Southwest corner of Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street. Photos: Brad Aaron

The city recently replaced four parking spots at Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street, in Inwood, with a no standing zone. The 34th Precinct reportedly requested the change to give drivers exiting Park Terrace West, a northbound one-way street, a better view of east-west traffic on 218th.

Inevitably, car owners accustomed to parking at the intersection complained, and those complaints, many of which were posted on a neighborhood email list, led to a story by DNAinfo. Here’s a taste:

At least seven residents said they were ticketed or towed after the new signs went up late last month.  Local parenting email list InwoodKids was recently flooded with parent complaints about the new parking regulations.

Inwood mother Beth More said she and her husband were ticketed and towed in the new zone on Jan. 5 after arriving home from the holidays.

“We had no idea the new signs were posted,” she told DNAinfo. “In fact, we were sure our car was stolen at first and never even thought to look up.”

The couple has appealed the $75 parking ticket and will fight for reimbursement of the $185 tow charge.

“I, like many others in the neighborhood, question if this really was a matter of safety or simply an opportunity for the city and police precinct to ticket more,” she said.

Several city and police sources said summonses issued just days after the new signs were installed are likely to be dismissed.

In case the no standing signs still don’t get the message across — a possibility, considering the illegally parked car out of frame in the above photo — on Sunday I saw a couple of homemade posters warning drivers not to park near the intersection.

I have driven this corner. I also walk it regularly. As a driver it was very difficult to detect whether cars on 218th were approaching without either inching into the Park Terrace West crossing or nosing into cross traffic. As a pedestrian I also appreciate that drivers have better sightlines. While it’s understandable that some were angry about being caught off guard, the idea that the city would look to raise revenue by clearing four parking spots at a blind intersection — and installing the proper signage, no less — smacks of Agenda 21-level paranoia.

Southeast corner, with no standing sign in the background.

How’s this for DIY messaging: Summons for parking in a no standing zone: $115. Fee to park almost anywhere else in Inwood: $0. Preserving life and limb through improved visibility: Priceless.

A reader passed along this photo of a new sign announcing that Fowler Square, a small triangle of grass in Fort Greene, is in line for a public space upgrade courtesy the Fulton Area Business Alliance and NYC DOT’s plaza program. Head to the Facebook group advertised on the sign and there’s more information. The next public workshop to help design the space, for example, will be on Thursday, February 16, at 6:00 p.m.

In past meetings, Community Board 2 endorsed the idea of a plaza wholeheartedly, according to a report in the Brooklyn Paper. Supporters haven’t always made a strong showing: At one meeting, some residents complained that by cutting off through traffic on a block of South Elliott Place and creating more space for pedestrians, the plan would “countrify” an urban area.

In what’s starting to be an annual tradition, Streetsblog’s first reader-submitted photo of 2012 shows a bus stop pole brought low by the impact of a motor vehicle. 2011 got off to a similar start.

This is the B69 stop at Vanderbilt and Atlantic, a stone’s throw from where Forest City Ratner and the Empire State Development Corporation want to build an enormous surface parking lot, beckoning people to drive to the new Barclays Center arena. The motorist who slammed into this pole had to drive across the Vanderbilt Avenue bike lane before wrecking city property. NYPD’s public information office had no details about the incident, which indicates that any bus riders or cyclists present at the time of the crash escaped with their lives intact.

Before the holidays, we caught word of three other curb-jumping incidents in Manhattan, at least two of which were known to have caused serious injuries. Not even the sidewalks are safe from driver recklessness. Meanwhile, City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca spent the end of 2011 on a media tour talking up his commitment to bike enforcement.

This crash occurred in the 88th Precinct. The commanding officer there is Deputy Inspector Anthony Tasso. If you’re concerned about traffic safety and want the 88th to do something about it, you can bring it up at the next community council meeting. The 88th Precinct community council meets on the third Tuesday of each month. Locations vary. Call ahead (718 636-6526) to confirm meeting dates and times.

Photos: Liz Patek

Streetsblog reader Liz Patek sent in these photos of the aftermath of a Tuesday afternoon crash at 68th Street and Broadway, in front of the Loews Lincoln Square movie theater. Liz writes:

Police were still on the scene. From talking to people, it appears that the cab backed up at a high speed around the corner from 68th to Broadway in order to get a parking spot. One of the people I spoke to was hit by the cab. She was OK. Two other pedestrians were injured and taken away in ambulances before I arrived. According to another witness, one of the other pedestrians who was hit got pulled under the cab and dragged for several feet. The driver also took out the street light.

NYPD had no information on the crash, and we could find no media reports. All of which is a pretty good indicator of how common these non-fatal crashes with injuries are. For every fatality that is written up somewhere there are dozens of “minor” crashes like this one. If you saw what happened here or have any info, let us know in the comments.

