Your revise for this account can be priceless–except insofar as it really helps to end this worse compared to careless litigation, in which particular case that almost certainly has a clear price. Rent a car Pakistan
Driver
Hi, one truck driver here that is a friend to cyclists and pedestrians. I might be in the minority, perhaps even an anomaly, but I exist.
Driver
and on a serious note, there is more space between two empty bike docks than there is between two cars typically parked on the street in Manhattan.
Driver
what are these “facts” you speak of? lol
dontyousee
Old photo!! That photo is an old photo, before they took away parking on that side of the street. Your point there, does not make sense.
Mark Walker
In addition to walking and stair climbing, subway travel while standing upright on a moving train also takes some physical effort and works a bunch of muscle groups, though it may not compare to cycling for sheer cardio. On the flipside, standing on an underventilated platform during a heat wave can be dangerous and highly unpleasant and I can understand why some would prefer cycling outside the oven.
Boris
Large parts of the city won’t be ready for bikes, or any other livability improvements, for that matter, until the suburban zoning rules that govern them are changed. Right now the city pushes an anti-urban agenda in most of Staten Island and large parts of Brooklyn and Queens. We can’t talk of bike share until we stop removing bike lanes, widening streets, and building absurd amounts of surface parking.
Anonymous
A discussion of whether to keep curbs in front of building entrances clear is a good one to have. The problem with these lawsuits is that they occurred only to block BikeShare, and not to block the line of parked cars. And as for squeezing past parked cars, it is often very difficult. I just have the cab drop me at the corner.
Boris
“my gas tax that employs gas attendants and station owners call that nothing too”
Are you saying gas station attendants get paid from public funds, despite the obscene profits of the oil companies that employ them? That’s a new one.
Daphna
It looks from the map like Turtle Bay residents were successful in getting their neighborhood deprived of docking stations. There are no docking stations on 1st Avenue north of 51st Street and only one on Sutton Place at 59th Street. Turtle Bay, already a transportation desert, must want to stay that way. They could have had this amenity in their neighborhood but they fought it. Fred Arcaro, the chair of the Transportation Committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 was especially influential in fighting bikeshare. He was also deceitful. CB6 conducted a survey of the proposed docking station locations. Fred Arcaro only forwarded the complaints to the DOT. Those who said they liked the proposed locations, or suggested a nearby location instead were not given to the DOT. Fred Arcaro only forwarded responses against the docking stations. Worse yet, he likely did not tell the DOT that he had filtered the responses so the DOT probably thought the negative feedback was the sum total of the feedback received about the proposed docking stations. Fred Arcaro also abused his power by refusing to share the responses he received with the Transportation Committee; he kept the responses to himself and made his own determination that the DOT should only see the negative feedback and did not tell the DOT that they were only seeing a partial selection of the feedback received.
Aside from Turtle Bay, I am concerned with other locations that do not have docking stations close enough together. Murray Hill has docking stations too far apart (also Fred Arcaro and CB6 territory). I would have liked to see docking stations every 3-4 blocks but there are many locations where the stations are 5-6 blocks apart.
Can we get that statement about not paving the Putnam Rail Trail documented? I would like to have hard evidence about Cohen’s real position on completing the last missing critical path piece in the 55 mile Putnam Rail Trail. The rest of the trail is paved and completed, but it’s missing a safe connection to the rail line’s original start in the Bronx. Maybe Wednesday evening at the Bronx CB 8 meeting, we can hear more about how we don’t need a 1.5 mile paved rail trail.
There are 8,000 toxic creosoted rail ties on the rail trail in Van Cortlandt Park that need to be removed. A stone dust path fails to meet required handicapped standards, even when new; and stone dust deteriorates rapidly, requiring expensive maintenance just to get back to a barely passable condition. Who has the maintenance budget for regrading mud several times a year? The soft path demanded by the runners will, in addition, be too narrow for safe use by all the people who already are using this trail.
This was originally a two track railroad, in operation for 150 years. It has more than enough room for an 8 foot running path, a 12 foot or wider paved bike path, and a separate paved walking path in the busier southern mile of the park. All this can be done without cutting any of the large trees growing along the sides of the rail right of way. There will be a full tree canopy over the entire trail, just as in the Westchester and Putnam County sections. Far too much misinformation has been presented over this short but critical former railroad line.
Kevin, both you and Nichole picked a wrong fallacy.
Subways hardly count as a sedentary travel mode compared to driving. New Yorkers walk far more to and from stations than drivers walk to their cars, and at most stations, we always have to walk up and down the stairs. Whether measured by calories burned or cardiovascular stress, NY straphangers and NY cyclists both get a better than US average workout.
Nichole appears to be trying to compare fatalities on the subways with cycling fatalities, in an attempt to clarify leaving pedestrians out of her traffic death position. This misses the key point about subway riders; it’s not their deaths on the trains that’s relevant, but their deaths on the streets while walking to and from the trains that relates to cyclists being killed on the streets. It’s not on the subway vs on a bike, but on your feet outside the subway, vs on the bike that should be measured. What Charlie and others keep pointing out is that the NYC streets are not safe for anyone.
Getting fatality “rates” for the subways is reasonably accurate – there are farebox counts to match the fatalities. But getting useful “rates” for bicycle and even for pedestrian deaths is very difficult. There are no reliable detailed user and exposure counts for cycling and too damned few for pedestrians. Body counts we have, but rates we really don’t.
But Charlie, I and a lot of people, are shocked that the numbers for pedestrians killed while standing on the sidewalk and the numbers of cyclists killed in this city are not very different. You’re standing on the sidewalk and the cars are still coming after you. And then the NYPD tells your next of kin that it was just a tragic accident.
Kind of like Friendly Fire in a combat zone.
(side point – I did a tour in Vietnam and tend to drop terms like Body Count and Friendly Fire liberally, as appropriate.)
There are 3 key factors needed to improve safety: Engineering; Education; and Enforcement.
The DOT has the mandate for engineering, and they have been re-engineering the hell out of NYC’s streets. What DOT does not have is a mandate for education or enforcement. DOT has been performing a heroic role in education, but they don’t have the authority to do what’s needed.
The NYS DMV should be the first stop in driver and traffic education, but if you look at the handful of questions about bikes and peds in the drivers test, it’s obvious they don’t take non-motorized modes seriously. The state education law mandated bicycle traffic safety education in schools; but when has anyone seen any such classes?
Finally, enforcement. That should be the role of the NYPD. Should be is the operative word here. The NYPD is AWOL. Once again, the DOT has shouldered the burden of trying to enforce bicycle food delivery safety laws, by going after the restaurants directly. You have noticed how many delivery cyclists have started wearing brand new safety vests with the name of the restaurant on them? This wasn’t because of anything the NYPD did.
Will Bike Share be the “cause” of more cyclists deaths. I don’t think so. Though some riders will crash, and some may even be killed, I don’t think it will be “caused” by Bike Share.
