members, and whether the group’s political connections played a role:

Lehrer: People say you’re trying to suck up to Senator Schumer and get a job with him because his wife is part of this group.

Walden: Right. Well, she’s not part of the group.

When the lawsuit was at its apex in the news cycle, Walden was trying to distance Schumer from it and deny former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall’s connection to the anti-bike lane group.

But Walden and Weinshall are happy to reveal their attorney-client relationship — when it suits them.

Streetsblog recently reached a settlement with the City University of New York, stemming from a freedom of information request that CUNY initially contested, to disclose Weinshall’s correspondence regarding the PPW bike lane and her efforts to have it removed. The arrangement stipulates that CUNY does not have to disclose emails that are subject to attorney-client privilege. If Iris Weinshall indeed was not Gibson Dunn’s client, then no emails she sent or received would be shielded from disclosure based on their relationship.

However, in a log of all email correspondence protected from disclosure [PDF], Weinshall claims more than 200 messages between herself, members of NBBL, and Gibson Dunn lawyers should remain confidential due to attorney-client privilege. The shielded documents included messages written six weeks before Walden went on the air saying Weinshall is “not part of the group” suing the city. The log describes many of these messages as “emails between clients and counsel reflecting legal advice and litigation strategy.”

To recap: In March, trying to portray the lawsuit as an exercise in “good government” litigation, Walden goes on the air and tells NPR listeners that Iris Weinshall is not suing the city. Then this summer, when Streetsblog requests Iris Weinshall’s emails via freedom of information law, hundreds of them are off-limits because Weinshall is a Gibson Dunn client.

No lawsuit will take away this bike lane. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

Official word of the decision came down last night and set off a round of jubilant tweeting from project supporters, celebrating what should be the last gasp of an extended PR attack that opponents waged against the PPW bike lane, NYC DOT, and street safety advocates. With the apparent end of the legal threat to the redesign, Brooklynites can rest a little easier knowing that the improved conditions for pedestrians and cyclists on PPW are here to stay. There will be no return to the old three-lane speedway configuration.

Bunyan’s ruling [PDF] is a major vindication for Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and NYC DOT’s bike and pedestrian program. “This decision results in a hands-down victory for communities across the city. The plaintiffs have been dead wrong in their unsupported claims about the bike path and DOT’s practices,” Sadik-Khan said in a statement. “This project was requested by the community, they voted repeatedly to support it, and their support has registered in several opinion polls. Merely not liking a change is no basis for a frivolous lawsuit to reverse it.”

The legal issues in the case hinged on two main questions: 1) whether the city, in responding to community requests for traffic calming and better bike connections on PPW, had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by installing the bike lane, and 2) whether the plaintiffs filed suit before the four-month statute of limitations had expired. Judge Bunyan’s decision rests squarely on his answer to the second question.

The city implemented the redesign in June and July of 2010. The plaintiffs and their attorney, Jim Walden, claimed this installation was a “trial” that did not become permanent until DOT presented data from a six-month evaluation period at a Community Board 6 hearing this January, about two months before they filed suit the first week of March.

But Bunyan rejected this argument, concluding that Walden and the bike lane opponents “presented no evidence that DOT viewed the bikeway as a pilot or temporary project.” He determined that the city committed to a permanent installation of the redesign as soon as the bike lane was built last summer, so the four-month window for opponents to file suit expired in November.

Because Bunyan dismissed the suit on statute of limitations grounds, he had no need to weigh in on the “arbitrary and capricious” question, and his decision does not address that aspect of the suit. From the outset, however, opponents had made the “trial” or “pilot project” issue a pillar of their argument, and Bunyan demolished it. He reserved his harshest rebuke for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who filed an affidavit at the eleventh hour alleging that DOT told him the redesign would be a trial in March 2010:

[T]he Borough President’s conclusory affidavit is devoid of detail and fails to raise a genuine issue of material fact. Moreover, the Borough President never mentioned in his December 9, 2010 testimony before the City Council’s Committee on Transportation that DOT had characterized the bike lane as temporary.

Walden issued a statement yesterday implying that the opponents are still considering an appeal, but it’s not clear they have any further legal path to eradicate the bike lane, now that their initial suit was deemed too late.

For months, the success of the PPW bike lane was overshadowed by the relentless campaign waged by politically-connected insiders against NYC DOT.

The legal victory for the redesign comes long after broad support for it had coalesced at the community level. In the latest community board vote on the PPW project, Brooklyn CB 6 voted unanimously to support several DOT-proposed modifications to the lane. The board first endorsed the design of the bike lane in May 2009, following a written request that DOT study the installation of a two-way separated bike lane in June 2007.

“I am proud of the community-driven process, through which neighborhood residents requested the bike path, suggested modifications, and approved the modified design this spring,” said City Council Member Brad Lander in a statement. “Ever since the bike path was first proposed four years ago by Park Slope’s representatives on Community Board 6, this has been an inclusive, transparent, and community-driven process.  While I respect those who do not like the bike lane, this is the way our government is supposed to work.”

The results of the redesign speak for themselves: The bike lane reduced injurious traffic crashes, speeding, and sidewalk riding, and led to big increases in cycling.

But the benefits have been overshadowed for months by the misinformation campaign waged by well-connected bike lane opponents, including former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, who is married to Senator Chuck Schumer. It was an anti-bike NIMBY effort on a scale that New York is unlikely to ever see again, unless Kirsten Gillibrand moves to the city and watches in horror as DOT stripes a bike lane in front of her house. To recap:

• Weinshall and the bike lane opponents used political connections to garner white-shoe legal representation, given entirely pro bono, for a spurious lawsuit against the city.
• Using cherrypicked data, the lawsuit made easily refutable allegations about DOT’s evaluation process that were nevertheless picked up and broadcast by the city’s tabloid media.
• Weinshall and former Deputy Mayor Norm Steisel lobbied City Council Member James Vacca in the run-up to last December’s hearing on bike policy, a harbinger of last winter’s intense “bikelash.”
• Senator Schumer reportedly met with some City Council members himself.

Though unsuccessful in court, the bike lane opponents have inflicted damage that can’t be undone overnight. Even in the extremely unlikely event that papers like the Daily News and the Post decide to run full-blown mea culpas about their willingness to reprint falsehoods about DOT’s use of data, it will take time for the agency to recuperate from the opponents’ relentless media attacks. Since the PPW opponents launched their campaign, the expansion of the bike network has slowed and previously-approved projects have been scaled back. Perhaps with the shadow of this lawsuit no longer hanging over the department, the city’s street safety efforts can now continue with renewed vigor.

Prospect Park West resident, former DOT commissioner and current CUNY vice chancellor Iris Weinshall.

CUNY has repeatedly denied access to Weinshall’s email correspondence related to the Prospect Park West bike lane, records which CUNY admits exist but refuses to disclose. CUNY has also withheld PPW-related correspondence from Brooklyn College dean Louise Hainline, who conducted business for the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” from her CUNY account.

Information gleaned from other FOIL requests revealed that both Weinshall and Hainline attempted to use CUNY resources to undermine the Prospect Park West project, but CUNY has maintained that the records Streetsblog requested are “personal” in nature and not subject to New York’s freedom of information law.

