Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue is all kinds of pedestrian-unfriendly, but a task force set up by Borough President Marty Markowitz is aiming to fix that.

Right now, Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue is known for its speedway design and anti-urban architecture. But Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz hopes to turn the road into a grand “Brooklyn Boulevard” and in August, he established a task force charged with planning the street’s future. This Monday, the task force’s transportation and traffic committee will hold its first meeting, charting a course going forward.

Markowitz chief of staff (and potential successor) Carlo Scissura is the task force’s chair. In an interview with Patch last month, Scissura said that he wants to see the street made safer and livelier. Trees and public seating might be added to the sidewalks and plazas, while in the street, Scissura proposed removing left turn lanes and widening the medians.

The task force has support from four City Council members and three Congresspeople in addition to the borough president. Any changes it develops will probably have significant political backing — and possibly significant access to funds. Go and make your voice heard: This is a moment when people are listening.

The transportation and traffic committee meeting is the first opportunity to share ideas about how the street should function. It will be held at Brooklyn Borough Hall (209 Joralemon Street) at 6:00 p.m., on Monday, November 14. The following night, the full task force will meet at 6:00 p.m. at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, 249 9th Street (at Fourth Avenue).

Not on Marty's watch: After fighting for years against a redesign that has brought all-ages cycling to Prospect Park West, the borough president has now directly inserted himself into the legal maneuvering to wipe out the PPW bike lane. Photo: PlanetGordon/Flickr

Yesterday afternoon LCG Communications, the PR firm representing bike lane opponents, alerted the local press: Markowitz had submitted an affidavit stating that DOT “explicitly described the PPW bike lane as a trial.” (Streetsblog is trying to obtain the actual affidavit; for now we just have the press release [PDF].) Markowitz has been fighting this project for at least two years, and the finality of the redesign has been a central legal issue for months, but only now, apparently, at the eleventh hour, did the borough president’s memory kick in.

For everyone who’s catching up on this story — we are deep in the weeds here. The permanence of the PPW redesign is a legal question with no actual bearing on the success, popularity, or legitimacy of the project. We are talking about an idea that was requested and approved by the local community board. A redesign that has slowed down speeding traffic, reduced crashes causing injury, and increased cycling while reducing sidewalk riding. It enjoys widespread support in the local community, and it’s attracting new riders, including kids who can now safely bike to Prospect Park on their own.

In a legal sense, however, the “trial” issue is important, because the plaintiffs missed their chance to file a lawsuit within the four-month statute of limitations following the permanent installation of a city project. Their case will get tossed unless the judge rules that the PPW redesign was implemented on a temporary basis.

The most pressing question raised by Markowitz’s affidavit is this: Why now? Why, with only hours to go until the next court hearing, did Markowitz come forward to share a recollection from 16 months ago? Given everything we know about Markowitz’s relationships with bike lane opponents and his deep involvement in the campaign to reverse the redesign of Prospect Park West, the sequence of events makes no sense.

Consider:

• Markowitz’s office came up with the idea of calling the bike lane a “trial” or “pilot” project before meeting with DOT brass on March 1, 2010.
• Markowitz made multiple TV appearances complaining about the Prospect Park West bike lane in the next year. Not once did he tell a sympathetic reporter like Marcia Kramer that he was told the project was a trial.
• Markowitz gave an extensive interview to WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein in April, 2010, barely a month after the meeting with DOT staff. At no point in the interview did he say the project is a trial.
• Markowitz testified at a New York City Council hearing on DOT bike policy last December, appearing with other PPW bike lane opponents. At no point in his testimony [PDF] did he call the project a trial.
• Markowitz has been in constant contact with bike lane opponents, including former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall, for nearly two years. He and his office have had prolific email correspondence with Brooklyn College dean Louise Hainline, leader of the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes,” going back at least to last May. The unsubstantiated contention that the project was a DOT “trial” figures prominently in the plaintiffs’ lawsuit [PDF]. Yet bike lane opponents made no mention of any DOT statements to Markowitz about a “trial” when they filed their complaint. That was four months ago.
• When the city replied to the plaintiffs’ suit, they made the permanence of the redesign the centerpiece of their legal argument. Because the bike lane had been installed eight months before the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit, the statute of limitations had run out. Marty said nothing at the time. That was more than a month ago.
• When Jim Walden, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, asked Judge Bert Bunyan to adjourn the case last month, he said he needed more time to review a FOIL disclosure from City Council Member Brad Lander, which would supposedly reveal DOT’s hidden “trial project” agenda. He said nothing about DOT statements to Markowitz.
• When Walden wrote to the judge asking for another delay, he cited a New York Times story about Bloomberg administration pilot projects, which made no mention of Prospect Park West, as the justification. He said nothing about Markowitz.

Only now is Markowitz coming forward with this recollection of being promised that the PPW redesign would be a trial — a memory that would have served his purposes on several prior occasions. Perfect timing.

Borough President Marty Markowitz

Streetsblog has been reporting on this project for more than two years now, and in all that time — throughout the community board presentations, open houses, and yet more community board presentations — not once have I seen or heard someone from DOT call the PPW redesign a trial. In fact, at one of the few meetings we didn’t report on — an April 29, 2010 Community Board 6 Transportation Committee meeting — DOT bike and pedestrian director Josh Benson explicitly said the project was not a trial. So where does this “trial” idea come from?

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Jim Walden, has embarked on an extended expedition ostensibly in search of the answer — issuing FOIL requests and subpoenas to NYC DOT and City Council Member Brad Lander’s office. He recently told the press, “We believe clearly, given [Lander's] own public statements, that the DOT told him in no uncertain terms it was a trial program, it was a trial bike lane.”

