Streetsblog New York City

This week is packed with community board meetings and public events in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Here’s a sampling of the items on the Streetsblog calendar this week. Head over to the full calendar for more events:

• Monday: Join Riders Alliance for a strategy meeting to win better G train service, as the MTA prepares to release a full line review of the crosstown route in June. 6:30 p.m.
• Tuesday: Council Member Donovan Richards, Jr., hosts a forum on speeding in his eastern Queens district. 6:00 p.m.
• Also Tuesday: In what looks to be a big moment for the Sheridan Expressway-Hunts Point Land Use and Transportation Study, city staff will discuss recommended courses of action for the little-used expressway. 6:00 p.m.
• More Tuesday: Brooklyn Community Board 2′s transportation committee will discuss traffic calming on Fourth Avenue, a bike corral, and seating in Dumbo. 6:00 p.m.
• Wednesday: The transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 12 will hear the Safe Routes to School proposal from DOT for P.S. 226. 7:00 p.m.
• Also Wednesday: A group has formed to oppose a Parks Department plan to pave the Putnam Line rail-trail in Van Cortlandt Park. Community Board 8′s Parks Committee has the issue on its agenda. 7:00 p.m.
• Friday: DOT is hosting an information session in Queens for non-profits and community groups interested in learning more about the city’s plaza program. 10:00 a.m.

Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.

With a week to go until Citi Bike launches, we’re hearing from readers who received their annual member keys in the mail over the weekend. Here’s a look at the packet that reader “dporpentine” opened on Saturday.

If you haven’t received your member key yet, I wouldn’t worry. Citi Bike has to send out about 13,000 or so member keys in time for the May 27 launch, and they’re not all going to arrive simultaneously. (I’m waiting for mine, too.)

A pedestrian and a cyclist are dead after a series of crashes in Brooklyn and the Bronx in which motorists also injured five other people. Three of the victims were teenagers. One crash left two young boys in critical condition. No charges are known to have been filed by NYPD or DAs Charles Hynes and Robert Johnson.

Zuleimi Torres. Photo: WEbook

On Friday afternoon, 16-year-old Zuleimi Torres was one of three people struck by the driver of an SUV on the Grand Concourse near Mt. Eden Parkway. From NY1:

Eyewitnesses said the car was going erratically down Grand Concourse, hit one pedestrian and then kept going and hit the other two pedestrians.

“He didn’t stop, he hit the first person, he did not stop. He just keep going and then we see the second one again got hit. We said, ‘Oh!’” a bystander said.

An off-duty officer arrested the driver as he tried to leave the car, but a breathalyzer test showed that the driver had no blood alcohol content.

Torres suffered a brain injury and died at St. Barnabas Hospital. Her friend, also 16, and the third victim, a 51-year-old woman, were hospitalized in stable condition.

Citing anonymous police sources, the Post reports that the driver “is not suspected of a crime,” and a “medical condition may have contributed” to the crash. ”Sources say the driver has a mental condition,” according to News 12. “Investigators say the driver will not face charges.”

In another crash early Sunday, an unidentified cyclist was killed by a livery cab driver in Crown Heights. From the Post:

Read more…

Fourth Avenue at 86th Street in Bay Ridge would get a pedestrian island - and a pedestrian fence - under a plan presented to CB 10 last week. Image: DOT

Last year, DOT redesigned Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park to calm traffic by widening pedestrian medians and reducing the number of motor vehicle lanes. Similar improvements are now on track for Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge and Park Slope. Last Thursday, Community Board 6′s transportation committee voted 14-1 to support the Park Slope plan. In Bay Ridge, CB 10′s transportation committee reviewed the plan last Monday; it now goes to a community forum scheduled for June 5.

The biggest news is that, based on public feedback, the Bay Ridge road diet, originally planned for both directions from Ovington Avenue to 84th Street, will cover more blocks than expected [PDF]. Now, both directions from Ovington Avenue to 86th Street and northbound Fourth Avenue from 101st Street to 95th Street will be converted from two lanes in each direction to one through lane in each direction plus left-turn lanes.

CB 10 has historically been reluctant to support DOT’s street redesigns, but while infamous cars-first board member Allen Bortnick raged against DOT at last week’s meeting, he seemed to be in the minority this time around. “The plan was very well-crafted and thought out and DOT took the idea of community input to heart,” CB 10 member Andrew Gounardes said. ”They went block by block and they tweaked their plan based on input from us. I’m very encouraged by that.”

The intersection with 86th Street, a major bus and subway hub with lots of pedestrian activity and automobile drop-offs, will be receiving a new pedestrian island on the south side of the junction for pedestrians crossing Fourth Avenue.

The crossing would also receive an 80-foot pedestrian fence along the west side of Fourth Avenue. Hemming people in isn’t a pedestrian-friendly solution to traffic dangers, but DOT’s fence proposal was received positively by the committee. ”It’s the most troublesome intersection we have in Bay Ridge,” Gounardes said.

Read more…

This weekend you might have come across the anonymous Daily News editorial in which Arthur Browne’s opinion team called Paul Steely White “smug” for defending bike-share (in an opinion piece solicited by Arthur Browne’s opinion team). But is it smug to point out that New Yorkers who don’t own cars also deserve to have a share of the curb? Or that bike-share stations made in 2013 belong in historic neighborhoods as much as 2013 model cars?

Of course not. For a dose of genuine smugness, I invite Arthur Browne and his team of cranks to read this condensed, satirical version of the attack they published on Saturday:

Moving one’s car for alternate-side parking is the single most aggravating aspect of living in New York City. Unless you’re one of those people who don’t own a car, in which case you never have to spend a second worrying about where to put your car, or whether you’ve paid up all your outstanding parking fines.