(once you ride one of those bikes, you find out you can’t accelerate, you only gather momentum slowly. they are hard to get into trouble.)
Will Bike Share be the “cause” of educating cyclists and preventing crashes and deaths. Actually, to some extent, yes it will.
Bike Share and DOT have teamed with Bike New York to use the BNY education staff to teach bike safety classed targeted to the Bike Share program. This is one of the bike safety projects BNY is doing with the money raised from 5 Boro Bike Tour rider fees/donations. Remember the court battle BNY had with the NYPD to keep the police for charging for the policing of a city sponsored event. You may recall that BNY won.
As noted by others, every increase in the numbers of bikes on the streets creates a better cycling environment by enhancing drivers awareness to cooperating with cyclists on the roadways. Several thousand more cyclists on the roads at all times – the Bike Share riders – will add to the cycling presence. This awareness of smaller, and usually slower, road users by drivers rubs off on drivers noticing pedestrians better, particularly at intersections. More traffic safety. Synergy – a wonderful word that applies here.
But what about those truck drivers? Well, what about them? We still have work to do.
There is a lot more to bicycle traffic safety than throwing down a series of one line zingers wrapped around three Parisian fatalities.
Daphna
When bike-share comes to Long Island City in Queens (hopefully very soon!) the outer roadway lane on the south side of the Queensboro Bridge will need to be reclaimed from motorists and given to pedestrians. The outer roadway lane on the north side of the Queensboro Bridge was already reclaimed from motorists and and is currently a shared bike/ped path. However, with increasing bike volumes, that lane will need to be for bikes only because there will be too much bike/ped conflict. The mirror lane like it on the south side of the bridge needs to be given to pedestrians. I hope there will be the political will to do this. The outer roadway lanes work perfectly for bike or pedestrian use. They are each a single lane that is already separated from all the other lanes.
It looks like the map on citibikenyc.com was updated yesterday. It now includes the nine Williamsburg stations, as well as a station at Grand Army Plaza & Central Park South. It also moved a station from 60th and Broadway to Broadway between 60th & 61st.
Absolutely. My only bike accident came from hitting a stretch of road that may as well have come from post-war Iraq. Even at an extremely leisurely speed, the entire bike just spun out of control from the asphault mogul course.
Anonymous
Right, and we should not talk about immediately feasible measures that might reduce local crime because what we really want is World Peace.
I agree with your laundry list, but it’s not something that the DOT or Citi Bike can do. What you want probably requires rewriting of laws at various levels, approval by city, state and federal agencies, and the consensus of hundreds of politicians and officials. So yes, fight for it, but don’t hold your breath.
On the other hand, Citi Bike could make a better effort at educating their customers about defensive cycling today.
Anonymous
Here’s hoping that the concerns for the safety of citi bikers, hastens the implementation of dedicated bike lanes on fifth and sixth avenue. It’s way over due.
Daniel
58,630 deaths due to cartdiovascular disease in NYS in 2008. Assume About 1/3 of the state’s population is in the city — so about 19,500 deaths in the city due to cardiovascular disease, or 243 deaths per 100,000. If you assume the average bike share user lowers her risk of cardiovascular disease 10%, that means every 100,000 bike share users will save about 24 lives per year. Paris has about 100,000 daily usage, lets be generous to Gelinas and assume that means 3 deaths per 100,000 bike share users. This means every 100,000 bike share users save a net of 21 bike share users lives per year.
To put it in a different perspective, if Gelinas’ article scares an average of 10,000 bike share users away for the next 5 years of the program, she will be responsible for over 10 deaths from cardiovascular disease alone. I don’t think Ms. Gelinas is really trying to kill people, she just didn’t think this through.
Anonymous
The Citi Bike is amazing cause its built in Canada. lol A great design perfect for short commutes in a city. It will be so popular that the main complaint will be lack of bikes or of empty slots.
Bronxite
I didn’t realize how this guy was a weasel until I saw this answer about the Putnam Trail and heard about his debate performance in Riverdale this evening.
Here he says the trail should be “upgraded,” letting the cycling community think he supports them.
But at the debate, he said he opposes paving the trail and wants it to be “stone dust” instead. So he’s giving a very different story to the local NIMBYs who are using bogus “environmental” concerns to try to derail the improvements to the greenway.
We have enough of this sort in the City Council already!
ADN
Julia and Amber are irrelevant. They are nothing but cannon fodder for the captains and generals who edit and publish the Post. This is the Post’s silly little War Against Bikes and Julia and Amber are mere foot soldiers. It’s entirely possible that the story that was published this morning is not even remotely similar to the story that Julia and Amber submitted to their editors yesterday afternoon. Julia and Amber may very well be in a position where they have no choice but to allow some angry Australian baby-boomer editor to destroy their reputations as journalists.
Ben Kintisch
Great points. An ambitious laundry list, for sure, but all admirable goals. Let’s roll up our proverbial sleeves!
The City of New York doesn’t license drivers, and it doesn’t register vehicles. It seems to me therefore that the city has an uphill battle to change the composition of the commercial vehicle fleet to decrease the number of tractor-trailers.
What the city can do, and in general fails to do, is emphasize the pure danger of trucks as the Velib’ system does. For a French-language example (the pictograms are ace, however) see here: http://blog.velib.paris.fr/blog/2013/02/11/angles-morts-2/
The city bike map has no such pictograms, and the city biking-etiquette handout has no such pictograms. Instead of discussing the dangers to bicyclists–trucks and crappy pavement–they discuss the dangers that bicyclists pose to others. Same thing with TA’s biking rules program.
The only thing I’ve seen in this line is the truck that DOT brings to Summer Streets to demonstrate the blind spots and limited visibility.
Gelinas wrote:
“Statistically, you are undeniably safer on the subway than on a bike.”
Kevin’s comment:
Really? I am quite prepared to deny it. The cardiovascular health benefits to transportation by cycling rather than a sedentary method such as the subway are much greater than any crime risk due to criminal motor vehicle operators.
If we look at the actual data, we are “undeniably” safer on a bike than on the subway.
Larry Littlefield
How about a general warning, that motor vehicles can kill you at any time with little care and no consequences? It could be applied to all cyclists, and pedestrians, not just Citibikes.
Pedestrians should be taught NOT to cross with the light. but to make sure traffic has stopped, will not start, and there is a screen of vehicles blocking those coming from behind. Then rush across rapidly in terror.
That is in fact what I taught my kids. Ignore the walk sign, make sure vehicles have stopped, and look back for drivers rushing around the corner.
The real safety measure would be to ban driving, walking, and bicycling between 11 pm and 4 am, based on what I read. Bad things happen then.
Daphna
Thank you pwbnyc for this well written statement. I like it when someone else writes what I had been thinking.
Mark Walker
As Mae West used to say, “goodness had nothing to do with it.”
anon
“Hear that? It’s the sound of tabloid narratives and NIMBY lawsuits deflating.”