The only records CUNY has furnished are a handful of emails between Hainline’s husband, Brooklyn College professor Micha Tomkiewicz, and Eric McClure, a co-founder of the neighborhood group Park Slope Neighbors, which organized in support of the PPW redesign before and after implementation. (In the exchange, Tomkiewicz asked McClure for the raw data from a Park Slope Neighbors speed gun survey of Prospect Park West. “The topic of competing transportation interests within a community is a popular research topic of my students,” he wrote. “Reliable data are precious.” McClure shared the speed gun results, but nothing in CUNY’s disclosure indicates that Tomkiewicz did in fact use the data in the classroom.)

CUNY contends that the Weinshall emails they are withholding are exempt from disclosure because they are personal communications “not related to CUNY,” and would cause “economic and personal hardship” to Iris Weinshall and to others who wrote and received them.

Streetsblog is now challenging CUNY’s refusal to disclose the information we requested. Last month we filed a petition in New York County Supreme Court [PDF] seeking the release of the records in our March FOIL requests. The thrust of our petition is that CUNY has claimed an exemption where none exists.

There is no blanket exemption for personal communications under New York’s freedom of information law. New York courts have determined that such correspondence is in fact subject to disclosure except in certain cases where disclosing the information would cause an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” CUNY has not shown that the withheld records meet this criteria.

In fact, emails that we know are being withheld contradict the claim that releasing the correspondence would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy. For instance, one of the records CUNY claims it cannot relinquish, which Streetsblog obtained from a separate FOIL request, is a message from bike lane opponent and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel to Iris Weinshall’s CUNY account that was copied to a New York Times reporter [PDF].

To qualify for an exception, CUNY must also show that the emails are not relevant to its work.  Streetsblog contests that claim as well. We already know that Weinshall and Hainline attempted to have City College professor Buzz Paaswell connect them to traffic engineers who could produce a study portraying the PPW redesign in a negative light, and discussed having CUNY students perform such a study. A CUNY administrator and CUNY dean trying to enlist the help of a CUNY professor and CUNY students in their campaign to eradicate a city project — that is, by definition, related to CUNY’s work.

Releasing the emails may embarrass CUNY officials by revealing more about the extent of their work to undermine the Prospect Park West project and NYC DOT’s bike program, but that is not legitimate grounds for withholding the records.

Our case is scheduled to be heard in New York County Supreme Court on July 19. You can review Streetsblog’s petition to the court in this PDF.

Former DOT commissioner and current CUNY vice chancellor Iris Weinshall.

Ostensibly, the dispute is between the anti-bike lane groups known as “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” (NBBL) and “Seniors for Safety” on the one hand, and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan on the other. But there’s one critical player whose name won’t be on the docket: Iris Weinshall, Sadik-Khan’s predecessor at the Department of Transportation.

Weinshall, the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer and currently the vice chancellor for facilities planning at the City University of New York, has campaigned against the Prospect Park West project for the better part of the past two years. At first attempting to prevent the redesign of PPW, then, once the bike lane was implemented, to discredit the finished product and undermine Sadik-Khan, Weinshall has worked mainly through backchannels and behind the scenes, her methods evading scrutiny.

Publicly, Weinshall has made three prominent statements on the bike lane that runs past the apartment she shares with Schumer on 9 Prospect Park West: a quote to the Daily News indicating her opposition to the project soon after its installation; a December, 2010 quote to the New York Times saying she was concerned “about safety elements of the bike lane and the level of both community input and the data that’s being made available to the community”; and a December, 2010 letter to the New York Times signed alongside Louise Hainline, a dean at Brooklyn College who also lives at 9 PPW, and Norman Steisel, a former deputy mayor under David Dinkins. The letter to the Times identified all three as members of NBBL.

Weinshall’s affiliation with the campaign to wipe out the bike lane has been swept under the rug since NBBL filed suit against the city and Sadik-Khan in March. Gibson Dunn attorney Jim Walden, who is representing NBBL pro bono, told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer that Weinshall is “not part of the group” suing the city.

The extent of Weinshall’s involvement in the opposition to the Prospect Park West redesign has become something of a guessing game, with reporters getting few if any answers out of Weinshall herself. But documents obtained by Streetsblog indicate that Weinshall’s activities are, in fact, intimately linked to NBBL’s campaign against the bike lane.

Last summer, Weinshall traded on her contacts at CUNY in an attempt to help members of NBBL discredit the Prospect Park West redesign, and she met with City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca in the run-up to the council’s December 9 hearing on bike policy – an early milestone in a long run of bad publicity for Sadik-Khan and the NYC DOT bike program, which stemmed in large part from opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign and their lawsuit.

Weinshall did not comment to Streetsblog, and the City University of New York has denied all freedom of information requests for Weinshall’s email correspondence related to the Prospect Park West bike lane. This story is based on correspondence obtained from other freedom of information requests and corroboration from other sources.

Before NBBL: Markowitz and Weinshall Urge DOT Not to Build the PPW Bike Lane

After years of community-led workshops grappled with the problems of motor vehicle speeding, sidewalk bike riding, and insufficient bike access to the western side of Prospect Park, the city presented plans for the Prospect Park West redesign to Brooklyn Community Board 6 in April, 2009, and the full board voted to approve the project that June.

The first warning shot from Weinshall came four months later. In a letter dated October 20, Borough President Marty Markowitz urged Sadik-Khan “to shelve this project indefinitely.”

“I am joined in this request by former DOT Commissioner, Iris Weinshall — who absolutely agrees that the installation of a two-way, barricaded bike lane would cause incredible congestion,” Markowitz wrote [PDF].

Well before NBBL and its offshoot “Seniors for Safety” formed, before Jim Walden became a sought-after source for quotes about what makes streets safe, Weinshall was quietly staking out her position and broadcasting it to her successor: The Prospect Park West bike lane would lead to intolerable traffic back-ups.

As Part of Campaign to Erase the Bike Lane in Front of Their Homes, CUNY Vice Chancellor and CUNY Dean Asked for Help From CUNY Professor and His Students

NBBL coalesced the summer after the bike lane was installed, in 2010. From the outset of the group’s formation, Weinshall has helped NBBL carry out its agenda.

In one episode last summer, Weinshall and Hainline used their CUNY connections in an attempt to undercut DOT. They convinced City College transportation professor Robert “Buzz” Paaswell to help steer them to pro bono transportation engineering assistance, with the intent of commissioning a traffic study of the Prospect Park West redesign. They also tried to enlist Paaswell’s students in their efforts, hoping to use them to collect traffic data. NBBL was ultimately unable to obtain a consultant to perform such a study. (Bike lane opponents eventually followed through on the idea of compiling a dataset to cast doubt on DOT’s statistics. They later used their own bike counts, taken near the northern tip of the Prospect Park West bike lane, to create the false impression that DOT had inflated bike counts the agency presented to the public, which were taken at the more heavily-traveled center of the corridor.)