This crash occurred in the 20th Precinct. The commanding officer there is Deputy Inspector Brian A. McGinn. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to McGinn or other precinct higher-ups, drop in on the next community council meeting. The 20th Precinct council “usually” meets on the fourth Monday of each month, except in July and August, at the 20th Precinct station house, 120 W. 82nd Street, at 7:00 p.m. Call ahead (212-580-6428) to confirm meeting dates and times.

Hint: There's no rack for the bike.

A few weeks ago muni-meters began popping up on the streets of Inwood. Naturally, this made me wonder if the city had considered turning the neighborhood’s defunct coin-op meters into bike racks.

DOT has converted discarded meter poles into racks in other parts of the city, and livable streets advocates have long noted Inwood’s lack of bike parking. According to the CityRacks map, there are 19 racks in Inwood, all of them on or within a block of Broadway. (The disappearing shelter, as far as I know, has not resurfaced north of Dyckman Street, though after it was removed DOT said it would seek another location nearby.)

We queried DOT on the possibility of Inwood meter conversions in mid-November, and again this week. We’ll update this post when we hear back.

Shared lane arrows point the way between the Hudson River Greenway and 181st Street. Previously, this was a one-way street. Photo: c34 via Flickr.

Two months after winning support from Manhattan Community Board 12, a safer connection to the Hudson River Greenway is now in place at 181st Street.

Before, Riverside Drive north of 181st Street served as a one-way highway on-ramp, forcing cyclists exiting the greenway to either ride against traffic or dismount. Cars, too, drove the wrong way to get back on local streets without entering the Henry Hudson Parkway, creating unsafe conditions.

Now, DOT has turned a short stretch of Riverside back into a two-way street with shared lane markings painted in both directions. At the cost of a few parking spaces, this critical Upper Manhattan greenway entrance has been made safer and more easily accessible.

The changes check off one item on Community Board 12′s list of requested bike infrastructure improvements, which it passed unanimously this July. Perhaps some high-quality bike lanes for Upper Manhattan will be next.

Pedestrians at the complex intersection of 71st, Broadway and Amsterdam enjoy shorter crossing distances and more space at the northern end of the intersection, next to a subway entrance. Photos: Noah Kazis

DOT has largely completed an overhaul of the complicated intersection of Broadway, Amsterdam and 71st Street, a year after presenting the plan to Community Board 7 (hat tip to the West Side Rag, which noted the new infrastructure last Thursday).

Dubbed the “bowtie of death” by Borough President Scott Stringer and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, who pressed DOT to take action last August and again this July, the intersection has long been one of the most dangerous places in Manhattan for pedestrians. According to Stringer’s office, there have been 34 traffic crashes here in the last two years.

Installation of the safety improvements began this August. Now pedestrians should have a far easier time making it across the tangle of streets. Using planters, granite blocks, and new surfacing flush with the roadbed, DOT has expanded sidewalks and medians, cutting crossing distances significantly. Abundant new crosswalks allow people to walk safely and legally where they’d previously been taking shortcuts without walk signals or a designated right-of-way. Along two blocks of Broadway, one southbound travel lane was removed to help calm traffic.

More pictures of the new safety features below the fold:

A number of new crosswalks make it easy, safe, and legal to cross the complex intersection in any direction. Before, pedestrians frequently cut from island to island without any official routes or signals for walking.

Looking south from the former "bowtie of death," new pedestrian space juts into Broadway on both sides of the intersection. On the left side of Broadway, the traffic lane was removed along this block.

Clarence sends over this photo of the newly car-free block of 37th Road between 73rd Street and 74th Street in Jackson Heights. Since this picture was taken, the asphalt on this block has been coated with an epoxy-and-gravel surface, and it looks like a two-way bike path will be striped on one side of the street.

The new plaza is part of a package to improve pedestrian safety, bike safety, transit effectiveness, and traffic flow in the commercial core of Jackson Heights, which DOT has been working on with neighborhood residents since the beginning of the year. You can track the changes and give DOT your comments through the online portal for the project.

HURRICANE DOCUMENTATION ALERT! With Irene closing in, keep in mind there may be interesting things like this to document in the aftermath with your cameras. Are there lots of people on bikes? Are the streets more quiet? Will your city impose HOV requirements on bridges? Will people walk more to get around? Get ready!

Photos: Clarence Eckerson

Last year I bought an old one-speed Rifton cargo trike, partly under the delusion that it could one day be used to showcase inventory outside the neighborhood newsstand/used book store that I dream of owning in my retirement years — assuming periodicals, books and retirement still exist (see: delusion).

Clarence Eckerson sends along these shots from city bike shops that beat me to it by a few decades. Good stuff, Clarence.