Sadly, no. Neither party is interested in facts or reality. It’s about inventing controversy to sell papers for the former and hurt feelings or something for the latter.
Anonymous
Ah, I see that now. Although that’s funny – it has the unintended consequence of suggesting that taxpayers are paying for a public program that in a perfect world, they should be paying for.
Anonymous
He’s saying that Citibank was bailed out with Taxpayer funds, thus, the taxpayer is paying for this. Talk about convoluted.
James Reefer
I’d vote for him.
Ian Turner
One major thing I think is missing in this debate: Cycling is healthy, even if it does carry some risk of injury. Whether velib’ added three extra deaths or not, it’s safe to say it prevents more than three deaths every year from heart disease, cancer, etc. The health benefits of cycling are generally understood to outweigh the health risks of cycling by somewhere between 20:1 and 100:1.
Daphna
Nicole Gelinas has been on streetsblog having a dialogue with streetsblog readers about flaws they found in her methodology and the conclusions she reached in her article. Where are Julia March and Amber Sutherland? Shouldn’t those two NY Post reporters be here trying to explain their reporting?
I don’t know, big trucks certainly get in the way of personal vehicles as well as being dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians. It might not be that far of a stretch for the Post to demonize them. After all, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Anonymous
I say Nicole here rather than Gelinas in a spirit of collegiality, not condescension.
Nicole Gelinas’s original column had two main points: Warning stickers or similar communications measures will help protect NYC bike sharers against turning heavy trucks that killed Velib users early on. And the steep rise in Central Business District (CBD) cycling from bike share statistically portends a rash of bike share fatalities.
I challenged Nicole on both points. If I went too far in subjecting the first argument to ridicule, I apologize. Perhaps my 20+ years storming the barricades on endangerment of pedestrians and cyclists alike led to my getting too edgy on that score. I also thought the (deserved) compliments I offered to Nicole inoculated me, at least to some extent. But I’m unshaken in insisting that the warning approach is both futile and a diversion from the main event of confronting and arresting dangerous behaviors by drivers.
On the numbers: Nicole’s comparison base of 31,000 cyclists (actually trips, since she compares them to bike share trips maxing at 27,500) may have State or City imprimatur, but it’s a screenline-crossing-only figure. As such it can’t come even close to being a proper metric for CBD cycling trips, as it excludes trips that never cross the screenline: trips like my daily commute, my wife’s, many of yours if you live in Manhattan south of 50th Street, most messengering, virtually all CBD food delivery, and most utilitarian non-commute trips to CBD doctors, schools, galleries, movies, restaurants and stores.
Twenty-one years ago, for an Appendix to the Bicycle Blueprint, I took a stab at extrapolating from screenline trips to estimate all NYC cycling trips, and I’ve kept at it ever since. My methodology is laid out in the spreadsheet I linked to in my post, in the seventh graf. It suggests, as I said, that several hundred thousand cycle trips starting, ending, or remaining in the CBD take place on a typical day. That may or may not be right, but I believe I’ve gone deeper than did Nicole to approximate how much CBD cycling takes place now, which statistically gives rise to the 2-3 CBD cycling deaths each year.
All that’s left is to reference the cogent comment to my post by “Guest” pointing out that bike sharers are more likely to be competent cyclists than “newbies” as I had assumed. This belies Nicole’s alarmism still further.
Daphna
I commend Nicole Gelinas for being on streetsblog reading and commenting intelligently. Just as she is asking others to be open to her point of view, I hope she is open too to hearing other points. At least a dialog is happening and that is good.
I agree with JarekAF that focusing specifically on giving bikeshare cyclists instructions to watch for trucks misses the forest for the trees. This warning to cyclists can be one tool, but to me it strikes me as similar to those silly LOOK signs that the DOT painted on crosswalks where motorists hit pedestrians. It puts the onus on those in danger instead of the drivers who are creating the danger. What is needed is a comprehensive approach on many fronts to stop the carnage on the streets including but not limited to:
1) East River bridge tolls and congestion price to reduce the volume of traffic and road rage
2) More streets metered and higher meter rates to increase parking turnover and lessen the driving around time searching and the dangerous behaviors drivers do to get a free or under-priced spot
3) Red light cameras placed abundantly
4) Speed cameras placed adundantly
5) New laws that criminalize more types of dangerous driver behavior
6) Far greater enforcement by NYPD of existing motor vehicle laws
7) Far greater application of existing laws by the District Attorney Strong automatic penalties for injuring or killing
9) Automatic impoundment of any vehicle involved in an injury or death until full conclusion of the investigation, and until the driver has his/her license back, with the driver paying for the tow charge and for the per day storage fee
10) Automatic suspension of the license of any driver who injured or killed
11) Create many more 20 mph zones
12) Decrease criteria for 20mph zones so that areas of Manhattan on the grid can qualify
13) Continued re-allocation of street space to pedestrians, cyclists and commercial vehicles
14) Continued narrowing of traffic lanes down to 10′ wide (many are 11′ or 12′ or more); narrow lanes encourage motorists to drive within the speed limits
15) Create many more streets that have physical barriers (curb bulb outs, pedestrian islands, speed bumps) which are street designs that are self-enforcing of the speed limit
16) Put more streets on road diets
17) Replace more parking with parklets (pop up cafes)
18) Build out the network of protected bike lanes; make sure all future lanes are wider to handle future growth
19) Dedicate more money to mass transit (so drivers have other better options for getting around); roll out much more SBS routes; have the courage to do actual BRT
20) Do a major PR campaign to get drivers to yield to pedestrians and cyclists at all times
21) Pedestrianize more blocks
22) Allow E bikes. Roll back the laws against them
23) Roll back the laws against commercial cyclists (cycling should be encouraged and not discouraged which is what these laws aim to do – they are not about safety)
24) Roll back the laws encumbering the DOT from installing bike infrastructure more quickly
25) etc. etc. etc.
A fruitful and much-needed safety education campaign if ever I heard of one! But unlikely to drive page hits.
JK
Nicole makes a good point about educating future bike share cyclists about dangerous trucks. Is there an effort underway to educate NYPD about the danger of big trucks, and get them to actually enforce the rules against oversize trucks? There is a 55 foot limit on tractor trailers in NYC, but 63ft and longer trucks are common — Rite Aide and Duane Reade both use oversize trucks for their everyday deliveries to stores, and have been for years. Does management at these companies know their NYC delivery trucks are illegal?
SpotCycle is still claiming they will support CitiBike. We’ll see next week.
NYFM
And as I will keep on telling people here and elsewhere: the city can and will be found liable for not citing enough drivers for speeding where it counts- midtown. Forget about a drop of 7% citywide: the critical info is WHERE were those speeding tickets issued?
Anonymous
Is anyone having trouble with the Android app? It shows a fraction of all the stations, and none in the East Village, Lower East Side, or above 14th St. Overall, the map and stations seem really slow to populate. I tried the iOS app on an iPad, and the map and all the stations appeared immediately.