Well, after some digging, we found out who wanted the Prospect Park West bike lane to be a “trial” project, and it wasn’t DOT. It was Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Flash back to February 2010. Brooklyn Community Board 6 had voted in favor of the Prospect Park West bike lane the previous June. Then in October, Markowitz, with the backing of former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall, had written to current commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, demanding that the project be shelved indefinitely. In preparation for a March 1 meeting between Markowitz and DOT brass, Borough Hall transportation policy point man Luke DePalma sent a memo prepping the borough president [PDF]. He concluded with the following piece of coaching:

DOT still plans to implement this project.
You should restate your opposition and concerns, and insist that this bike lane, if installed, be done on a “pilot” or trial basis. This will give DOT a chance to monitor the impacts the lane might have on the traffic during the spring and summer.

So, by a count of one to zero, this memo from the borough president’s office refers to a “pilot” or “trial” project more than all the DOT presentations on PPW combined.

At the March 1 meeting, DOT informed Markowitz that the redesign was moving ahead and would be installed soon. The borough president was not pleased. As a concession, DOT told Markowitz they would not pour any concrete as part of the project in 2010.

In a May 6, 2010 email to Markowitz [PDF], prompted by a message from Brooklyn College dean Louise Hainline (before she became head of the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes”), DePalma described his understanding of the arrangement between the borough president and DOT:

DOT’s original plan from 2009 was to install a full build-out of the PPW bike lane with raised concrete medians, etc. Because you raised issue with the plan, DOT pledged to hold off on the full build out of the permanent structures, until a “testing” period could elapse during the summer/ fall that would illustrate that the bike lane could work without incident. Weinshall’s statement that this “temporary” installation is “bogus” is her opinion and I can’t comment on it.

I’m not naive- I realize that it is almost certain that DOT will make this bike lane permanent and that this “trial” is intended to placate opposition…

Apparently, this piece of horsetrading between DOT and Markowitz is a key underpinning of the NBBL contention that the PPW project is a “trial” or “pilot.” But the lack of concrete does not make a street redesign any less final, and conducting an evaluation after implementing a project does not make it provisional.

In a trial, the assumption is that achieving a permanent state — be it banishing cars from a park, or bringing a new pharmaceutical to market — is contingent on meeting some criteria. Here’s how DOT described the process in their 2010 report on the Midtown pedestrian plazas [PDF]:

Green Light for Midtown, the pilot project implemented by the New York City Department of Transportation in 2009, addresses a problem and opportunity that was hidden in plain sight, that of Broadway’s disruptive and dramatic diagonal path across the midtown grid…

The goals of Green Light for Midtown are to improve and maximize mobility and safety while providing additional benefits to the West Midtown community. This evaluation report uses a comprehensive set
of quantitative information to assess how well the changes achieved the project’s goals.

With PPW, the assumption has always been that the change is permanent but reversible in the event of total failure. The Kent Avenue and Grand Street protected bike lanes are made out of thermoplast and paint too. Like the Prospect Park West bike lane, they are easily reversible, and like PPW, they are not trials. DOT has also conducted evaluations of several street redesigns, including the First and Second Avenue protected bike lanes, without ever designating them trials. With those projects, as with Prospect Park West, the agency was measuring the effect of permanent changes.

In their complaint [PDF], attorneys for the bike lane opponents cite instances where Lander and members of his staff referred to the project as a “trial,” but they fail to mention that DOT’s Benson publicly corrected that perception at an April 29, 2010 community board meeting. From Benson’s sworn affidavit [PDF]:

I distinctly recall one of the representatives stating that the PPW Project would be a trial project, and I immediately corrected this publicly by stating that the PPW Project was not a trial project, but that after its installation it would be monitored with adjustments made as deemed appropriate.

The fact is that the plaintiffs received ample signals that, while representatives were tossing around the word “trial,” the city itself didn’t consider the project to be one. Hainline appears to have grasped this after conferring with Weinshall. In a May 6, 2010 email exchange with Markowitz [PDF], she wrote:

I ran into Iris Weinshall in the elevator at 9 PPW today, and she says that “temporary” is bogus (which is what you said too).

And Markowitz, in response, seemed to acknowledge that the “trial” or “pilot” language was not the city’s official designation: “only the Mayor can derail this plan…all of our local city council members support this proposal and are using the ‘pilot’ as a cover.”

Despite DOT’s public correction and Markowitz’s frank analysis, Hainline persisted in calling the project a trial. Her insistence is on display in a July, 2010 message to the NBBL email group [PDF]. Hainline forwarded an email from Community Board 6 district manager Craig Hammerman in which he referred to the PPW “formal evaluation.” But when she passed Hammerman’s message around to the group, Hainline called it a “trial.” You can distinguish her text from Hammerman’s by the different fonts:

By October, NBBL’s liaison to city government, former deputy mayor Norman Steisel, was emailing his objections to Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith (and a dozen other city officials) in a message with the subject “Prospect Park West Bike Lane Trial” [PDF].