The bike lane opponents began to search for a traffic engineer to help them in late June, according to correspondence obtained from Markowitz’s office. In a message dated June 29 [PDF], Hainline typed up and e-mailed out notes from a recent NBBL meeting to 22 of her allies, including Weinshall’s daughter — Yale Law School graduate Jessica Schumer — and three staff members at the Brooklyn Borough President’s office: “Louise will work with Iris to find a transportation consultant for this project, keeping mind at the moment we have no financial resources — just our brain trust.”

Hainline and Weinshall put that brain trust to work in the following month. By August 3, Hainline was able to announce to the group that she had made contact with Paaswell and that he had offered to help them. “We may or may not get some pro bono help, but Paawell [sic] thought he could steer us some, even if he can’t help us overtly,” Hainline wrote in the e-mail [PDF]. The “help” they discussed, Hainline continued, included “objective data collected by people who know how to do this (like some of his students), on counts of pedestrians, bikers, cars, etc.”

Hainline wrote that Paaswell then referred her to Sam Schwartz Engineering. Schwartz told Streetsblog that Paaswell reached out to him and set up a phone call with him and Hainline, though Schwartz did not take the job.

In a phone call with Streetsblog, Paaswell confirmed that the conversation with Hainline took place, including the discussion of using his students to collect traffic data, and said that it was arranged by Weinshall. He said he decided not to help Weinshall and Hainline further because “I didn’t have the time right then.”

Hainline has not returned repeated requests for comment.

Weinshall Contacts Council Member James Vacca Leading Up to December’s Bike Hearing

On December 9, the City Council Transportation Committee convened a hearing on NYC DOT’s bike policy. After Sadik-Khan went through a battery of questions, mainly from council members expressing varying degrees of hostility to cyclists and bike infrastructure, committee chair James Vacca gave the floor first to Steisel; then to Lois Carswell, the lead representative of the anti-bike lane group “Seniors for Safety”; then to Carol Linn, an active member of NBBL; then to Markowitz. The four bike lane opponents testified before any pro-bike speakers, and some exceeded the two-minute allotment for public testimony. Steisel clocked in at sixteen minutes, according to people in attendance.

The hearing led to a cycle of news coverage the next day portraying the city’s bike program as a source of controversy and dispute, as well as a lot of media time for characteristically buffoonish bike lane mockery from Markowitz.

Weinshall did not make an appearance at the hearing, but correspondence from Vacca’s office indicates that she contacted him on multiple occasions in the weeks leading up to the event.

On October 29, Vacca directed his legislative policy analyst via email to set up a meeting with Weinshall and Steisel [PDF]. The following month is also when Weinshall and Steisel met with City Council Members Brad Lander and Steve Levin, whose districts include segments of Prospect Park West, to voice displeasure with the bike lane and lobby for its removal, according to the New York Times. At the time we went to press, Vacca’s office had not returned a request to confirm when the meeting with Weinshall and Steisel took place.

As the hearing approached, Weinshall attempted to contact Vacca several times. She called his legislative office on November 22 [PDF], then placed calls to his legislative and district offices on December 2 [PDF] and 3 [PDF 1, 2, 3], the week before the hearing, according to staff e-mails obtained from Vacca’s office via a freedom of information request. Vacca apparently returned the call sometime before the evening of December 4 [PDF].

The day after the hearing, Vacca received a thank you e-mail from Steisel [PDF], copied to Weinshall. The message begins, “on behalf of my associates and myself, I want to thank you for affording us an opportunity to present our concerns about the current configuration of the bike lane on Prospect Park West.”

Vacca also apparently scheduled a meeting with Weinshall and Council Member Steve Levin after the New Year, based on an invitation confirmed via email on January 6 [PDF].

Vacca spokesperson Bret Collazzi sent the following response when Streetsblog asked to speak to the council member about the documents we received from his office:

As a matter of policy, Council Member Vacca does not discuss private conversations. That said, based on your prior coverage of our December 9^th hearing, I feel the need to once again reiterate that the Council Member convened a hearing on bicycling in New York City because it is a topic of great importance to New Yorkers, not because of discussions with any individual or group.

The NBBL + Weinshall Effect

Tomorrow’s hearing at Brooklyn Supreme Court could mark the end of the NBBL lawsuit. Or it might lead to another round of waiting, pending a decision from Judge Bunyan. Regardless of the outcome, the Prospect Park West bike lane opponents have already affected the shape of New York’s streets, if not the one in their own front yards. By inserting cherry-picked numerical arguments and false claims about the public process that preceded the PPW project into their lawsuit accusing NYC DOT of acting in bad faith — accusations that have been picked up repeatedly in the press despite the ease with which they are rebutted — they have made it much harder for the city to roll out street redesigns that are proven to encourage bicycling, prevent injuries, and save lives.

In community board meetings to discuss bike lanes in southern Brooklyn, people who vote on street design projects can be overheard sneering dismissively at statistics documenting the safety effect of projects like the Prospect Park West bike lane. The NYC DOT bike program, which had expanded the network of bike lanes at a clip of 50 miles per year since 2007, has drastically slowed, with only a handful of projects on the construction calendar for 2011. Bike projects that had already won community board votes in favor have been scaled back.

Iris Weinshall probably won’t go anywhere near Brooklyn Supreme Court tomorrow. She will keep her distance from any press covering the lawsuit that she is ostensibly not a party to. But the story of the lawsuit can’t be told separately from the story of Weinshall’s campaign to eradicate the Prospect Park West bike lane.

#3: Before NBBL was lobbying City Hall to remove the Prospect Park West bike lane, Marty Markowitz and Iris Weinshall were lobbying DOT to not even build the PPW bike lane (PDF). #4: NBBL has a U.S. Senator on their side.

If opponents of an effective street safety project repeat dishonest distortions about it often enough, does that make their position true? Apparently, the Daily News editorial board thinks so. An opinion piece they published over the weekend on the Prospect Park West bike lane might as well have come straight from the desk of Gibson Dunn lawyer Jim Walden, the corporate litigator, Chuck Schumer campaign donor, and rumored Brooklyn DA hopeful who’s now representing bike lane opponents “pro bono.”

A decade ago Daily News reporters were crusading for safety improvements on Queens Boulevard, leading to measures that prevented injuries and saved lives. Now, without any hint of skepticism, truthseeking, or other basic journalistic impulses, the Daily News editorial writers seem content to lift talking points straight from street safety opponents, aligning themselves with the goal of making New York more dangerous. They apparently believe the narrative spun by the anti-bike lane group known as “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and their spin-off, “Seniors for Safety” — a story in which DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is the only person in New York who wants safer streets for biking and walking, and the local community could, at any moment, “erupt into open revolt.”

It can be time-consuming to visit the neighborhood you’re opining about, do nuts-and-bolts research, or fact-check the faulty assertions in a lawsuit before you reprint them for hundreds of thousands of readers, so Streetsblog has compiled this handy list for the future reference of the Daily News editorial staff, or anyone who’s actually curious about how this project came to be and what the opponents are really after (hint: it’s not safety or “better bike lanes”).

The NBBL narrative obscures the following:

1. Community groups asked for the project

   One of NBBL’s basic tenets, unchallenged by the tabloid dailies, is that the city foisted the Prospect Park West redesign on the neighborhood. But the fact is that public pressure to tame traffic on Prospect Park West had been mounting since 2006, when the Park Slope Civic Council’s traffic and transportation forum highlighted rampant speeding on PPW as a major quality of life concern.