The facts about Paris traffic data post-bikeshare may be interesting facts, but you see how many words they take up (“fit in” means, literally, space on a page — it doesn’t mean thematically or anything). I included the number about bike deaths in Paris falling after the initial spike, however, which goes to your general point about traffic calming and driver/cyclist learning.That was the most relevant collective traffic-calming point to the topic at hand.
I picked Paris because, as I noted several times, Paris is the only city relevant to us in terms of population density. (Boston and Washington are just nowhere; London is closer but not by much, and also problematic because of different urban layout).
Cyclists are being singled out for instruction because bikeshare is new! We are adding a huge number of new cyclists unfamiliar to the streets via this one city policy. We are not, by contrast, adding a huge number of pedestrians to the streets.
Tone is a funny thing. You complain about the tone, yet you can’t find a specific example of a poor tone in the piece. The piece is very dry tonally. There is no nice way to gloss over the fact that people died, nor should here be.
And btw, no one wants to read a 2,000-word article that jumps around from topic to topic. This is not “semi-literacy,” as at least one Streetsblog commenter likes to term non-”expert” readers; this is just people having lives and not wanting to be bored silly.
I would like to see articles on all sorts of topics in all sorts of venues, including traffic calming. But one person writes one article about one narrow topic at one time.
Many people have already addressed the traffic-calming issue. I would add nothing to parroting what people like Komanoff have already said on this important topic. If experts on the traffic-calming aspect of the topic want to write for broader outlets on this particular topic, then they should! I’m not simply going to repeat other people.
To my knowledge, though, nobody in the New York market (before my piece) had addressed what we can learn from the recent history of the city closest to us in density — as determined by NYC DOT — in terms of cyclist safety. This piece, thus, filled a void.
It’s not advocacy for or against anything — it’s just reporting something that is potentially useful.
The facts about Paris traffic data post-bikeshare may be interesting facts, but you see how many words they take up (“fit in” means, literally, space on a page — it doesn’t mean thematically or anything). I included the number about bike deaths in Paris falling after the initial spike, however, which goes to your general point about traffic calming and driver/cyclist learning.That was the most relevant collective traffic-calming point to the topic at hand.
I picked Paris because, as I noted several times, Paris is the only city relevant to us in terms of population density. (Boston and Washington are just nowhere; London is closer but not by much, and also problematic because of different urban layout).
Cyclists are being singled out for instruction because bikeshare is new! We are adding a huge number of new cyclists unfamiliar to the streets via this one city policy. We are not, by contrast, adding a huge number of pedestrians to the streets.
Tone is a funny thing. You complain about the tone, yet you can’t find a specific example of a poor tone in the piece. The piece is very dry tonally. There is no nice way to gloss over the fact that people died, nor should here be.
And btw, no one wants to read a 2,000-word article that jumps around from topic to topic. This is not “semi-literacy,” as at least one Streetsblog commenter likes to term non-”expert” readers; this is just people having lives and not wanting to be bored silly.
I would like to see articles on all sorts of topics in all sorts of venues, including traffic calming. But one person writes one article about one narrow topic at one time.
Many people have already addressed the traffic-calming issue. I would add nothing to parroting what people like Komanoff have already said on this important topic. If experts on the traffic-calming aspect of the topic want to write for broader outlets on this particular topic, then they should! I’m not simply going to repeat other people.
To my knowledge, though, nobody in the New York market (before my piece) had addressed what we can learn from the recent history of the city closest to us in density — as determined by NYC DOT — in terms of cyclist safety. This piece, thus, filled a void.
It’s not advocacy for or against anything — it’s just reporting something that is potentially useful.
• First the riders would be too fat for the bikes. Then they would be too small and weak to handle heavy cruiser bikes. Now they’re on the brink of death.
We’ve heard from the tabloids, what are they saying on teevee? I’m sure Marcia Kramer is working on a segment about the terrorist threat they pose.
• First the riders would be too fat for the bikes. Then they would be too small and weak to handle heavy cruiser bikes. Now they’re on the brink of death.
We’ve heard from the tabloids, what are they saying on teevee? I’m sure Marcia Kramer is working on a segment about the terrorist threat they pose.
Anonymous
Lots of problems with this:
A) Where’s your evidence that women and older people are, statistically speaking, novice cyclists in Paris? Here maybe. There? I’d like to see the primary source that supports any assertion along those lines.
B) This is claim gets at the heart of the problem with your initial article: “All of this increase was due to bikeshare.” No: the increase was due to additional drivers killing additional cyclists. That these deaths happened on bikeshare bikes does not necessarily mean the bikeshare system itself was responsible. And all the other evidence you gather to help substantiate that point does not give you reason to be so confident in this assertion. You claim here you won’t make any broad, unsubstantiated generalizations, but this most assuredly is one.
C) Let’s pretend, though, that any person on a bikeshare bike is killed by that system. Does that mean that the death last October was “due to” bikeshare? Or is the system off the hook now?
D) The absolutely singular causality you imagine here is . . . kinda scary. Even in your original article you don’t pretend it’s just a matter of “put a warning about trucks on a bike and the carnage will end.” But that’s the only trick you have up your sleeve here.
E) In your original article, you also acknowledge that drivers of large vehicles were educated about how to operate around bikes. But you didn’t (even in that reportorial way) suggest that happen here as well. And in this post, you skip past it once again, moving on to enforcement rather than education: “Of course, the city should also force truckers to follow the rules of the road, as he suggests.” This is part and parcel of your imagined singular causality: one notice, one result.
F) Were there no changes to road design concurrent with the release of bike share? Were drivers having to accommodate new traffic patterns in any of the locations? Could the change during that initial period not be due to the world’s most powerful notice about turning trucks but rather to increasing experience (and education) on the part of drivers of large, dangerous vehicles? All questions you skip past–with a confidence that belies your “just the facts, ma’am” response.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
sara baloch
Your revise for this account can be priceless–except insofar as it really helps to end this worse compared to careless litigation, in which particular case that almost certainly has a clear price. Rent a car Pakistan
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Driver
Hi, one truck driver here that is a friend to cyclists and pedestrians. I might be in the minority, perhaps even an anomaly, but I exist.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Driver
and on a serious note, there is more space between two empty bike docks than there is between two cars typically parked on the street in Manhattan.
in response to FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano: Bike-Share Racks Are Not In Our Way
Driver
what are these “facts” you speak of? lol
in response to FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano: Bike-Share Racks Are Not In Our Way
dontyousee
Old photo!! That photo is an old photo, before they took away parking on that side of the street. Your point there, does not make sense.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Mark Walker
In addition to walking and stair climbing, subway travel while standing upright on a moving train also takes some physical effort and works a bunch of muscle groups, though it may not compare to cycling for sheer cardio. On the flipside, standing on an underventilated platform during a heat wave can be dangerous and highly unpleasant and I can understand why some would prefer cycling outside the oven.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Boris
Large parts of the city won’t be ready for bikes, or any other livability improvements, for that matter, until the suburban zoning rules that govern them are changed. Right now the city pushes an anti-urban agenda in most of Staten Island and large parts of Brooklyn and Queens. We can’t talk of bike share until we stop removing bike lanes, widening streets, and building absurd amounts of surface parking.