When the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit, they could not cite any instance where a DOT official called the project a trial or pilot. This is the best Walden could do:

Furthermore, Respondents stated at various times that the results of the study would be released for public scrutiny and that the bicycle lane would not become permanent until after the study data was released and reviewed. For example:

a. In her August 13, 2010 letter to New York State Assembly Member Brennan and New York City Council Member Lander, Commissioner Sadik-Khan stated an intention to present “the findings from the monitoring period at a public forum” early in 2011, where the “public [would] be encouraged to respond to this data and provide any additional input.”

b. Commissioner Sadik-Khan, in her October 22, 2010 letter to CB 6 Chairperson Bashner, promised to report back to the Board in “early 2011 to provide information” on utilization of the EBL [sic] and its impact on safety. In addition, she solicited the “counsel and guidance” of CB6 and looked forward to working with it “in a spirit of partnership and cooperation.”

c. In her November 17, 2010 letter to Steisel, Commissioner Sadik-Khan assured him that “the community process did not end when the project was implemented” and that DOT intended to “present and discuss [its] findings with members of the community following the study period.”

There’s no doubt that the people who are now suing the city wanted the Prospect Park West redesign to be a trial. But referring to it as a trial amongst themselves and to the officials they sought to sway doesn’t make it so.

#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.

For those who don’t want to squint, Pearson’s lead paragraphs go like so:

The families of Brooklyn residents killed or injured by cars while biking in the borough last year are fuming at Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Advocates and angry victims’ families charge Markowitz made light of their loss by peddling into last week’s State of the Borough address on an oversized tricycle — an obvious jab at the controversial Prospect Park West bike lane.

“At the very least he could acknowledge the issue, as opposed to making jokes about it,” said Naomi Doerner, 32, whose boyfriend Scott Andresen suffered a serious spinal cord injury after being struck by a speeding car last July on Myrtle Ave. in Clinton Hill.

“His constituents are paying the ultimate price, and we’re not the butt-end of a joke,” Doerner said.

You can read the rest here.

Via Gothamist, here’s the video of Marty Markowitz making his entrance to the State of the Borough address last night. The Borough President, who parks his SUV on the pedestrian plaza of Borough Hall and uses lights and sirens on local streets when he’s late for press events, is perfectly comfortable riding a trike on 100 or so feet of traffic-free carpet. (To the delight of City Council Member David Greenfield, the first to rise for the standing O.)

So pay no attention to Marty’s dogged efforts to undo street safety improvements that can help reduce the thousands of preventable traffic injuries in Brooklyn each year. Marty likes bikes.

Marty Markowitz at a press conference last month, calling for the removal of pedestrian refuges.

In his State of the Borough address last night, Markowitz did not acknowledge those letters. He did not mention the 80 lives lost each year on Brooklyn streets. Instead, he played his opposition to street safety measures for laughs, and continued to oppose a popular traffic-calming project, the re-design of Prospect Park West.

From Markowitz’s prepared remarks:

[Borough President rides in on bike lane]

Welcome to beautiful Sunset Park, Brooklyn, USA, and the 2011 State of the Borough address!

As you can see, I’ve taken advantage of the Department of Transportation’s newest bike lane. Of course, I can tell it’s still under construction, because the D.O.T. hasn’t yet removed all the seats in the auditorium to make room for it!

…

TRANSPORTATION

As I’m sure you noticed, I made my entrance tonight on what I like to [call] my senior cycle, so I hope you understand that I am not against bicycles. I’m not even against bike lanes. I’ve supported their creation around Brooklyn, including 9th street near Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Greenway that runs from Greenpoint to Sunset Park.

But for the majority of New Yorkers, it is simply not feasible to make bicycles their primary mode of transport, and unfortunately that’s the direction I believe the City’s policy is heading. They are trying to stigmatize car owners and get them to abandon their cars, when the fact is, even many bicyclists also own cars!

Cycling is no substitute for mass transit, and there are still tens of thousands of Brooklynites who live far from public transportation and who rely on a car to reach their jobs and live their lives. But of course, we must have a comprehensive plan that insures the safety of drivers, walkers and cyclists. And we should all remember to show respect to one another — drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, everybody who uses our streets. I have been a vocal critic of the Prospect Park West bike lane because I think it is a perfect example of how not to install a bike lane. It has disrupted the aesthetics of one of Brooklyn’s most beautiful thoroughfares and made it more dangerous to cross the street safely, especially for seniors, young children and parents with strollers.

Markowitz says he is for the safety of drivers, walkers, and cyclists, but in fact he is opposed to a project that has reduced injuries and tamed rampant speeding, making the street safer for drivers, walkers, and cyclists. At no point does he mention the 16,000 injuries sustained in motor vehicle crashes in his borough each year, or how he would keep Brooklynites safer on their streets.

Markowitz says he is concerned about people’s ability to get around and live their lives, but the data show that the PPW re-design has had no discernible effect on traffic travel times on any avenue. Meanwhile, thanks to the protected bike lane, more Brooklynites are using PPW to reach their jobs, take their kids to school, and conduct their daily lives than before.

Markowitz says he is concerned for Brooklynites who live far from transit. At no point in his speech does he mention the 57 percent of Brooklyn households who do not own a car, or how the city should improve streets so that they can get around more conveniently and safely.

Markowitz says he supports the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, but he was publicly silent last year when business interests based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard threatened to derail a large portion of the greenway route, on Flushing Avenue.

Markowitz says he is not against bike lanes, but he is against the Prospect Park West bike lane, which enjoys 78 percent approval among his own constituents, according to Council Member Brad Lander’s survey of nearly 3,000 Brooklynites.

Markowitz claims to be looking out for the interests of seniors, young children, and parents with strollers, but he is not looking out for these seniors, young children, and parents with strollers:

Photo: Matthew Weinstein

Photo: Ben Fried

Photo: Zoe Schlanger/Gothamist

Photo: Ben Fried

Last month, Markowitz called for the removal of pedestrian refuges on a stretch of Fort Hamilton Parkway where three people have died in the past three years.