   Later that year, after holding a series of public workshops, the Grand Army Plaza Coalition produced a report including recommendations for better bike access to GAP, and in 2007, Brooklyn Community Board 6 asked the city to study the implementation of a two-way, protected bike lane on PPW. Park Slope Neighbors later gathered 1,300 signatures asking for a two-way bike lane and traffic calming measures on the street — all before DOT proposed the PPW redesign in 2009. No one had to convince people that their neighborhood streets could function a lot better.

2. DOT’s safety data is rigorous and honest

   Data collected from the six-month study period after implementation of the re-design clearly shows that the incidence of speeding on PPW has gone down significantly, and the early results indicate that crash and injury rates have declined. You can’t be “for safety” and oppose a project that produces these benefits, so NBBL has attacked the data and cherrypicked numbers to undermine confidence in DOT’s methodology.

   To do this, NBBL claimed that DOT typically doesn’t use multi-year averages of crash data to ascertain the effect of street redesigns, when the truth is that this is exactly how DOT and other transportation agencies measure safety effects, because that’s the statistically rigorous way to do it. As Gary Toth, a 34-year veteran of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, told Streetsblog: “It is the opponents’ lawyers who are grasping at aberrations and doing the very thing they accuse the DOT of — selectively picking data to stack the deck in their favor.”

3. Before NBBL was lobbying City Hall to remove the PPW bike lane, Iris Weinshall and Marty Markowitz were lobbying DOT to not even build the PPW bike lane

   From the beginning, the campaign against the bike lane has been spearheaded by opponents with political clout. In October 2009, after the PPW redesign had been approved by CB 6, Borough President Marty Markowitz wrote to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, asking her not to install the redesign. “I am joined in this request by former DOT Commissioner, Iris Weinshall — who absolutely agrees that the installation of a two-way, barricaded bike lane would cause incredible congestion,” Markowitz wrote in a letter [PDF] obtained by Streetsblog through freedom of information requests. The attempt to perform an end-run around a multi-year community-led planning process had begun. Weinshall would later join Louise Hainline and Norman Steisel in penning a letter to the New York Times on behalf of NBBL, speciously claiming that the redesign increased danger on PPW.

4. They have a U.S. Senator on their side

   NBBL leaders have taken to saying that only “a small number” of their members are politically connected. But it only takes one former deputy mayor to go over the heads of the local community board and get direct access to City Hall. It only takes one former transportation commissioner to lend an air of legitimacy to spurious claims about a traffic-calming project increasing risk. And if that former DOT chief is married to a U.S. Senator, that’s all you need to enlist City Council members to start agitating against the current DOT and its projects to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

5. They have media access that would make Snooki jealous

   In the annals of NYC NIMBYism, NBBL may be the only neighborhood-level opposition group that has hired a PR firm to get its message out to the press. They’ve also received a helping hand from Marty Markowitz’s office, which offered to put members of NBBL in touch with CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer last October, according to email correspondence obtained by Streetsblog. CBS2 aired a Kramer segment in February featuring Markowitz, NBBL member Steve Spirn, and video footage provided by NBBL. The coordination between all these parties is never revealed to the viewer, who sees a series of bike lane opponents that seem unrelated to each other. Kramer never mentioned NBBL herself during the segment; only after she kicked it back to the anchor did he say that a group called “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” planned on suing the city.

6. Most people like the redesign

   A phone survey commissioned by Assembly member James Brennan found a 3-2 margin of support for keeping the bike lane — and that was using a sample skewed heavily toward car owners. A web survey put out by City Council Members Brad Lander and Steve Levin and Brooklyn CB 6 received 3,000 responses and found 70 percent support for keeping the redesign. And at the last CB 6 hearing that invited public testimony on the bike lane, about eight times as many people signed up to speak in favor of the redesign as signed up to speak against it. The only way to set off a community “revolt” related to the bike lane would be to remove it.

7. NBBL is very upset about a single blog comment

   In the NBBL narrative, DOT conspired to, in the words of Gibson Dunn attorney Jim Walden, “enlist an individual (the ‘Blogger’) to wage a viral campaign against critics of the PPW configuration.” The “viral campaign” Walden refers to consists of a blog comment posted here on Streetsblog last April by Aaron “The Blogger” Naparstek (who had stepped down as  Streetsblog editor-in-chief about three months before posting the comment in question). The Blogger’s notorious comment was not, in fact, prompted by DOT overlords calling on him to attack opponents. It wasn’t even directed at specific individuals — all that was known at the time was that bike lane opponents had put up an anonymous flyer around Park Slope advertising an upcoming meeting. The comment was mostly a parody of that flyer. Yes, this is what all the fuss has been about.

8. The defense of the Prospect Park West bike lane came from the bottom up

   Picture this scenario: You’re engaged in the goings on in your neighborhood and involved with a local civic group, and about five years ago you participate in public forums and workshops where people talk about what needs to change to make the neighborhood a better place to walk and bike. The ideas coalesce into a vision. It can be tough to get the city to take a community-generated plan and run with it, but after a lot more organizing and signature-gathering, the city draws up an official plan based on part of this vision. The community board approves the plan, and then the following year the city implements it.

   This is the point in the Prospect Park West story when NBBL appeared on the scene, sending letters to deputy mayors and then threatening to sue the city for installing the PPW redesign. All those engaged neighborhood residents who put in the hours to brainstorm how to fix their streets and gather signatures in support of their ideas didn’t need any prodding from the city to defend the new bike lane. There was no DOT-orchestrated campaign to “collude with bike lobbyists to mislead the public and attack opponents,” as the NBBL lawsuit alleges. The defense of the PPW bike lane is the work of many engaged residents who want to preserve a hard-won safety improvement for their neighborhood.

9. The NBBL lawsuit is flimsy

   The NBBL complaint is “largely public relations, with no more law behind it than is minimally necessary to avoid sanctions for frivolity,” according to an NYU Law School professor who specializes in government law.

10. 

    Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov, used with permission

Noah Kazis contributed reporting to this post.

There are many things we still don't know about the involvement of former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel in efforts to erase the Prospect Park West bike lane and undermine the city's street safety policies.

Thanks to some rescheduling, we’ve got nearly two months until the first court hearing on the Prospect Park West lawsuit. Flimsy as the plaintiffs’ case may be, they now have a long time to run their smear campaign against DOT and the neighborhood advocates who put in years of organizing to make this street safer.

So we’re probably going to be seeing more of Gibson Dunn lawyer Jim Walden in the media — he’s quite skilled at getting the papers to reprint his arguments, no matter how scurrilous. And the more we hear from Jim, the less we seem to read about the political maneuvering his clients have engaged in to erase a project that enjoys broad support and has slowed speeders while opening up a neighborhood street for all-ages cycling.

Which is too bad, because there are an awful lot of public figures connected to this campaign to erase a single bike lane. Think of the political story that will eventually be written. It involves City Council members, a borough president, former deputy mayors, a former federal prosecutor and top candidate for U.S. Attorney, a former transportation commissioner, a sitting U.S. Senator, and maybe a certain political correspondent at CBS2.

