Streetsblog New York City

Earlier this year, Streetsblog filed a set of freedom of information requests in our attempt to reveal the political maneuvering behind the campaign to get rid of the Prospect Park West bike lane. Since then we’ve received voluminous responses from the offices of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Council Member James Vacca, which have helped fill in some missing details. Thanks to those responses, we now have a clearer sense of how former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer and a resident of Prospect Park West, has played a central role in the bike lane opposition. What we don’t have, for the time being, is any Weinshall correspondence furnished by her current employer, the City University of New York, in response to our freedom of information request.

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.

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Tomorrow, Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Bert Bunyan is expected to weigh in for the first time on the core arguments brought by opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign against the City of New York.

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.

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#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.

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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.

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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.

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The latest bike story ricocheting around the local media is Mayor Bloomberg’s reaction to a crowd in the Rockaways that reportedly booed the mention of bike lanes. David Seifman at the Post ran with it yesterday. Adam Lisberg at the Daily News picked up on it today. And NY1 managed to work it into a story about today’s blizzard.

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.”

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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.)

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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.

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More termed-out wackiness from City Hall. Last week, Bronx City Council Member G. Oliver Koppell issued a press release calling for the "resignation or removal" of DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The reason? Koppell wants a left turn signal at 254th Street and Riverdale Avenue, and DOT doesn't think the intersection needs one.

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.

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.