On the local news and in front of the City Council, he’s called for the removal of pedestrian safety measures and speciously claimed that the popular Prospect Park West bike lane was imposed against public will. He’s cast aspersions on data proving the effectiveness of the PPW re-design, ridiculed bike lanes, and maintained that establishing safer streets for walking and biking “stigmatizes” motorists.

At the same time, the borough president has been silent about traffic crashes that have killed and maimed people on Brooklyn streets. After one week this January in which an 83-year-old rabbi was killed and several children hospitalized with serious injuries caused by traffic, Markowitz stood in front of the local TV cameras and called for pedestrian islands to be ripped out of Fort Hamilton Parkway, where three people had been killed in just the past three years.

Tomorrow evening, Markowitz will deliver his state of the borough address, and people whose lives have been altered by traffic violence in Brooklyn are asking him to get serious about preventing deaths and injuries — and to stop standing in the way of life-saving improvements to the borough’s streets.

Friends and relatives of traffic violence victims have sent letters to Markowitz urging him to take street safety seriously and “change his way of thinking.” Transportation Alternatives sent the following excerpts from those letters.

From Susan Gossiaux, whose 21-year-old daughter Emily Gossiaux was hit by a truck while riding her bike:

“My daughter is now blind…and recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Don’t just use people’s lives as a public stepping stone for votes or power plays.”

From Andrew Weeks, whose friend Neil Chamberlain was killed in a hit-and-run in Williamsburg last year:

“I know this was a preventable death… One month after my friend Neil’s death, an older man was hit and killed on a bicycle one block from where I live, on Bushwick Avenue… I commute on bicycle to work on Bushwick Avenue, and it’s terrifying.”

From Naomi Doerner, a Brooklyn resident whose boyfriend Scott Andresen is recovering from a spinal cord injury after a car door opened in the path of his bicycle, throwing him into oncoming traffic.

“Scott is alive and can walk again. We are grateful for this every day… Think of all the people that can be saved from this needless outcome with your support of greater visibility, safety and mobility through progressive active street designs and enforcement.”

From Donna Ganson, whose husband spent a month in a coma after being struck in 2009 by a speeding car while walking their daughter to school:

“Something has to be done to make our streets safer and you must stop opposing these changes… You and others need to understand that streets belong to people, those walking, biking and driving cars, and all these citizens should have equal and safe access to them.”

From James Paz:

“On October 23, my girlfriend and I were struck from behind by a car while riding our bicycles down Franklin Street in Greenpoint. The driver did not stop and we both suffered major injuries.  My girlfriend spent a month in the hospital and today, three months later, she is still not able to walk without the use of crutches. There is no doubt in my mind that this accident would not have happened had there been protected bike lanes on this street as there are just a few blocks further on Kent Avenue.”

From Wendy Clouse, whose daughter Jasmine Herron was killed while riding her bicycle after a driver opened her car door in Herron’s path.

“Please change your way of thinking… I live in Colorado, we have bicycle lanes everywhere. I know there is limited room, but for you to deny there is a problem is disconcerting to me. I will never see Jasmine again. I will never have a grandchild. The world will never see her future art. She was such an inspiration to so many. Will the world say so about you and your beliefs?”

Update: Markowitz’s press secretary said he was aware of at least one of the letters, which the borough president intends to respond to directly. Currently Markowitz is not planning to address street safety issues in the state of the borough tomorrow.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories.  9/11 was not an inside job, Oswald acted alone, the Moon landing was real, and Elvis is still dead.

When it comes to all of the bike lane hate that seems to be spewing forth from various corners of this city, and Brooklyn in particular, I feel the same way.  Norman Steisel probably has a better chance of getting calls to Marty Markowitz returned than you or I, but I wouldn’t begin to suggest that Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes is in communication with Marty’s office on matters of strategy.  If they were, I think their war plan would at least appear to be coherent.

To wit, see if you can follow this logic:

• There are two sets of data: the DOT’s and NBBL’s.
• On the same day the DOT counted 863 cyclists using the Prospect Park West bike lane, Neighbors For Better Bike Lanes collected video surveillance showing only 470 bikes, a difference of about 54%.
• Such a huge discrepancy is beyond the realm of statistical variation.
• Therefore, the DOT is making up bike counts out of thin air.
• If the DOT makes up bike count numbers, then none of their data can be trusted.
• The NBBL data can be trusted.

This is somewhat reasonable, especially if you’re inclined to not trust the DOT.  But just when it seems like it all makes sense, along comes Marty Markowitz with his own logic:

• There are two sets of data: the DOT’s and NBBL’s.
• Marty Markowitz claims that on the day DOT did their bike counts, the department tipped off cycling advocates, resulting in a 54% difference between their count and NBBL’s.
• Such a huge discrepancy can only be explained by cycling advocates who flooded the bike lane with extra trips beyond what one would find on a typical weekday.
• Therefore, the DOT is inflating bike counts by tipping off cyclists.
• If the DOT tips off cyclists, none of their data can be trusted.
• The NBBL data can be trusted.

Marty, you’re messing things up for NBBL!  Either the DOT inflated their numbers by counting imaginary cyclists who were not present or they tipped off real cyclists to ride the lane in big numbers.  Your head might explode if you start thinking of ways in which both statements can be true.

In the first case, the difference has already been explained by Ryan Russo at the DOT.  According to the Park Slope Patch, Russo’s explanation was that “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes had monitored a different section of Prospect Park West, a section with less bike traffic.” I’m a bigger fan of Occam’s Razor than I am of conspiracy theories, and this explanation is as simple as it is true.