Not only do we despise alternate-side parking, we also despise every single New Yorker who doesn’t have to structure their life around it.

All of this has nothing to do with bike-share, which isn’t going to make owning a car in NYC any more or less miserable. But it fills us with rage to know that the city is making it easier to live without a car by launching this bike-share program, when New Yorkers without cars already have it so good.

Someone wipe that grin off Paul White’s face.

Now that’s smug.

Investigators are still poring over Friday’s train derailment and collision in Connecticut. Early reports point to damaged track as the cause of the crash that injured 70 people.

Photo: Christian Science Monitor

Meanwhile, Amtrak has said that the route connecting New York and Boston will be closed for several days while the investigation continues, and Metro-North says commuter rail service on the eastern end of the New Haven line will also be out of commission for much of this week. Alternate tracks are undergoing repairs, and that means the tens of thousands of people who rely on this rail line are in a tough position.

Bloggers around the Streetsblog Network today said this incident exposes how fragile the Northeast Corridor, a system that serves hundreds of thousands of commuter trips every day and 12 million intercity Amtrak trips each year, really is. Cap’n Transit says “we can’t depend on the Northeast Corridor.”

The lack of alternative service is just pathetic. “If all the trains use the same tracks, it doesn’t really seem like there are many alternatives for getting into the city,” New Haven resident Robert Li told the Stamford Advocate. “Especially if you don’t have a car.” There were bus bridges to get people home last night, but there are no buses, let alone trains, all weekend. This evening Eric Gershon of Yale News tweeted, “830 pm Peter Pan bus NYC to New Haven packed due to Fri MetroN #train #derailment. Long lines, short tempers at Port Authority.”

Meanwhile, Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas says it’s telling that a single incident like this could completely immobilize a significant part of the system:

Read more…

The Rob Ford crack-smoking video is sucking the oxygen from every other bike-related story on this Bike to Work Day, but it looks like a good number of New Yorkers are keeping their eyes on the prize: Today is the last day to get a Citi Bike membership in time to ride on the day the system launches, May 27.

Twitter sources indicate the number of Citi Bike memberships has hit the 13,000 range. Back on Tuesday, the number was about 10,000.

Five years ago, bike-share was something they did in France, and a large-scale system like the one that will launch at the end of the month didn’t seem to be in the cards for New York. There have been plenty of setbacks for NYC bike-share in the past year, but now here we are, 10 days from the launch of a new transit system.

Research has shown that women are more comfortable biking on protected bike lanes, but the male-dominated engineering profession has discouraged this type of street design. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

A study published in this month’s American Journal of Public Health finds that highly influential transportation engineers relied on shoddy research to defend policies that discourage the development of protected bike lanes in the U.S. In their paper, the researchers point out that male-dominated engineering panels have repeatedly torpedoed street designs that have greater appeal to female cyclists.

The research team, led by Harvard public health researcher Anne Lusk, examines four engineering guides published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials between 1974 and 1999. All of these guides, treated like gospel by engineers across the country, either discourage or offer no advice about protected bike lanes, despite the fact that research has shown that women, in particular, are much more likely to bike given facilities that provide some separation from vehicle traffic.

Lusk found that many of AASHTO’s official claims regarding the purported safety problems of protected bike lanes were offered without supporting evidence. AASHTO refused the consider data demonstrating the proven safety record of protected bike lanes outside of the United States. And since there have been almost no protected bike lanes in the U.S. until quite recently, AASHTO based its position against protected bikeways on domestic street designs like sidewalk bikeways, not real bike lanes designed specifically to integrate physically protected bicycling into the roadway.

The researchers came to this rather damning conclusion: “State-adopted recommendations against cycle tracks, primarily the recommendations of AASHTO, are not explicitly based on rigorous and up-to-date research.”

Lusk and her team carried out a safety study of their own, examining crash reports on protected bike lanes in 19 U.S. cities. They found that protected bike lanes had a collision rate of about 2.3 per million kilometers biked — lower than the crash rates other researchers have observed on streets without any bike lanes. (Those rates vary from 3.75 to 54 crashes per million kilometers.)

Lusk’s research also suggests the lack of gender balance in the engineering profession may have contributed to the resistance to protected bike infrastructure. Researchers found that in 1991 and 1999, AASHTO’s Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines were written by a committee made up of 91 and 97 percent men, respectively.

“The AASHTO recommendations may have been influenced by the predominantly male composition (more than 90%) of the report’s authors,” Lusk writes.

Read more…

The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage.

Janice Brown was thrown from the car she was riding in when the driver, speeding and allegedly drunk, hit a barrier on the off-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge. Photo: DNAinfo

Fatal Crashes (5 Killed This Week, 76 This Year; 3 Drivers Charged*)

• Soundview: Manuel Verdesoto, 82, Struck by Unlicensed Driver While Crossing Street (Streetsblog)
• Woodhaven: Driver Hits 73-Year-Old Rafael Diaz Crossing Atlantic Ave.; No Charges (DNA)
• Elmhurst: Elba Granizo, 75, Hit by Driver Making Left Turn; No Charges (Streetsblog)
• Bay Ridge: Pedestrian, 30, Struck By Driver in April, Dies from Injuries (Streetsblog)***
• Sheepshead Bay: Yuliya Hermanska, 27, Killed in March by Curb-Jumping Driver Who Ran Red; No Charges (Streetsblog)***
• Williamsburg: Janice Brown, 21, Ejected From Car When Driver Crashes Near BQE (Post, News 12)
• LIC: Daniel Nieves, 32, Crashes Motorcycle Into Tree on Vernon Blvd. (TL)

Read more…