We’d like to find out more about the connections between all these players, and we’re not going to find out by calling them up and asking politely. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

At the beginning of February, Streetsblog sent a freedom of information request to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s office, asking for his staff’s communications about the Prospect Park West project. The request was delivered on February 8, according to the U.S. Postal Service, but when we later checked in with Markowitz’s office, they told us they never received it. Markowitz’s staff counsel asked us to email the request to him, which we did. He then said he’d let us know by March 16 if the request would be granted. We’re still waiting to hear back on that one.

Streetsblog needs some muscle behind this FOIL request if we’re going to get any information out of it. So we’ve hired attorney Steve Vaccaro of Rankin & Taylor to manage the process. We’re not getting pro bono assistance on this one, and our budget doesn’t usually include a line for FOIL-related legal expenses, so if you can contribute to Streetsblog this spring, it will help us see this important reporting project through to completion.

In addition to Markowitz, Streetsblog is seeking information about PPW-related political activity from Iris Weinshall and Louise Hainline, both prominent members of the bike lane opposition and high-level employees at the City University of New York who are subject to the state’s freedom of information law. We are also FOILing Hainline’s husband, CUNY professor Micha Tomkiewicz, who has been closely involved in the opposition, and City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, to learn more about lobbying that preceded last year’s bike policy hearing, where PPW opponents received an inordinate amount of attention.

Streetsblog is interested in gleaning information from these FOIL requests to help fill in some of the big gaps in the political backstory surrounding the Prospect Park West project, the attempt to eradicate it, and the smear campaign aimed at the people who requested, planned and supported it.

There’s a lot of information out there still to be uncovered. We know Senator Chuck Schumer has had words with City Council members, asking what they’re going to do about the Prospect Park West bike lane (and other bike lanes), but we don’t have any details about whom Schumer tried to influence or how.

We know that Iris Weinshall and Norman Steisel — a guy who used to run City Hall — had sit-downs with City Council members before last December’s committee hearing on bike policy, but we don’t know how they managed to get so much camera time for Steisel before anyone else got to testify.

We know that bike lane opponents have managed to get free services from a very expensive litigator at a politically-connected white shoe law firm, but it’s never really been explained why Jim Walden took this case pro bono, unless you believe that suing the city to undo a popular and effective street safety project is really an exercise in “good government litigation.”

These are some of the questions we hope to answer when people disclose the information we’ve requested. If you’re fed up with watching the city’s program to promote cycling and prevent traffic deaths and injuries get bogged down in the fight over a single project on a single street, I hope you’ll support this work and contribute to Streetsblog. We believe that telling the political story behind the Prospect Park West fight will have implications not just for this project, but for street safety improvements all over the city.

In an effort to undo a bike lane reportedly opposed by Senator Chuck Schumer, Jim Walden, a partner at Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, is providing free legal services to wealthy Prospect Park West residents who live in some of the most exclusive real estate in Brooklyn. Photo: Gibson Dunn.

Jim Walden is a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the kind of white shoe firm where lawyers represent major corporations at rates of nearly a thousand dollars per hour. His name has been popping up on Streetsblog recently because he represents a politically-connected group attempting to undo the redesign of Prospect Park West. According to press accounts, Walden is doing this work at no charge to the client. Walden would not comment to Streetsblog for this story.

Under the ethical standards of the legal profession, lawyers are expected to donate a certain amount of their time pro bono publico, for the good of the public, and some of Walden’s pro bono representations are quite impressive. In 2007, he received Gibson Dunn’s top award for exemplary pro bono work for representing 11,000 New Yorkers whose food stamps had been wrongfully terminated. Last June, Walden won a pro bono case in front of the United States Supreme Court preventing a legal resident from being deported for a minor drug offense.

Walden’s newest pro bono case, however, doesn’t rise to the standard he’s set in the past. In representing a group of Brooklyn residents fighting against the traffic-calming Prospect Park West street redesign, Walden is devoting his pro bono time to the affluent and politically connected, not those in need.

The New York City Bar Association’s statement of pro bono principles, which Gibson Dunn has signed on to, defines pro bono work as legal services provided without fee to:

• “persons of limited means,
• charitable, religious, civic, cultural, community, governmental and educational organizations committed to serving the needs of persons of limited means and/or in matters which are designed primarily to address the needs of persons of limited means,
• individuals, groups or organizations seeking to secure or protect civil rights, civil liberties or public rights,
• individuals, groups or organizations who have been harmed by a natural disaster or public emergency or who are providing assistance to persons harmed by a natural disaster or public emergency, and
• charitable, religious, civic, cultural, community, governmental and educational organizations in matters in furtherance of their organizational purposes, where the payment of legal fees would significantly deplete the organization’s economic resources.”

Esther Lardent, the president of the Pro Bono Institute, wouldn’t comment on the particulars of a specific case, but did share some general principles about pro bono work. “If this is something that could be handled on a contingency basis in the marketplace,” explained Lardent, “that would be unlikely to be something that could happen on a pro bono basis.” If the clients can afford to pay, in other words, it’s not likely to merit pro bono services.

The Pro Bono Institute is a non-profit organization that helps support pro bono work; Gibson Dunn has signed on to the institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge. “In recognition of the special needs of the poor for legal services, we believe that our firm’s pro bono activities should be particularly focused on providing access to the justice system for persons otherwise unable to afford it,” reads one section of that challenge.

The pro bono coordinator of another major law firm, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect the firm, told Streetsblog that while different firms have different approaches to pro bono work, “We try to focus all of our pro bono on helping the poor, or helping institutions that help the poor, or advancing rights.”

It’s hard to call the leaders of the anti-bike lane group either poor or powerless. The group’s leading spokespeople are Norman Steisel, a former deputy mayor, and Louise Hainline, a dean at Brooklyn College. They have published letters in print and online media alongside Iris Weinshall, a former DOT commissioner and the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer.

The group’s membership form [PDF], which solicits donations to help pay for “incidental costs of our litigation expenses,” instructs donors to send their non-tax deductible contributions to 9 Prospect Park West, PHA — the penthouse apartment in one of the most exclusive addresses in Brooklyn.

A co-op apartment in 9 Prospect Park West recently sold for $3.2 million dollars, with $3600 per month in maintenance fees. The penthouse apartment, one can safely assume, must command a higher price than that. To repeat: According to its membership form, the group receiving free legal services from Jim Walden and Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher is headquartered in an apartment likely worth several million dollars.

While the ability of the client to get legal help on their own is an important consideration in pro bono work, it isn’t the only one. Lardent gave the example of the pro bono work many law firms provided to members of Congress in the Citizens United campaign finance case. While those clients weren’t low-income or without power, explained Lardent, the case wasn’t really about the particular client. If a case “would benefit the legal system as a whole, benefit access to justice,” said Lardent, “we’re very likely to say that’s an appropriate pro bono representation.”