Marty’s claim in the second case makes things really complicated for Norman Steisel, Iris Weinshall, Louise Hainline, Lois Carswell and the other NBBLers.  If they claim that their numbers can be trusted over the DOT’s, how can they explain that on a day when the bike lane was teeming with riders, NBBL failed to count 393 cyclists?  Either their collection methods didn’t work, which I’m guessing they will not admit, or 54% of the participants in this vast bike-wing conspiracy stopped riding before reaching President Street. This failure to ride the length of the bike lane seems especially curious since Grand Army Plaza was the gathering point for cyclists and advocates for safe streets at the October 21, 2010 rally.

There is no conspiracy, just abject paranoia coming from Marty Markowitz.  We’ve now reached the latest–and hopefully last–phase of anti-bike-lane strategy: throwing claim after claim against the wall and seeing what sticks.  I don’t even know if you can call that a strategy, much less a conspiracy.

It’s hard to know what to say after viewing this CBS2/Marcia Kramer segment. Watch Marty Markowitz allege that bike counts on Prospect Park West were inflated because advocates got tipped off by DOT about when the counts would happen, then biked over to use the new lane on those days. Your jaw may drop.

Marty seems to have either lost the ability to distinguish truth from fiction, or his stubbornness is just all-consuming and he’s ceased to care about his public credibility.

Naparstek retrieved this Markowitz quote from an interview with WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein last April, which seemed to indicate that Marty would accept the PPW redesign if it panned out:

I think the two-way bicycle lanes will cause a great inconvenience to the residents of Prospect Park West… I hope that the commissioner and the department is right. If they’re right, and in fact it causes no bottlenecks, no inconvenience, and if it works, I’ll be the first to say I was wrong. I would.

The data shows that the project has met these criteria. So how far will Marty contort himself to defend his position? How long can he hold out, clinging to the notion that the street should go back to its prior incarnation as a three-lane speedway? The longer he does, the more he’ll be remembered as the Borough President who wanted Brooklyn to be plagued by dangerous streets.

Also, as Naparstek points out, how can Marcia Kramer and CBS2 broadcast this slander and not think to call up the advocates whom Markowitz accuses of collusion?

In the last few days, a speeding livery cab driver plowed into a Sunset Park sidewalk, injuring a mother and her two nine-month-old twins; a hit-and-run driver knocked a boy out of his stroller and ran over his stomach on Kent Avenue; and 83-year-old Rabbi Mosha Adler was struck by a car in Midwood and sustained lacerations to the head. The rabbi died. The other four victims are hospitalized with serious injuries.

The Borough President has become increasingly vocal on traffic issues recently, testifying before City Council and sending out holiday cards about bike lanes. But after a bloody week for Brooklyn pedestrians, where is Marty Markowitz? Is he paying attention? How long do we have to wait until we see Marty stand up and say this is unacceptable?

If you were watching CBS2 last night, you got an answer. Perched on a Boro Park sidewalk, Markowitz joined Assembly Member Dov Hikind to blast the pedestrian safety improvements NYC DOT has added to Fort Hamilton Parkway. The new refuge islands, installed on a stretch of road where three people died in traffic in the past three years, are, in Marty’s view, “meshugga.”

So it seems that Brooklyn has to wait at least a year or two before Marty will say something even vaguely connected to the maiming and killing that happened in his borough this week. Then, after the city has planned a way to protect people on these streets, secured resources to implement the plan, and built out the improvements, Marty will notice. But not because a street became safer. He’ll notice because someone complained that the street is different than it was before.

That will grab Marty’s attention. And then he’ll send an alert out to the local TV news producers, stand in front of the cameras, and, employing his cute ethnic phrase du jour, say, “This is unacceptable.”

Photo: Brownstoner

A Park Slope constituent contacted the BP’s office to set Marty straight, and received a response from a Markowitz staffer. Here is an excerpt:

In your email to the borough president, you referred to the 1000 or so people from the community that signed a petition in support of the bike lane. With this, I assume you are referring to the Park Slope Neighbor’s petition. The borough president’s position regarding this petition is simply this: he rejects the assertion that Park Slope Neighbors is in any way representative of this community. Though you may disagree, the borough president’s criticism is not unfair. Park Slope Neighbors has primarily focused itself on advocating for the kinds of transportation changes the DOT implemented on PPW. Having positioned itself as a transportation advocacy group, seeking traffic calming in Park Slope, they have sacrificed a claim to impartiality. This is not a critique of the merits of their case, simply a statement of fact that they can not have their cake and eat it too: they can not purport to being objective or representative if they are going to also take strong advocacy stands for the particular type of transit policy DOT is implementing. Consequently, the borough president is well within his right to challenge their findings and dispute the relevance of any survey they issue. Again, as an issue advocacy group they are inclined to find data supportive of their positions. Consider this: for every signature they obtained on that 1000-person petition, how are we to know how many people from the public did not sign on because they did not agree with its stated purpose. If I stood on a street corner and asked you to sign a petition to ban dogs completely in Prospect Park, you would likely not sign it (hopefully) though I’m sure I could get a plenty of people to do so. I could then cite the numbers of people who signed the petition as proof that the community agrees with my position.

People, just give up with the organizing, awareness building, and public assembling already. If you want to be active in your community and make change happen, that’s nice and all. But if you want Marty to listen, first you’ve got to agree with Marty.

I’m with Naparstek. This was the sign of the day.

The pro-bike lane crowd at Grand Army Plaza this morning didn't fit into my camera frame.