in response to Sadik-Khan: NYC Bike-Share Will Launch May 27
Anonymous
A discussion of whether to keep curbs in front of building entrances clear is a good one to have. The problem with these lawsuits is that they occurred only to block BikeShare, and not to block the line of parked cars. And as for squeezing past parked cars, it is often very difficult. I just have the cab drop me at the corner.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Boris
“my gas tax that employs gas attendants and station owners call that nothing too”
Are you saying gas station attendants get paid from public funds, despite the obscene profits of the oil companies that employ them? That’s a new one.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Daphna
It looks from the map like Turtle Bay residents were successful in getting their neighborhood deprived of docking stations. There are no docking stations on 1st Avenue north of 51st Street and only one on Sutton Place at 59th Street. Turtle Bay, already a transportation desert, must want to stay that way. They could have had this amenity in their neighborhood but they fought it. Fred Arcaro, the chair of the Transportation Committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 was especially influential in fighting bikeshare. He was also deceitful. CB6 conducted a survey of the proposed docking station locations. Fred Arcaro only forwarded the complaints to the DOT. Those who said they liked the proposed locations, or suggested a nearby location instead were not given to the DOT. Fred Arcaro only forwarded responses against the docking stations. Worse yet, he likely did not tell the DOT that he had filtered the responses so the DOT probably thought the negative feedback was the sum total of the feedback received about the proposed docking stations. Fred Arcaro also abused his power by refusing to share the responses he received with the Transportation Committee; he kept the responses to himself and made his own determination that the DOT should only see the negative feedback and did not tell the DOT that they were only seeing a partial selection of the feedback received.
Aside from Turtle Bay, I am concerned with other locations that do not have docking stations close enough together. Murray Hill has docking stations too far apart (also Fred Arcaro and CB6 territory). I would have liked to see docking stations every 3-4 blocks but there are many locations where the stations are 5-6 blocks apart.
in response to Eyes on the Street: Bike-Share Stations Come to Williamsburg
Steven Faust
Can we get that statement about not paving the Putnam Rail Trail documented? I would like to have hard evidence about Cohen’s real position on completing the last missing critical path piece in the 55 mile Putnam Rail Trail. The rest of the trail is paved and completed, but it’s missing a safe connection to the rail line’s original start in the Bronx. Maybe Wednesday evening at the Bronx CB 8 meeting, we can hear more about how we don’t need a 1.5 mile paved rail trail.
There are 8,000 toxic creosoted rail ties on the rail trail in Van Cortlandt Park that need to be removed. A stone dust path fails to meet required handicapped standards, even when new; and stone dust deteriorates rapidly, requiring expensive maintenance just to get back to a barely passable condition. Who has the maintenance budget for regrading mud several times a year? The soft path demanded by the runners will, in addition, be too narrow for safe use by all the people who already are using this trail.
This was originally a two track railroad, in operation for 150 years. It has more than enough room for an 8 foot running path, a 12 foot or wider paved bike path, and a separate paved walking path in the busier southern mile of the park. All this can be done without cutting any of the large trees growing along the sides of the rail right of way. There will be a full tree canopy over the entire trail, just as in the Westchester and Putnam County sections. Far too much misinformation has been presented over this short but critical former railroad line.
in response to City Council Candidates on the Issues: Andrew Cohen, District 11
Steven Faust
Kevin, both you and Nichole picked a wrong fallacy.
Subways hardly count as a sedentary travel mode compared to driving. New Yorkers walk far more to and from stations than drivers walk to their cars, and at most stations, we always have to walk up and down the stairs. Whether measured by calories burned or cardiovascular stress, NY straphangers and NY cyclists both get a better than US average workout.
Nichole appears to be trying to compare fatalities on the subways with cycling fatalities, in an attempt to clarify leaving pedestrians out of her traffic death position. This misses the key point about subway riders; it’s not their deaths on the trains that’s relevant, but their deaths on the streets while walking to and from the trains that relates to cyclists being killed on the streets. It’s not on the subway vs on a bike, but on your feet outside the subway, vs on the bike that should be measured. What Charlie and others keep pointing out is that the NYC streets are not safe for anyone.
Getting fatality “rates” for the subways is reasonably accurate – there are farebox counts to match the fatalities. But getting useful “rates” for bicycle and even for pedestrian deaths is very difficult. There are no reliable detailed user and exposure counts for cycling and too damned few for pedestrians. Body counts we have, but rates we really don’t.
But Charlie, I and a lot of people, are shocked that the numbers for pedestrians killed while standing on the sidewalk and the numbers of cyclists killed in this city are not very different. You’re standing on the sidewalk and the cars are still coming after you. And then the NYPD tells your next of kin that it was just a tragic accident.
Kind of like Friendly Fire in a combat zone.
(side point – I did a tour in Vietnam and tend to drop terms like Body Count and Friendly Fire liberally, as appropriate.)
There are 3 key factors needed to improve safety: Engineering; Education; and Enforcement.
The DOT has the mandate for engineering, and they have been re-engineering the hell out of NYC’s streets. What DOT does not have is a mandate for education or enforcement. DOT has been performing a heroic role in education, but they don’t have the authority to do what’s needed.
The NYS DMV should be the first stop in driver and traffic education, but if you look at the handful of questions about bikes and peds in the drivers test, it’s obvious they don’t take non-motorized modes seriously. The state education law mandated bicycle traffic safety education in schools; but when has anyone seen any such classes?
Finally, enforcement. That should be the role of the NYPD. Should be is the operative word here. The NYPD is AWOL. Once again, the DOT has shouldered the burden of trying to enforce bicycle food delivery safety laws, by going after the restaurants directly. You have noticed how many delivery cyclists have started wearing brand new safety vests with the name of the restaurant on them? This wasn’t because of anything the NYPD did.
Will Bike Share be the “cause” of more cyclists deaths. I don’t think so. Though some riders will crash, and some may even be killed, I don’t think it will be “caused” by Bike Share.
(once you ride one of those bikes, you find out you can’t accelerate, you only gather momentum slowly. they are hard to get into trouble.)
Will Bike Share be the “cause” of educating cyclists and preventing crashes and deaths. Actually, to some extent, yes it will.
Bike Share and DOT have teamed with Bike New York to use the BNY education staff to teach bike safety classed targeted to the Bike Share program. This is one of the bike safety projects BNY is doing with the money raised from 5 Boro Bike Tour rider fees/donations. Remember the court battle BNY had with the NYPD to keep the police for charging for the policing of a city sponsored event. You may recall that BNY won.