Even if you believed that helping politically-connected insiders overturn a multi-year public process was an issue of access to justice, in such cases you also have to apply a higher level of scrutiny. “Is this a loss leader or a business development strategy?” asked Lardent. “How did the firm take this case on? What was its motivation?” If a case came in through an established pro bono committee and received a vote of support from that committee, she said, that’s very different than if a case reached the firm through its commercial work. “You want to make sure this wasn’t in some way a client accommodation.” You also need to be sure it isn’t a personal favor for either clients or the firm’s attorneys, she explained.

One inappropriate use of pro bono that firms are presented with all the time, explained the coordinator at the other law firm, would be supporting an elite private school that a lawyer’s child attends. Although such a school could qualify under a loose reading of the pro bono guidelines, “it doesn’t really fit into our reading of the Pro Bono Institute definition.” Those cases don’t make it through the firm’s pro bono committee.

While it isn’t clear what process Gibson Dunn went through in taking on this case pro bono (we have tried to contact their New York office, their pro bono coordinator, their press office, and Jim Walden), the details that have emerged suggest that it may not meet the standards that Lardent set out.

It has been reported, for example, that the bike lane opponents were put in touch with Walden by Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and a current partner at Gibson Dunn. Walden’s connections to Senator Chuck Schumer raise additional ethical questions for the case. Walden made the maximum contribution to Schumer’s 2010 re-election campaign and was almost Schumer’s pick to be U.S. attorney in 2009. Schumer has reportedly lobbied City Council members against the bike lane and is married to Weinshall.

William Simon, the Everett B. Birch Professor in Professional Responsibility at Columbia Law School, explained that most pro bono guidelines include an escape clause broad enough to cover Gibson Dunn’s decision to take this case on a pro bono basis. “You’re going to find a catch-all in most of the promulgated definitions” of pro bono, he said. But, he noted, “If I were in a firm, I’d certainly push for a definition of pro bono that focused on relatively disadvantaged people who really need the assistance.” If the point of pro bono work for most law firms is primarily to boost their reputations, he said, taking on this particular case “may undermine some of the reputational advantages they’re going to get.”

To Simon’s point, Gibson Dunn’s own pro bono page states proudly, “Whether protecting constitutional rights, working to preserve historic buildings, battling slumlords, protecting the environment, or facilitating adoptions and guardianships, our attorneys have provided access to justice for those who could not otherwise afford it.”

Fighting a bike lane that is making the street safer and preventing injuries probably won’t be one of Gibson Dunn’s featured pro bono suits any time soon.

Ben Fried contributed reporting to this post.

Clarification: The post has been updated to clarify that Esther Lardent of the Pro Bono Institute was not commenting or rendering judgment about this specific case. After publishing, we received an email from the Pro Bono Institute stating that “the article leaves the inaccurate impression that Lardent’s words apply specifically to the case that is the focus of the story, when in fact her explanation of pro bono was a general one and wholly divorced from the case in question.” This was not Streetsblog’s intent, and we have amended the post to explicitly reflect that Lardent was referring to “general principles about pro bono work.”

The Daily News headline is a good example of how the press itself is distorting this story. Out of a few notable but rather mild quotes from Bloomberg (“I don’t think we’ve done a very good job at explaining and planning,” he said. “There are plenty of people that do like them.”), the News spun the headline “Bloomberg says city needs to listen more closely to those opposed to bike lanes.”

First off, I’m not seeing the connection between the Bloomberg quote and the headline. The mayor seems to be saying that there’s room for improvement in public communication and outreach, not that the city should empower bike lane opponents.

As for outreach, I’m sure DOT or any other public agency can always do better, but the reporters who are parachuting in to these bike policy stories don’t seem to know that, in many cases, DOT has been responding to neighborhood-based initiatives for safer streets. Judging from what he’s been saying in public, the mayor may not know this either.

Protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenue are linked to street safety campaigns by groups including the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Coalition for Pedestrian Safety (ChekPeds). The Columbus Avenue lane fits with the vision for safer streets supported by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance. Lanes on Brooklyn’s Kent Avenue and Flushing Avenue came out of years of grassroots work by the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. The Prospect Park West redesign sprang from community meetings and public charrettes held by the Park Slope Civic Council and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, going back nearly five years.

No one in the press seems to be approaching these groups, who’ve been deeply involved in improving street safety and bicycling, for their perspective. So I checked in with Christine Berthet, co-founder of ChekPeds.

“DOT has installed four bike lane segments in our neighborhood. For the last three they learned from their mistakes and did extensive planning and outreach,” she said. “Change is hard, especially when it involves taking away privileges from a minority and redistributing space, time, clean air and safety to the majority. We applaud Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan for forging forward on this mission.”

Instead of talking to New Yorkers who have the authority to speak knowledgeably about how streets are changing, the press has fed off two types of conflict. The first is garden-variety kvetching, which is hardly unique to bike lanes. I’ve sat through hour-long community board discussions where members were filled with abject terror about the arrival of new city office facilities, because the additional workers would supposedly make it harder to find free on-street parking. I’ve heard community board members from Sheepshead Bay say pedestrian islands and street trees are a menace. The fact that a crowd in the Rockaways booed bike lanes is not especially remarkable.

What’s remarkable is how the press has conflated the first type of conflict with the second type: organized lobbying against a single project by a small group of politically-connected bike lane opponents. Ninety percent of the media noise about bike lanes the past few months has really been about one bike lane, the two-way path on Prospect Park West, and one group of NIMBYs, which includes the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer.

The PPW bike lane is popular and it’s improved safety, but a handful of people who have the ear of Marty Markowitz, James Vacca, and other political players do not like it. Their views do not represent the majority of Brooklyn or their own neighborhood, but their perspective is dominating the pages of the Post and the TV screens of people who get their news from CBS2.

Data from the sixth month study period indicates that the traffic calming redesign has substantially reduced the incidence of injurious crashes on Prospect Park West. Graphic: NYC DOT

The loudest applause at last night’s Brooklyn CB 6 meeting on the Prospect Park West bike lane went to DOT Assistant Commissioner Ryan Russo, after he wrapped up his presentation documenting the redesign’s effect on safety, bicycling rates, and traffic. The brief summary: injuries are down, cycling is up, and speeding has been tamed while travel times and traffic volumes are the same as before. The project has been a success so far and DOT will be moving ahead with further tweaks, like installing raised concrete islands in the pedestrian zones between the bike lane and the traffic lanes.

The second loudest applause went to Council Member Brad Lander, after he told the audience of about 150 that the DOT data “shows the project is working to me and that we should keep it and move forward.” (In contrast, you could hear crickets chirping after Lander’s colleague in the council, Steve Levin, weighed in on the redesign by saying he’s concerned about the effect on snow removal. Christmas blizzard populism has its limits.)

Other than that, there weren’t many occasions to audibly and directly register one’s opinion at a meeting devoted mainly to audience questions about DOT’s presentation. CB 6 will be holding another event to gather public feedback on the redesign, probably in March. So prepare to save the date.

When the Q&A rolled around last night, the anti-bike lane folks were easy enough to spot because their questions mainly boiled down this: They don’t believe DOT. The “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” just don’t believe that a project which has slowed down speeding traffic and shortened crossing distances for pedestrians has actually improved safety. They would rather believe that their self-reported, apples-to-oranges data collection represents the truth, and that opposition to the bike lane is actually 50 times greater than what they’ve been able to muster.