Hundreds of Brooklynites gathered this morning at Grand Army Plaza to show their support for the redesigned Prospect Park West. They made a statement that should be hard for elected officials and the press to miss: Most people who live in the neighborhoods near PPW like biking and walking on the new, traffic-calmed street and don’t want to see those changes taken away.

I peg the crowd size at about 300 supporters. If you want to count heads, here are two more shots that complete the picture…

The right side of the crowd.

The left side of the crowd.

The rally was organized by Park Slope Neighbors, the Park Slope Civic Council, and Transportation Alternatives in response to an anti-bike lane demonstration that took place on PPW and Carroll Street. After massing at GAP, most of the pro-bike lane crowd walked down PPW to declare their love for the safer street to the gathering of about 70 or so opponents, while a large contingent rode up and down the two-way bike path.

The defining moment of the morning, I would say, came when Carlo Scissura, chief of staff to Borough President Marty Markowitz, rallied the bike lane opponents by telling them the PPW redesign was the vision of “one person” — Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The large mass of bike lane supporters were standing just a few feet away when he said it.

Scissura’s remark elicited a hearty round of booing on a morning that otherwise was largely free of overt confrontation.

Carlo Scissura, chief of staff to Borough President Marty Markowitz, addresses the anti-bike lane crowd.

Unfortunately, it appears as though the tape we used to record interviews during the rally was corrupted, so I don’t have the audio and video that I hoped to show everyone. Here are a few more pictures from what was an impressive display of support for safer, bike-friendly streets. Hats off to the organizers and to everyone who showed up.

Markowitz is outraged that there's no bike lane on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Image: NY1

It’s showtime for the Prospect Park West bike lane, with a bike lane protest and a rally for the redesign coming up tomorrow morning.

In a prelude to the big day, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz is making some rounds in the media. The Brooklyn Paper and NY1 got some choice quotes from the beep, who appears to be getting increasingly agitated about one lane-mile of pavement shifting from automotive transportation to active transportation.

Markowitz doesn’t seem to feel constrained by the truth when he deals with the press. He told the Brooklyn Paper’s Stephen Brown:

“Nobody asked for this! This is the vision of the DOT! Their belief! Their ideological approach!”

We’ve covered this ground before, but the fact is that many people asked for the PPW bike lane. More than 1,300 people signed the Park Slope Neighbors petition calling on DOT to calm traffic on PPW and install a two-way protected bike path. Before that, in 2007, Brooklyn Community Board 6 asked DOT to study a two-way protected path on PPW. When DOT came back to the CB with a redesign, the proposal passed.

Then there’s Markowitz’s denial that speeding was a problem on the old PPW:

“I lived on Prospect Park West for eight years! My windows faced it, and I rarely saw speeding,” said Markowitz, adding, “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but I rarely saw it.”

How do you pinpoint speeding with the naked eye? You can see someone racing and weaving through traffic at 60 mph easy enough, but what about when most of the traffic is exceeding the city speed limit of 30 mph and moving in the 30-45 mph range? People who actually went out and measured traffic speeds on the old PPW with radar guns found that speeding was the norm. DOT clocked more than 70 percent of motorists speeding, and Park Slope Neighbors observed 30 percent exceeding 40 mph. After the bike lane went in, PSN measured less than two percent of cars exceeding 40 mph.

This is significant. The typical stopping distance for motorists traveling at 40 mph on dry pavement is 118 feet. At 30 mph it’s 75 feet. And at 20 mph it’s 40 feet.

So, when Markowitz says, “When you cross the street children often break from their parents and there is a danger that a cyclist won’t see the kid in time — or a senior citizen!” — that’s actually an argument for the redesign. If someone walks across the street unexpectedly on the new PPW, people operating multi-ton vehicles on the roadway are now more likely to be able to react in time to avoid catastrophe.

Then, when all else fails, Markowitz can always play the Manhattan card:

Here we are, on the east side of Manhattan, Fifth Avenue — no bike lanes. Central Park West? No two-way bike lane! But in Brooklyn, our entrances into Prospect Park — bike lanes.

Gotta side with Marty on this one. Let’s get some protected bike lanes on Fifth Avenue and CPW!

As for the claim that Brooklyn is a “guinea pig” — when was the last time Markowitz got chauffeured around the East Village in his SUV? How about Chelsea, the Upper West Side, Chinatown, or the Lower East Side? All those parts of Manhattan have parking-protected bike lanes, with the first pilot routes having gone in on Ninth Avenue and Eighth Avenue.

If you haven’t RSVP’d for tomorrow’s rally yet, it’s not too late. Email rsvp [at] parkslopeneighbors [dot] org.

Jimmy Vacca sketches out some street geometry during a Streetsblog interview in May. Photo: Noah Kazis

Six months after taking over the New York City Council Transportation Committee, I have already seen some of the problems that can arise when communities do not feel they are part of the process:

In early June, the Department of Transportation (DOT) replaced a driving lane on Prospect Park West with a spacious, two-way bike lane. Built over the objection of local residents and elected officials, the bike lane has given rise to a civic group dedicated to removing the lane. Among the members: two former DOT commissioners.

He also cites two more examples where he thinks outreach was inadequate: the striping of the Bedford Avenue bike lane through Hasidic Williamsburg, which was erased soon after Mayor Bloomberg was re-elected last fall, and public notification about an increase in parking meter rates in February 2009.

Acknowledging that lockstep public opinion is impossible, Vacca goes on to say that "you can never please everyone; sometimes you need to charge forward and hope your opponents come around."