As noted by others, every increase in the numbers of bikes on the streets creates a better cycling environment by enhancing drivers awareness to cooperating with cyclists on the roadways. Several thousand more cyclists on the roads at all times – the Bike Share riders – will add to the cycling presence. This awareness of smaller, and usually slower, road users by drivers rubs off on drivers noticing pedestrians better, particularly at intersections. More traffic safety. Synergy – a wonderful word that applies here.
But what about those truck drivers? Well, what about them? We still have work to do.
There is a lot more to bicycle traffic safety than throwing down a series of one line zingers wrapped around three Parisian fatalities.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Daphna
When bike-share comes to Long Island City in Queens (hopefully very soon!) the outer roadway lane on the south side of the Queensboro Bridge will need to be reclaimed from motorists and given to pedestrians. The outer roadway lane on the north side of the Queensboro Bridge was already reclaimed from motorists and and is currently a shared bike/ped path. However, with increasing bike volumes, that lane will need to be for bikes only because there will be too much bike/ped conflict. The mirror lane like it on the south side of the bridge needs to be given to pedestrians. I hope there will be the political will to do this. The outer roadway lanes work perfectly for bike or pedestrian use. They are each a single lane that is already separated from all the other lanes.
in response to Eyes on the Street: Bike-Share Stations Come to Williamsburg
Jeremy Lenz
It looks like the map on citibikenyc.com was updated yesterday. It now includes the nine Williamsburg stations, as well as a station at Grand Army Plaza & Central Park South. It also moved a station from 60th and Broadway to Broadway between 60th & 61st.
in response to Eyes on the Street: Bike-Share Stations Come to Williamsburg
MFS
Kudos to Gelinas for responding
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Keith Williams
Please learn how our roads are financed before suggesting non-drivers pay zero.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Ryan Brenizer
Absolutely. My only bike accident came from hitting a stretch of road that may as well have come from post-war Iraq. Even at an extremely leisurely speed, the entire bike just spun out of control from the asphault mogul course.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Anonymous
Right, and we should not talk about immediately feasible measures that might reduce local crime because what we really want is World Peace.
I agree with your laundry list, but it’s not something that the DOT or Citi Bike can do. What you want probably requires rewriting of laws at various levels, approval by city, state and federal agencies, and the consensus of hundreds of politicians and officials. So yes, fight for it, but don’t hold your breath.
On the other hand, Citi Bike could make a better effort at educating their customers about defensive cycling today.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Anonymous
Here’s hoping that the concerns for the safety of citi bikers, hastens the implementation of dedicated bike lanes on fifth and sixth avenue. It’s way over due.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Daniel
58,630 deaths due to cartdiovascular disease in NYS in 2008. Assume About 1/3 of the state’s population is in the city — so about 19,500 deaths in the city due to cardiovascular disease, or 243 deaths per 100,000. If you assume the average bike share user lowers her risk of cardiovascular disease 10%, that means every 100,000 bike share users will save about 24 lives per year. Paris has about 100,000 daily usage, lets be generous to Gelinas and assume that means 3 deaths per 100,000 bike share users. This means every 100,000 bike share users save a net of 21 bike share users lives per year.
To put it in a different perspective, if Gelinas’ article scares an average of 10,000 bike share users away for the next 5 years of the program, she will be responsible for over 10 deaths from cardiovascular disease alone. I don’t think Ms. Gelinas is really trying to kill people, she just didn’t think this through.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Anonymous
The Citi Bike is amazing cause its built in Canada. lol A great design perfect for short commutes in a city. It will be so popular that the main complaint will be lack of bikes or of empty slots.
in response to Citi Bikes Are Not Fixies, and Most People Will Be Happy With That
Bronxite
I didn’t realize how this guy was a weasel until I saw this answer about the Putnam Trail and heard about his debate performance in Riverdale this evening.
Here he says the trail should be “upgraded,” letting the cycling community think he supports them.
But at the debate, he said he opposes paving the trail and wants it to be “stone dust” instead. So he’s giving a very different story to the local NIMBYs who are using bogus “environmental” concerns to try to derail the improvements to the greenway.
We have enough of this sort in the City Council already!
in response to City Council Candidates on the Issues: Andrew Cohen, District 11
ADN
Julia and Amber are irrelevant. They are nothing but cannon fodder for the captains and generals who edit and publish the Post. This is the Post’s silly little War Against Bikes and Julia and Amber are mere foot soldiers. It’s entirely possible that the story that was published this morning is not even remotely similar to the story that Julia and Amber submitted to their editors yesterday afternoon. Julia and Amber may very well be in a position where they have no choice but to allow some angry Australian baby-boomer editor to destroy their reputations as journalists.
in response to FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano: Bike-Share Racks Are Not In Our Way
Ben Kintisch
Great points. An ambitious laundry list, for sure, but all admirable goals. Let’s roll up our proverbial sleeves!
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Jonathan R
The City of New York doesn’t license drivers, and it doesn’t register vehicles. It seems to me therefore that the city has an uphill battle to change the composition of the commercial vehicle fleet to decrease the number of tractor-trailers.
What the city can do, and in general fails to do, is emphasize the pure danger of trucks as the Velib’ system does. For a French-language example (the pictograms are ace, however) see here: http://blog.velib.paris.fr/blog/2013/02/11/angles-morts-2/
The city bike map has no such pictograms, and the city biking-etiquette handout has no such pictograms. Instead of discussing the dangers to bicyclists–trucks and crappy pavement–they discuss the dangers that bicyclists pose to others. Same thing with TA’s biking rules program.
The only thing I’ve seen in this line is the truck that DOT brings to Summer Streets to demonstrate the blind spots and limited visibility.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Kevin Love
Gelinas wrote:
“Statistically, you are undeniably safer on the subway than on a bike.”
Kevin’s comment:
Really? I am quite prepared to deny it. The cardiovascular health benefits to transportation by cycling rather than a sedentary method such as the subway are much greater than any crime risk due to criminal motor vehicle operators.
If we look at the actual data, we are “undeniably” safer on a bike than on the subway.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Larry Littlefield
How about a general warning, that motor vehicles can kill you at any time with little care and no consequences? It could be applied to all cyclists, and pedestrians, not just Citibikes.
Pedestrians should be taught NOT to cross with the light. but to make sure traffic has stopped, will not start, and there is a screen of vehicles blocking those coming from behind. Then rush across rapidly in terror.
That is in fact what I taught my kids. Ignore the walk sign, make sure vehicles have stopped, and look back for drivers rushing around the corner.
The real safety measure would be to ban driving, walking, and bicycling between 11 pm and 4 am, based on what I read. Bad things happen then.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Daphna
Thank you pwbnyc for this well written statement. I like it when someone else writes what I had been thinking.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Mark Walker
As Mae West used to say, “goodness had nothing to do with it.”
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
anon
“Hear that? It’s the sound of tabloid narratives and NIMBY lawsuits deflating.”