Streetsblog regular “Moocow” submitted this shot, snapped this morning in South Slope. Anyone else spotted a cycling TEA?

Reader Jeremy Charette sends this shot from the corner of Smith Street and Sackett Street in Brooklyn, where a crew was installing what I believe to be a genuine first for NYC: on-street bike parking.

Eight bike racks are getting bolted into the blacktop in what’s currently a no-standing zone. In addition to the added convenience of the bike parking, anchoring the racks in the pavement will keep the sidewalk uncluttered and prevent illegally idling and/or parked cars from obscuring sightlines at the intersection.

The safety dividend should be significant, Jeremy writes:

Since I moved in seven years ago, I’ve seen countless car accidents at the corner of Smith and Sackett in Brooklyn. Problem is, drivers coming from Sackett Street can’t see around parked cars on the Southeast corner of the intersection, making it a blind corner. Cars tend to roll through the stop sign on Sackett Street, and at least 1 or 2 a year get t-boned by vehicles coming down Smith Street.

This year they finally put up a “no standing” sign for the two spots before the corner, but cars and trucks STILL park there!

I came out this morning to find this! They’ve painted the no parking zone, put up a curb, and are installing bike racks!

In Portland they call this on-street parking set-up a bike corral. NYC DOT has reclaimed curb space for bike parking before, but that always entailed building out the sidewalk, which is pleasant but comes at a considerable expense. This new treatment effectively preserves pedestrian space too, at a much lower cost. (There’s also a hybrid treatment at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, where DOT added bike parking to an epoxy-and-gravel sidewalk extension.)

It’s great to see bike corrals arrive in NYC.

Cyclists can now use bike lanes on the Pike Street median while construction continues on the pedestrian space and landscaping. Photo: via Flickr

Last week we highlighted the construction underway on the upgraded bike lane and pedestrian space along Allen Street. Just a bit further south, the bikeway portion of the project is already open along Pike Street south of Madison Street. Streetsblog reader Jacob-uptown snapped some great pics of the new lanes and the ongoing work. As his shots show, the new design provides lots of space for cyclists and pedestrians alike and will bring a line of greenery through the neighborhood.

In mid-July, the lack of physical separation between this bike lane and the street led to constant blockage by parked cars. Photo: Jacob-uptown via Flickr

Jacob also found some welcome improvements at the new two-way bike lane along South Street. When Streetsblog attended the opening of the new East River Waterfront Esplanade, the on-street bike lane was blocked by cars, buses, and NYPD vehicles. Now, however, orange barrels keep motor vehicles from intruding where they’re not supposed to be.

If you have some photos you want to share, tag them “Streetsblog” on Flickr to get our attention. More pics after the jump.

As Pike Street hits the East River under the Manhattan Bridge, separate bike and pedestrian spaces will merge into a shared-use path in the center of the street. Photo: Jacob-uptown via Flickr

Another view of the open but still incomplete bike lane along Pike Street. The bike lane curves away from the traffic lane at intersections to give pedestrians space to wait before crossing traffic. Photo: Jacob-uptown via Flickr.

On Allen Street between Hester and Grand, the outline of the upgraded bikeway is visible. It bends toward the median at intersections, providing a space for pedestrians to pause between the bike lane and the traffic lanes as they cross the street. Photo: Noah Kazis

Crews are currently at work turning the new pedestrian plazas and protected bike lanes on Pike Street and Allen Street into more attractive, long-term fixtures of the Lower East Side. The new construction will add landscaping and higher-quality materials, helping the local community achieve the vision developed for Allen and Pike Streets in a multi-year grassroots process.

After the first phase of this project was completed in 2009, traffic injuries dropped by 40 percent at the intersections with pedestrian plazas, according to NYC DOT. At the corner of Allen and Delancey, injuries dropped 57 percent.

Work on upgrading the improvements with better materials began on the southernmost end of the corridor, on Pike between South and Madison Streets, in February. Right now, crews have dug up the median on the block of Allen between Hester and Grand Streets, with plans to work north to Delancey. Check below the fold for a rendering of what the new sections of Allen will look like once completed.

A rendering of what the intersection of Allen and Broome will look like after construction. Image: Parks Department

Photo: Susan Kille

Construction is moving ahead on one of the summer’s blockbuster livable streets projects, the addition of new pedestrian and bicycle amenities at Grand Army Plaza. As often happens in Brooklyn, in the course of digging up the pavement the crew unearthed some remains from the previous incarnation of the street. Susan Kille posted this shot of old trolley tracks on Union Street, which were briefly exposed over the weekend.

Trolleys running on Union, Grand Army Plaza, and Prospect Park West were part of the surface rail network blanketing Brooklyn and much of Queens before streetcars exited the scene in the 1950s.