I spoke to Vacca last week to make sure he knew about the community board vote in favor of the PPW bike lane, Council Member Brad Lander's support, and all the signatures that volunteers gathered asking for a two-way bike path to make cycling and walking safer on PPW -- that the re-design had in fact been built at the urging of local residents and with the support of the local council member.

Vacca said that after the piece was published, he received a few emails from readers upset about his characterization of the PPW bike lane, and that Lander had contacted him to fill in the background about the public support that the project enjoys. Before the piece was published, he'd received emails from opponents of the bike lane, and "was hearing from Marty Markowitz." He said that he doesn't oppose the PPW project. (If you're wondering, Vacca couldn't name the second DOT commissioner, in addition to Iris Weinshall, who's come out against the bike lane.)

"It wasn’t that I meant to neglect any constituency, but I did want to reflect that not everyone was brought in," he said. The column, he said, was "meant to reflect an overall policy that I'd like to have. At the end of the day, I do believe that the process has to start at the community board, and the community board is the entity that has to identify all the stakeholders that have to be brought to the table."

When the phone call ended it still wasn't clear to me what the "overall policy" that Vacca has in mind would look like in practice. If community boards could conduct the sort of public process that groups like the Grand Army Plaza Coalition have employed -- starting from a set of principles, bringing together partners, holding public workshops -- some projects would probably enjoy more momentum when the inevitable opposition arises. But if the primary goal is to completely avoid the conflict that comes with changing the street, then the surest way to achieve it is to do nothing and let the status quo continue.

As for the re-designed PPW, my guess is that Vacca would appreciate it if he came out to Brooklyn and saw the big difference it's made in the character of the street. It's a treatment that's created room for safe biking while tackling a problem that he's committed to addressing: chronic speeding. If the city won't "charge forward" with a project like this after receiving more than a thousand signatures and a community board vote in favor, it's hard to see how anything innovative will get accomplished.

A rendering of the New Domino, as it would look from below the Williamsburg Bridge. Image: The New Domino

The City Council has final say on the project's approval, making Levin's position especially important, since the council usually defers to the local member's opinion. Levin has said that his support for the project depends on reducing the project's size, increasing the number of affordable units, and cutting parking spaces by half. "Every parking space they provide is another car that will be congesting our streets," said Hope Reichbach, Levin's communications director. Levin wants to cut the project down to 1,600 residences, according to the Post, so in tandem with his call to halve parking, his demands would decrease the parking ratio at the project. 

Markowitz -- not known for opposing provisions for cars -- also recommended cutting parking. The borough president gave his support for the overall project, but not to one of its four underground lots -- which would trim at least 266 parking spaces.

Markowitz said that he was responding to local demands for less parking, including a request from CB 1 to cut parking. "The neighborhood was concerned about providing spaces above and beyond what current zoning allows," he said, "and since the final build-out of this project is years away, I didn’t feel that there was an immediate need to provide an allowance for that many spaces." Markowitz also recommended testing out a car-sharing program during the early stages of development to try and keep down car-ownership levels.

For now, the developer seems willing to consider reducing the amount of parking included at the New Domino. "We don't want to include parking for parking's sake," said Susan Pollock, a senior vice president at CPC Resources. But parking decisions get made in what she described as "a world called SEQRA-land," referring to the state's environmental review process. The developer chose to provide enough parking to match the very high car-ownership rate of the surrounding area in part because of the formulas used by New York's environmental law. Perversely, those formulas often give developers the incentive to build huge amounts of parking in order to avoid lawsuits claiming their project will have an adverse impact on the environment.

One solution, according to Pollock, is to update the parking calculations using data from the 2010 Census, which she said is likely to show lower car-ownership rates in that part of Williamsburg. "If we get the new data," she said, "we may be able to drop the amount." CPC Resources is currently in negotiations with the planning department about the possibility of making such an adjustment. Pollock reiterated her interest in renegotiating the number of parking spaces downward at a public hearing this Wednesday, according to the Post.

The New Domino will continue to move through the land use review process in the upcoming weeks and months. If the City Council agrees with Williamsburg residents, Community Board 1, Levin and Markowitz that New Domino doesn't need 1,700 parking spaces, and if the planning department helps to recalculate the parking levels needed to meet SEQRA standards, it would be a rare victory for parking reform. 

Kramer on the "already-congested" Prospect Park West.

Kramer followed up last week's hack-job on the city's public plaza program with another error-riddled report last night. At one point, she gestures at the wide-open expanse of Prospect Park West and tells the audience that "what the transportation commissioner wants to do is eliminate two full lanes of traffic." Actually, the project will take away one traffic lane, and more than a thousand people have asked DOT to do it. Is anyone checking facts at CBS2?

The segment is basically a platform for Markowitz to condemn the expansion of New York's bicycle network. When the Beep claims that the city is "putting bicycle paths on every single block of New York City," and the reporter makes no attempt to question the assumption, you know you've crossed into paranoia-land.

What Kramer neglects to mention is that, even after the addition of 200 lane-miles in the last three years, the NYC bike network -- including sharrows -- covers about five percent of the city's streets, probably less if you apply some rigorous math.

(The city has about 420 lane-miles of on-street bike routes, and 6,375 linear miles of streets. That works out to about 6.5 percent, but two-way bike lanes like the ones on Allen Street, Kent Avenue, or Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn get counted twice, so the actual percentage is smaller.)