Sadly, no. Neither party is interested in facts or reality. It’s about inventing controversy to sell papers for the former and hurt feelings or something for the latter.
in response to FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano: Bike-Share Racks Are Not In Our Way
Anonymous
Ah, I see that now. Although that’s funny – it has the unintended consequence of suggesting that taxpayers are paying for a public program that in a perfect world, they should be paying for.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Anonymous
He’s saying that Citibank was bailed out with Taxpayer funds, thus, the taxpayer is paying for this. Talk about convoluted.
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
James Reefer
I’d vote for him.
in response to City Council Candidates on the Issues: Andrew Cohen, District 11
Ian Turner
One major thing I think is missing in this debate: Cycling is healthy, even if it does carry some risk of injury. Whether velib’ added three extra deaths or not, it’s safe to say it prevents more than three deaths every year from heart disease, cancer, etc. The health benefits of cycling are generally understood to outweigh the health risks of cycling by somewhere between 20:1 and 100:1.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Daphna
Nicole Gelinas has been on streetsblog having a dialogue with streetsblog readers about flaws they found in her methodology and the conclusions she reached in her article. Where are Julia March and Amber Sutherland? Shouldn’t those two NY Post reporters be here trying to explain their reporting?
in response to FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano: Bike-Share Racks Are Not In Our Way
Ian Turner
Well, there is this: http://gothamist.com/2011/02/07/cop_tickets_cyclist_for_not_wearing.php
in response to New York Post Serving as Stenographers for Bike-Share Litigants [Updated]
Matt BK
I don’t know, big trucks certainly get in the way of personal vehicles as well as being dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians. It might not be that far of a stretch for the Post to demonize them. After all, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Anonymous
I say Nicole here rather than Gelinas in a spirit of collegiality, not condescension.
Nicole Gelinas’s original column had two main points: Warning stickers or similar communications measures will help protect NYC bike sharers against turning heavy trucks that killed Velib users early on. And the steep rise in Central Business District (CBD) cycling from bike share statistically portends a rash of bike share fatalities.
I challenged Nicole on both points. If I went too far in subjecting the first argument to ridicule, I apologize. Perhaps my 20+ years storming the barricades on endangerment of pedestrians and cyclists alike led to my getting too edgy on that score. I also thought the (deserved) compliments I offered to Nicole inoculated me, at least to some extent. But I’m unshaken in insisting that the warning approach is both futile and a diversion from the main event of confronting and arresting dangerous behaviors by drivers.
On the numbers: Nicole’s comparison base of 31,000 cyclists (actually trips, since she compares them to bike share trips maxing at 27,500) may have State or City imprimatur, but it’s a screenline-crossing-only figure. As such it can’t come even close to being a proper metric for CBD cycling trips, as it excludes trips that never cross the screenline: trips like my daily commute, my wife’s, many of yours if you live in Manhattan south of 50th Street, most messengering, virtually all CBD food delivery, and most utilitarian non-commute trips to CBD doctors, schools, galleries, movies, restaurants and stores.
Twenty-one years ago, for an Appendix to the Bicycle Blueprint, I took a stab at extrapolating from screenline trips to estimate all NYC cycling trips, and I’ve kept at it ever since. My methodology is laid out in the spreadsheet I linked to in my post, in the seventh graf. It suggests, as I said, that several hundred thousand cycle trips starting, ending, or remaining in the CBD take place on a typical day. That may or may not be right, but I believe I’ve gone deeper than did Nicole to approximate how much CBD cycling takes place now, which statistically gives rise to the 2-3 CBD cycling deaths each year.
All that’s left is to reference the cogent comment to my post by “Guest” pointing out that bike sharers are more likely to be competent cyclists than “newbies” as I had assumed. This belies Nicole’s alarmism still further.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Daphna
I commend Nicole Gelinas for being on streetsblog reading and commenting intelligently. Just as she is asking others to be open to her point of view, I hope she is open too to hearing other points. At least a dialog is happening and that is good.
I agree with JarekAF that focusing specifically on giving bikeshare cyclists instructions to watch for trucks misses the forest for the trees. This warning to cyclists can be one tool, but to me it strikes me as similar to those silly LOOK signs that the DOT painted on crosswalks where motorists hit pedestrians. It puts the onus on those in danger instead of the drivers who are creating the danger. What is needed is a comprehensive approach on many fronts to stop the carnage on the streets including but not limited to:
1) East River bridge tolls and congestion price to reduce the volume of traffic and road rage
Strong automatic penalties for injuring or killing
2) More streets metered and higher meter rates to increase parking turnover and lessen the driving around time searching and the dangerous behaviors drivers do to get a free or under-priced spot
3) Red light cameras placed abundantly
4) Speed cameras placed adundantly
5) New laws that criminalize more types of dangerous driver behavior
6) Far greater enforcement by NYPD of existing motor vehicle laws
7) Far greater application of existing laws by the District Attorney
9) Automatic impoundment of any vehicle involved in an injury or death until full conclusion of the investigation, and until the driver has his/her license back, with the driver paying for the tow charge and for the per day storage fee
10) Automatic suspension of the license of any driver who injured or killed
11) Create many more 20 mph zones
12) Decrease criteria for 20mph zones so that areas of Manhattan on the grid can qualify
13) Continued re-allocation of street space to pedestrians, cyclists and commercial vehicles
14) Continued narrowing of traffic lanes down to 10′ wide (many are 11′ or 12′ or more); narrow lanes encourage motorists to drive within the speed limits
15) Create many more streets that have physical barriers (curb bulb outs, pedestrian islands, speed bumps) which are street designs that are self-enforcing of the speed limit
16) Put more streets on road diets
17) Replace more parking with parklets (pop up cafes)
18) Build out the network of protected bike lanes; make sure all future lanes are wider to handle future growth
19) Dedicate more money to mass transit (so drivers have other better options for getting around); roll out much more SBS routes; have the courage to do actual BRT
20) Do a major PR campaign to get drivers to yield to pedestrians and cyclists at all times
21) Pedestrianize more blocks
22) Allow E bikes. Roll back the laws against them
23) Roll back the laws against commercial cyclists (cycling should be encouraged and not discouraged which is what these laws aim to do – they are not about safety)
24) Roll back the laws encumbering the DOT from installing bike infrastructure more quickly
25) etc. etc. etc.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Steve Vaccaro
A fruitful and much-needed safety education campaign if ever I heard of one! But unlikely to drive page hits.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
JK
Nicole makes a good point about educating future bike share cyclists about dangerous trucks. Is there an effort underway to educate NYPD about the danger of big trucks, and get them to actually enforce the rules against oversize trucks? There is a 55 foot limit on tractor trailers in NYC, but 63ft and longer trucks are common — Rite Aide and Duane Reade both use oversize trucks for their everyday deliveries to stores, and have been for years. Does management at these companies know their NYC delivery trucks are illegal?