Some of the more high-profile bike lane opponents, including Iris Weinshall and Norman Steisel, could be spotted in the pews of the Old First Reformed Church, shaking their heads as Russo and DOT bike and pedestrian director Josh Benson explained their data. (Interesting factoid: DOT bike counts and traffic flow data are collected by outside consultants, not agency staff.)

At one point, NBBL member Lois Carswell asked why her group had counted half the number of cyclists on PPW as DOT on Tuesday, November 19. Russo explained that NBBL’s camera, trained on the northern tip of the bike lane, would not have captured as many cyclists as DOT’s count, which was conducted at the center of the bike lane. Much of the bike commuter traffic using PPW to access bicycle lanes on 2nd and 3rd Streets would have been recorded by DOT, but not by NBBL, Russo explained.

Note that the Post’s Sally Goldenberg and CJ Sullivan completely flubbed this explanation in their piece on the CB 6 meeting today:

Assistant DOT Commissioner Ryan Russo said that his agency counters caught more riders because they were at more points along the route.

I was at the meeting, and that is not what Russo said. Hardly the only crime against journalism in a piece that might as well have been written by Steisel without intermediaries.

Carswell also wanted to know why DOT hadn’t furnished NBBL with data in response to a FOIL request they filed 60 days ago. The end of the study period was December 31, Russo said, so DOT had not even finished collecting its data until 20 days ago.

Another skeptic questioned the DOT’s “before” count of weekday cyclist volume on PPW, saying an internet search had revealed that the count was conducted an on unusually rainy day — June 9, 2009 — which would skew the recorded increase in cycling. Benson explained that as a rule, bike counts are done on sunny days, and the crews will call it quits if it starts to rain.

There’s also the fact that according to the National Climatic Data Center, in nearby Bayonne, New Jersey (the nearest weather station to Brooklyn), the weather on June 9, 2009 was in the sixties with zero precipitation. UPDATE from the comments: It did rain on this day in Central Park — mostly overnight rain with some cloudbursts in the morning.

The quote of the day, though, has to go to Carswell after Russo explained why NBBL’s bike counts would be lower than DOT’s: “I disagree with your logic.”

Photo: NYC DOT

At tonight’s Brooklyn Community Board 6 meeting, NYC DOT will present its final report on the re-designed Prospect Park West. The Brooklyn Paper has the latest safety stats from the city, and they show what one would expect from a project that has substantially reduced speeding: crashes and injuries are down across the board.

From July to December last year, total crashes were down 16 percent and total injuries were down 21 percent compared to the six-month July-to-December averages from 2007 to 2009. Before the re-design, crashes were twice as likely to cause injury than after the redesign. There have been no reported pedestrian injuries on the new PPW and no injuries from bike-on-ped crashes, according to NYPD.

If you want to see these safety gains made permanent and concrete pedestrian refuges go in on PPW, now is no time to get complacent. It’s time to pack the room at the CB 6 meeting. The politically connected anti-bikeway group that goes by the name “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” will be there, and they will be spreading misinformation.

Streetsblog has acquired part of a document that NBBL has distributed to make its case (see it for yourself in this PDF). Reader Mike Epstein wrote the following response, which might provide a little extra motivation to turn out tonight and speak up for safer streets:

*****************

The people who put together this document are very good at lying. The biggest lie is their name: “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes.” They are against bike lanes, not for them. Let me point out a few more cases of their double-speak, exaggerations, and outright fabrications.

“PPW… has historically been very safe” [P. 1]

Not if you consider a speedway to be safe. Before the redesign, most cars on PPW were speeding, and the statistics from both DOT and Park Slope Neighbors verify that. Before the re-design, crossing the street felt more dangerous and traffic moved so fast that most people were too scared to bike on PPW. It’s hard to imagine that was a desirable state, but apparently it was for NBBL. By their argument, the BQE is a safe, traffic-calmed street, because it has few (or no) pedestrian injuries.

“A self-interested group of bikers… successfully promoted a Class 1 protected bicycle lane” [P. 1]

This is the big lie. The idea of traffic calming PPW did not come from “a group of bikers.” The public process that led to the redesign started at the Park Slope Civic Council’s transportation forum in the spring of 2006. Speeding on PPW and Eighth Avenue and the lack of bikeability were major public concerns that came out of that forum.

The PPW redesign process continued in numerous meetings and public charettes run by the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. PPW was constantly discussed as a street in need of redesign.

In June 2007, Community Board 6 requested that DOT study traffic-calming measures and a protected two-way bike path for PPW. Here is an excerpt from the resolution:

“DOT should, as promptly as possible, establish a class 2 bicycle path on PPW to connect the proposed 9th Street bicycle path with the 15th Street (Bartel Pritchard Square), 3rd Street, and Grand Army Plaza entrances to Prospect Park, as well as the 3rd Street/2nd Street bicycle path. DOT should study traffic-calming measures on PPW, including the possible installation of a one-way or two-way Class 1 bicycle path on PPW.”

NBBL doesn’t want you to know that this public process has been going on for five years, that the project was requested by the closest thing there is to a representative body for the community, or that the survey about the completed redesign by Council Members Brad Lander and Steve Levin and Community Board 6 found broad support for keeping it — 71 percent in Park Slope.

“PPW… actually functioned well” [P. 1]

Maybe for the small percentage of neighborhood residents who drive everywhere, but it was a frightening street for the majority who get around without a car — a speedway full of drivers traveling at speeds exceeding 40 mph, weaving for advantage, that has no place dividing a dense residential neighborhood from a beautiful and popular park.

“duplicative protected bike lane” [P. 1]

Hardly. The lane in the park is one-way, has few entrances and exits, is not protected from cars during rush hours, and is primarily for recreation. It does not serve most commuter or transportation needs within Park Slope. And the project is in large part about traffic calming, not just the bike lane. PPW has gone from a wild-west speedway to a calm, residential, neighborhood street. It’s quieter, easier for pedestrians to cross, and the calmed traffic means a much lower chance of fatalities in the event of crashes.

“pedestrian and vehicular safety has in fact decreased” [P. 1]

To have any validity, NBBL’s claim that safety has decreased must be based on comparing “before” and “after” data collected using the same methodology. But that is not what NBBL has done. They have compared apples to oranges. Their “before” data comes from the state DMV, which only compiles crashes severe enough to generate a police report. Their “after” data is based on witness accounts, and describes events that may not rise to the level of a reportable crash (in many cases, it is the same witness describing these events). The two datasets are not comparable. An honest comparison would use “before” and “after” data from the same source — data that will be available from the DMV for all to see.

“The lane in November is not used nearly as much during the week as DOT has reported” [P. 8]

NBBL assert that their video cameras and counters observed fewer cyclists on Tuesday, November 19 than the number of cyclists recorded in DOT’s bike counts (470 vs. 863). Again, NBBL use the dishonest tactic of comparing apples to oranges. Their video camera was set up on the third floor of a PPW residence between President and Carroll Streets. DOT compiled their bike counts between 4th Street and 5th Street. The difference is significant.