While Marty imagines that ubiquitous bike lanes have "stigmatized" drivers, and Kramer, standing in front of the free-flowing traffic on PPW, wants her audience to believe that it's "already congested," we don't hear a word about the dangers of walking and biking on a street where most drivers speed, nor a citation of the mounting evidence that NYC's new bike-ped improvements are reducing injuries to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists. Plenty of commentary from people who don't know anything about bicycling for transportation, though.

By the time Kramer gets to the shot of DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow's disembodied voice, the piece feels like total self-parody. Up in the McMansion-land that she calls home, though, this stuff probably still comes across as a good faith attempt to conduct journalism.

Markowitz says he doesn't want to "stigmatize" motorists. How about just slowing them down?

And if Markowitz has given any consideration to the rampant speeding on PPW, he doesn't show it. A DOT survey last March clocked 70 percent of drivers on PPW traveling faster than the 30 mph limit, with 15 percent driving 40 mph or faster. Last month, on an unseasonably warm weekend at the outset of spring, volunteers with Park Slope Neighbors found even higher rates of speeding, observing 80 percent of motorists exceeding the limit and 30 percent driving faster than 40 mph. All this lawlessness is happening a few feet from one of the biggest walking destinations in the borough of Brooklyn, but Marty doesn't acknowledge it.

The following exchange between Bernstein and the Beep really gets to the heart of this dispute, and many others that come up when the subject is how to allocate street space:

AB: You don't seem to much care for Janette Sadik-Khan. You've called her a zealot, why?

MM: She is a zealot. I can tell you this much -- I respect her professionalism. She personally is a very nice woman. I think she's a professional -- I know she's a professional. We just disagree in certain instances where I'm acutely aware that she wants to make it hard for those that choose to own their automobiles. She wants to make it difficult, their life difficult. I really believe that.

AB: Why, why would she want to do that?

MM: Well, I think because she would like to see more people stop car usage and get on their bicycles. Or walk.

AB: Is that an unworthy goal?

MM: Within reason it is a worthy goal. If I personally walk more than I currently walk and use the bicycle more than I currently use it just for pleasure I probably would be in much better shape, for sure. However, I represent everyone. Not just a segment of the population. And I have to balance out those that feel that everyone should be on bicycles and those that feel that they need their automobile and that they shouldn't be stigmatized.

To Markowitz, giving street space to cycling and walking isn't justified if it throws the status quo out of whack. In this case, the starting point is a three-lane speedway with wide crossing distances and no dedicated space for bicycles. How does this "represent everyone," when 57 percent of Brooklyn households don't own cars? (When Markowitz departed the State Senate in 2001, more than 64 percent of the households in his district were car-free [PDF].) On Prospect Park West, "balancing out" interests calls for exactly the type of solution that Markowitz has rejected.

Instead of seeing the PPW improvements as freeing people to safely walk and bike on a popular route, Markowitz gives the impression that he feels personally attacked -- "stigmatized" -- as a motorist. He envisions a DOT commissioner conspiring to "make life difficult" for motorists and frets that the removal of a few parking spaces on Prospect Park West will cause Park Slope car owners to decamp for Scarsdale.

I suppose this post might make Markowitz feel more stigmatized, but I have some reassurances for him. No one is trying to ban driving or extinguish private car ownership in NYC. The 1,300 people who signed a petition in favor of this project are just trying to calm traffic on Prospect Park West and give people safe options for getting around without a car. It's true that people who drive won't be quite as privileged on PPW as they are right now, but there will still be space to drive and park if this project gets built.

Parking in Park Slope might get infinitesimally more difficult, but it's already a hassle. Imagine if it was easy and convenient to own and operate a car in New York City -- subsidized parking structures filling up entire blocks, freeways where the East River used to be. Would you want to live there? Fuhgeddaboudit!

A safer path to Prospect Park? Fuhgeddaboudit! Photo: New York Post

The borough president last year fired off a letter to DOT about its proposal for a two-way, parking-protected bike lane on the east side of Prospect Park West, calling it an "ill-advised proposal that would cause incredible congestion and reduce the number of available parking spaces in Park Slope." The project garnered the qualified support of Community Board 6 and was set to be built in September.

Eric McClure of Park Slope Neighbors filed a report for Streetsblog last April on the CB 6 committee deliberations, and described the existing conditions on PPW:

At nearly 50 feet wide and with three travel lanes, the street encourages high speeds and reckless driving, forces pedestrians to make long crossings, and lacks dedicated cycling space, despite a high volume of bicycle traffic. Prospect Park West's existing vehicle volume, which peaks at about 1,100 cars per hour, can easily be accommodated by two lanes, [DOT's Preston] Johnson said.

In field surveys last month, DOT found that more than 70 percent of the cars on Prospect Park West were exceeding the 30 mph speed limit, and at least 15 percent were traveling at 40 mph or faster. From 2005 to 2007, there were 58 reported crashes on Prospect Park West.

The new design, set to include pedestrian refuge islands and Greenstreets landscaping, is expected to have a minimal impact on parking, with the loss of about two spaces at each signalized intersection. Yet Markowitz has pegged his objection to this negligible reduction, never mind that everyone who takes the bus, the train, walks or bikes to this side of Prospect Park -- a huge majority -- would have an easier and safer path to get there.

Inexplicably, Markowitz also claims that "the bike lane would be especially problematic during the summer surge in foot traffic," according to the Brooklyn Paper. Actually, no. The bike lane, the traffic calming, and the pedestrian improvements are especially necessary during the summer surge in foot traffic. Not that any of this would necessarily register with Mr. Lights and Sirens himself.

Streetsblog has a message in with DOT to find out if there's still a timeline to build the Prospect Park West bike lane, or if this important safety measure is on indefinite hold.