Doug at Brooklyn Spoke has a great series of shots from the era when trolleys plied PPW, there was nary a parked car in sight, and the sidewalks were more generous than they are today. It’s a fitting response to opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign who seem to think that preserving the street’s historic charm entails keeping the parking lanes exactly as they were in May, 2010.

The First Avenue bike lane extension is not yet complete, but there's enough thermoplast in some sections to set off the floating parking lane, and some New Yorkers are already taking advantage of the safe space. Photo: Noah Kazis

As Marcia Kramer informed CBS2 viewers last night, construction has begun on the extension of the First and Second Avenue bike lanes from 34th Street to 57th Street. The section of First Avenue from 34th Street to 47th Street is the only part of this project where the bike lane will be physically protected from traffic. Above 47th it becomes a plain painted bike lane and then transitions into a shared lane from 49th Street to 57th Street. So far, the lane only consists of paint — construction hasn’t started on any pedestrian islands — but some cyclists are already making use of the protected space.

More pics below the fold.

Paint and barrels mark what appears to be the site of a future pedestrian island at 34th Street and First Avenue. Photo: Noah Kazis

At the northern end of the UN tunnel, in the high 40s, the parking protected lane transitions into a buffered bike lane. Photo: Noah Kazis

At 49th Street, the bike lane turns into a shared lane. This lane is set off with a solid painted line to minimize automobile lane changes. Bike stencils should later be added below the painted chevrons, and signs will be posted to further notify drivers to share the space. Photo: Noah Kazis

Whether motorists had switched to using the floating parking lane instead of remaining curbside changed block by block. Photo: Noah Kazis

Reader Marc Norman sends this shot of sanctioned law-breaking from Kent Ave. and Broadway in North Brooklyn.

SUVs parked on the sidewalks as far as the eye can see all under the watchful eyes of NYC traffic (see scooter also on sidewalk). A cop saw me taking the photo and assured me it was OK because Bloomberg was speaking at Giando. Actually, it makes it worse.

The view south on Washington Avenue at Prospect Place. Photos: Ben Fried

It looks like DOT is exercising its option to stripe a bike lane on Washington Avenue, imposing some order on street markings from Eastern Parkway to Atlantic Avenue. Previously it wasn’t really clear whether this part of Washington was one traffic lane or two traffic lanes in each direction, leading to a lot of double-parking, dodging, weaving and speeding. Now it’s official: Washington Avenue is one lane in each direction with left-turn bays and a marked bike route (some of which is sharrows). I could be wrong, but this bike lane might be NYC’s first new route in 2011, which is shaping up to be a slower year for bike network expansion compared to the previous three years.

The bike route was described as “optional” in DOT’s presentation on the project, which Brooklyn Community Board 8 approved in April. The safety improvements on Washington include new pedestrian infrastructure for the five-point intersections at Atlantic Avenue and at Park Place. Local residents, led by architect Jeff Sherman, had gathered hundreds of signatures asking for pedestrian improvements at Atlantic.

The expanded sidewalks at the intersection of Washington, Park, and Grand Avenue will, one hopes, permanently discourage police from depositing their vehicles in the pedestrian right of way. (Full disclosure: I cross this intersection just about every day.) Crews have been carving up the asphalt there for the past two days, holding the sidewalk parkers at bay for the time being, at least at the corner marked off with construction barrels.

This was the scene outside 153 Franklin Street last night. Yes, that is a reporter’s notebook, but they’re not talking about what it’s like to bike all day in the midst of speeding cabbies, aggressive SUV drivers, and trucks a hundred times bigger than you, delivering food to impatient customers while getting demonized in the press with startling frequency. A tipster writes:

What’s this, a reporter interviewing a cyclist to get a balanced perspective on the livable streets movement?

No, they’re finding out what Dominique Strauss-Kahn had delivered for dinner.

The bike lane on Adams Street used to be located on the right side of the street, but it looks like it might be switching to the left, where drivers may be less inclined to block it.

A reader sends this shot of the freshly paved surface of Adams Street, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge just south of Johnson Street. The parking regulations have switched sides, so it looks like the old curbside bike lane on the right side of the street — a notorious double-parking zone — will be shifting over, either all the way to the left curb or between the parking lane and the moving lane. We have a request in with DOT to find out what the plan is.

A left-curb placement might make this bike lane somewhat less susceptible to chronic blockage by illegal parkers, nicely captured by Brownstoner today on a stretch of Adams closer to Tillary Street and the bridge entrance:

Photo: Brownstoner

DOT is in the process of fleshing out a substantial redesign of the Tillary and Adams approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, currently scheduled for construction sometime next year. An early concept for the project included a center median, two-way protected bike lane on one block of Adams south of Tillary. Word is that Council Member Steve Levin’s traffic task force wants to see the protected path extend all the way south to Atlantic, but funding remains less than certain.