Ninety percent of the bike lane is south of Carroll Street, meaning the NBBL footage comes from the northern tip of the bike lane. The DOT counts were taken at the center of the bike lane. The DOT location would therefore capture more bike trips, especially considering that it’s easier to access the bike path from the south than from the traffic maelstrom at Grand Army Plaza, and that many cyclists enter and exit PPW from the bicycle lanes on 2nd Street and 3rd Street, major connecting routes to the heart of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Downtown Brooklyn, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Using the standard multiplier effect of 50:1 for constituent letters, these letters represent almost 7,500 unhappy people.” [P. 2]

In other words, NBBL feel the need to fabricate the documented opposition to the bike lane by a factor of 50.

The pro-PPW-redesign Facebook group has 1,895 members. One could use a 50:1 multiplier to claim that 94,750 people strongly support the redesign, but that would be completely dishonest.

When it comes to measurements that don’t use enormous multiplier effects, the new configuration has proven to enjoy significantly more support than opposition. Again, the Lander/Levin/CB6 survey found general support for the traffic calming project, with the vast majority of respondents preferring to keep the new design as is or make minor adjustments.  And when NBBL staged a rally in October, they were outnumbered by a factor of about 5 to 1 by supporters of the re-design.

The core issue here is that NBBL represents about 25 or 30 very wealthy, very politically connected people (former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, former First Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel, and several of their friends and relatives) who are throwing a highly visible tantrum because they didn’t get their way. No more and no less.

If Iris Weinshall cared about street safety, she could have done much, much more to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities during her tenure as DOT commissioner. The fact that so much has been done to make New York City streets safer since she left office is a testament to her approach to transportation. When she was DOT commissioner, Weinshall said repeatedly: “My job is to keep the traffic moving.” She never saw the job of transportation commissioner as being anything much beyond that. Street safety, sustainability, improving conditions for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders — these were never Iris Weinshall’s priorities.

Please bear in mind that the neighborhood supports this project, the community board supports this project (and requested it in the first place), and its success has been rigorously documented. All that’s going on here is that a few well-heeled people don’t like change. They are getting headlines, press, and attention from the City Council because they are politically connected. And the local press loves a good street fight — especially if it’s about bikes and even moreso if it involves Park Slope. Meanwhile, the real story is the broad and deep support for this project, and the successful transformation of PPW into a street that works better for most people, not the lies concocted to make you think there’s a ton of opposition to it.

Koppell says there have been "many accidents" at the intersection due to traffic volume and the difficulty of making left hand turns, and that "Deputy Inspector Pilecki from the Bronx DOT" agrees that a turn signal is needed. But a city source tells Streetsblog that DOT has inspected the intersection many times, at Koppell's request, and disagrees with the councilman's assessment. (For what it's worth, CrashStat shows fewer than five bike-ped-involved collisions there between 1995 and 2005.) Deputy Inspector Pilecki is actually with the NYPD, which our source says has stationed officers at the interchange only at the behest of the councilman.

From Koppell's press release [PDF]:

"Commissioner Sadik-Kahn [sic] has shown arrogance and a total disregard for our community's needs and safety," Koppell said. "Her lack of sensitivity and understanding necessitates that she resign or be dismissed."

The statement says that Koppell, who is a former Assembly member and New York State attorney general, has been asking for the signal "for the past four years." We contacted Koppell's office to see if he ever demanded that former Commissioner Iris Weinshall lose her job during the first three years of his quest -- and if, as we hear, the intersection is along the route between the councilman's home and office. We are awaiting a call back.

This holiday season, users of Central and Prospect Parks got an unexpected and welcome gift after years of finding coal (and exhaust) in their stockings. Interestingly, the sources of that exhaust didn't seem to complain (or perhaps even notice) that things had changed.

For years, cars have been barred from most of the Parks' Loop Drives during weekday non-rush hours. But year after year, an exception has been made for the period between Thanksgiving and New Years when the city has temporarily lifted the weekday traffic ban. They called it "Holiday Hours." The reason, to quote a 2005 Department of Transportation press release, was "to provide additional capacity to help process the expected increase in vehicular trips during the holiday season" and, as former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall said in 2006, "to help make room for the many people that want to enjoy our City's attractions." In other words: Accommodating more motor vehicle traffic was the mitigation for too much motor vehicle traffic.

Whether there is any evidence that "additional capacity" is needed or does anything more than fuel traffic congestion was the subject of a post on this site in November 2006 (see "Sacrificing Central Park to Appease the Traffic Gods"). But there is no doubt that the sudden appearance of car traffic during times of day that have been car-free for the previous ten months has been an annual jolt to the park's thousands of recreational users.

This year, however, at the urging of Transportation Alternatives, DOT for the first time quietly failed to open the Parks' gates to the anticipated crush of Santas hurtling to Midtown to fill their SUVs with gifts. The suspension of car-free hours was itself suspended. What ensued is instructive: nothing.

DOT officials say that they didn't receive any calls or complaints through 311 and the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit heard nothing from motorists furious that they hadn't received their customary holiday handout. Traffic congestion around the Parks did not appear to be any worse than usual.

But while drivers may not have noticed or cared much, the Parks' recreational users certainly did. According to a DOT official, the agency received considerable feedback through e-mail and other means from people who noticed that weekday car-free hours in Central and Prospect Parks remained intact during the holidays and were pleased. T.A., too, heard from many delighted park users, some of whom could not believe their eyes (or their lungs).

"We're going to keep reviewing how it went, but certainly we'd look to do it again next holiday season," the DOT official said. "At this point we see no reason to make a change."

All this bodes well for the three-month trial closing of both parks to traffic this summer, a long-overdue measure being pushed by TA and numerous elected officials, including Upper West Side Council Member Gale A. Brewer, who introduced the car-free summer legislation two years ago. To be sure, drivers are more likely to notice when a privilege is taken away rather than simply not reinstated. But nearly every incremental restriction of car traffic in both parks has been preceded by dire predictions of traffic cataclysm. Time and time again, these fears have proved groundless.

The holiday hours story should embolden officials to take an extended holiday from traffic and make Central and Prospect Parks the refuges they were meant to be.

Photo: Swruler9284 / Flickr

Multiple sources say that Mayor Bloomberg has chosen Urbitran Chairman and CEO Michael Horodniceanu as New York City's next transportation commissioner. Iris Weinshall's last day on the job will be Friday, April 13. No word yet on when the official announcement will be.

We will know if Mayor Bloomberg heard that call by the choice he makes for DOT. 

As a wise New York City traffic engineer once told me:

"Traffic engineers have failed," Sam Schwartz says. "If you compare the accomplishments of our profession over the last 50 years to the medical profession, our performance is equivalent to millions of people still dying of polio, influenza and other minor bacterial diseases that have been cured."

While London, Paris, and cities and towns all across Northern Europe are, with great success, developing ways to make their dense central districts less convenient, accessible and free to automobiles, American traffic engineers are still focused on figuring out how to shove more motor vehicles through our nation's roadways. The traffic engineers' solution for congestion is to add a lane or build a new road. In Schwartz's words, that's like "telling an obese person that the way to get healthy is to buy a bigger pair of pants and a longer belt."