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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?

We’re one week into the new year, and 2011 is off to a vicious start on Brooklyn streets.

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.”

At yesterday’s day of action on Prospect Park West, one contention from the opposition especially didn’t sit well with everyone who turned out to support the redesigned, traffic-calmed street. With hundreds of bike lane supporters gathered on the sidewalk a few feet away, Borough President Marty Markowitz’s chief of staff, Carlo Scissura, told the assembled crowd that the new PPW is the vision of just “one person,” referring to transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

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.

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…

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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.

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City Council Member Jimmy Vacca has made several public shows of support for street safety initiatives since taking over as chair of the transportation committee at the beginning of the year. To draw attention to the statewide complete streets bill, he stood with Speaker Christine Quinn at 23rd Street, using the Ninth Avenue bike lane as backdrop. He appeared with Quinn, Mayor Bloomberg, and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan at last week's big pedestrian safety announcement. And he told Streetsblog in an interview this spring that reducing speeding is one of his top priorities.

So it was disappointing to read this passage in a Vacca-penned op-ed called "City's Bold Transportation Agenda Needs Public Buy-In," published in City Hall News last month:

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.

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In an unusual turn of events, two Brooklyn politicians and one community board are pushing for less off-street parking at the New Domino development proposed for the Williamsburg waterfront. City Council Member Steve Levin and Borough President Marty Markowitz have recently bolstered a resolution from CB 1 calling for hundreds of fewer parking spaces. 

The New Domino is a massive redevelopment of 11.2 industrial acres just north of the Williamsburg Bridge. Developer CPC Resources has proposed building 2,200 residences, along with office and retail space. Current plans call for 1,694 parking spaces, even more than what's required by city parking minimums. 

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.

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Cross motorhead journo Marcia Kramer with sidewalk-hogging Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz and this is the unholy offspring that you get: A skewed news segment on the proposed Prospect Park West bike lane, where facts don't matter and wild assumptions go unchallenged.

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.

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Today's Andrea Bernstein interview with Marty Markowitz (transcript here) is a must-read if you want to get inside the head of the Brooklyn Beep and see the borough through the tint of his windshield.

The specific issue at hand is the two-way protected bike path proposed for Prospect Park West (reminder: open house info session happening tonight), which Markowitz finds objectionable. In the interview, Marty floats the idea of using the Flatbush Avenue sidewalk as a northbound cycling alternative, which tells you most of what you need to know. Safer cycling on Flatbush would be a great addition to what DOT proposed for PPW, but as a substitute it's laughable -- a two-mile detour that makes no sense even if you're getting around in a car.

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:

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