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
JBS
SpotCycle is still claiming they will support CitiBike. We’ll see next week.
in response to Official Citi Bike Mobile App Now Available
NYFM
And as I will keep on telling people here and elsewhere: the city can and will be found liable for not citing enough drivers for speeding where it counts- midtown. Forget about a drop of 7% citywide: the critical info is WHERE were those speeding tickets issued?
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Anonymous
Is anyone having trouble with the Android app? It shows a fraction of all the stations, and none in the East Village, Lower East Side, or above 14th St. Overall, the map and stations seem really slow to populate. I tried the iOS app on an iPad, and the map and all the stations appeared immediately.
in response to Official Citi Bike Mobile App Now Available
Danelle Davis
Got my Citibike key today and downloaded the app…sweet!
in response to Official Citi Bike Mobile App Now Available
Nicole Gelinas
The facts about Paris traffic data post-bikeshare may be interesting facts, but you see how many words they take up (“fit in” means, literally, space on a page — it doesn’t mean thematically or anything). I included the number about bike deaths in Paris falling after the initial spike, however, which goes to your general point about traffic calming and driver/cyclist learning.That was the most relevant collective traffic-calming point to the topic at hand.
I picked Paris because, as I noted several times, Paris is the only city relevant to us in terms of population density. (Boston and Washington are just nowhere; London is closer but not by much, and also problematic because of different urban layout).
Cyclists are being singled out for instruction because bikeshare is new! We are adding a huge number of new cyclists unfamiliar to the streets via this one city policy. We are not, by contrast, adding a huge number of pedestrians to the streets.
Tone is a funny thing. You complain about the tone, yet you can’t find a specific example of a poor tone in the piece. The piece is very dry tonally. There is no nice way to gloss over the fact that people died, nor should here be.
And btw, no one wants to read a 2,000-word article that jumps around from topic to topic. This is not “semi-literacy,” as at least one Streetsblog commenter likes to term non-”expert” readers; this is just people having lives and not wanting to be bored silly.
I would like to see articles on all sorts of topics in all sorts of venues, including traffic calming. But one person writes one article about one narrow topic at one time.
Many people have already addressed the traffic-calming issue. I would add nothing to parroting what people like Komanoff have already said on this important topic. If experts on the traffic-calming aspect of the topic want to write for broader outlets on this particular topic, then they should! I’m not simply going to repeat other people.
To my knowledge, though, nobody in the New York market (before my piece) had addressed what we can learn from the recent history of the city closest to us in density — as determined by NYC DOT — in terms of cyclist safety. This piece, thus, filled a void.
It’s not advocacy for or against anything — it’s just reporting something that is potentially useful.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Nicole Gelinas
The facts about Paris traffic data post-bikeshare may be interesting facts, but you see how many words they take up (“fit in” means, literally, space on a page — it doesn’t mean thematically or anything). I included the number about bike deaths in Paris falling after the initial spike, however, which goes to your general point about traffic calming and driver/cyclist learning.That was the most relevant collective traffic-calming point to the topic at hand.
I picked Paris because, as I noted several times, Paris is the only city relevant to us in terms of population density. (Boston and Washington are just nowhere; London is closer but not by much, and also problematic because of different urban layout).
Cyclists are being singled out for instruction because bikeshare is new! We are adding a huge number of new cyclists unfamiliar to the streets via this one city policy. We are not, by contrast, adding a huge number of pedestrians to the streets.
Tone is a funny thing. You complain about the tone, yet you can’t find a specific example of a poor tone in the piece. The piece is very dry tonally. There is no nice way to gloss over the fact that people died, nor should here be.
And btw, no one wants to read a 2,000-word article that jumps around from topic to topic. This is not “semi-literacy,” as at least one Streetsblog commenter likes to term non-”expert” readers; this is just people having lives and not wanting to be bored silly.
I would like to see articles on all sorts of topics in all sorts of venues, including traffic calming. But one person writes one article about one narrow topic at one time.
Many people have already addressed the traffic-calming issue. I would add nothing to parroting what people like Komanoff have already said on this important topic. If experts on the traffic-calming aspect of the topic want to write for broader outlets on this particular topic, then they should! I’m not simply going to repeat other people.
To my knowledge, though, nobody in the New York market (before my piece) had addressed what we can learn from the recent history of the city closest to us in density — as determined by NYC DOT — in terms of cyclist safety. This piece, thus, filled a void.
It’s not advocacy for or against anything — it’s just reporting something that is potentially useful.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety
Jym Dyer
• First the riders would be too fat for the bikes. Then they would be too small and weak to handle heavy cruiser bikes. Now they’re on the brink of death.
We’ve heard from the tabloids, what are they saying on teevee? I’m sure Marcia Kramer is working on a segment about the terrorist threat they pose.
in response to Predictions of Bike-Share Carnage Are a Mirage and a Distraction
Jym Dyer
• First the riders would be too fat for the bikes. Then they would be too small and weak to handle heavy cruiser bikes. Now they’re on the brink of death.
We’ve heard from the tabloids, what are they saying on teevee? I’m sure Marcia Kramer is working on a segment about the terrorist threat they pose.
in response to Predictions of Bike-Share Carnage Are a Mirage and a Distraction
Anonymous
Lots of problems with this:
A) Where’s your evidence that women and older people are, statistically speaking, novice cyclists in Paris? Here maybe. There? I’d like to see the primary source that supports any assertion along those lines.
B) This is claim gets at the heart of the problem with your initial article: “All of this increase was due to bikeshare.” No: the increase was due to additional drivers killing additional cyclists. That these deaths happened on bikeshare bikes does not necessarily mean the bikeshare system itself was responsible. And all the other evidence you gather to help substantiate that point does not give you reason to be so confident in this assertion. You claim here you won’t make any broad, unsubstantiated generalizations, but this most assuredly is one.
C) Let’s pretend, though, that any person on a bikeshare bike is killed by that system. Does that mean that the death last October was “due to” bikeshare? Or is the system off the hook now?
D) The absolutely singular causality you imagine here is . . . kinda scary. Even in your original article you don’t pretend it’s just a matter of “put a warning about trucks on a bike and the carnage will end.” But that’s the only trick you have up your sleeve here.
E) In your original article, you also acknowledge that drivers of large vehicles were educated about how to operate around bikes. But you didn’t (even in that reportorial way) suggest that happen here as well. And in this post, you skip past it once again, moving on to enforcement rather than education: “Of course, the city should also force truckers to follow the rules of the road, as he suggests.” This is part and parcel of your imagined singular causality: one notice, one result.
F) Were there no changes to road design concurrent with the release of bike share? Were drivers having to accommodate new traffic patterns in any of the locations? Could the change during that initial period not be due to the world’s most powerful notice about turning trucks but rather to increasing experience (and education) on the part of drivers of large, dangerous vehicles? All questions you skip past–with a confidence that belies your “just the facts, ma’am” response.
in response to Gelinas Responds to Komanoff on Bike-Share Safety