The image shows a total of 9 or buffer’…enough for another parking area or even a tight lane.

What Im getting at, is if there space, people will use it (double parking)

That’s another great thing about bicycles, Stacy — you can always dismount and become a pedestrian if you want to cut through a park where bike riding isn’t permitted.

Wow, five feet of space to cycle on, right smack in the middle of the door zone. Urban planners apparently know nothing about riding bikes.

There’s already a perfectly good bike route in place. It is known as a street.

Vehicular cyclists are still flying the flag? Still? Even after city after city shows that improved facilities lead to high biking rates?

You may feel comfortable riding in the middle of the street but it should be pretty obvious that you are heavily outnumbered by people who prefer to have a space on the street away from cars.

This isn’t to say that this is the best possible facility but it stands to be a much more heavily used route than an unstriped street.

“Vehicular cyclists are still flying the flag?”

There has been an influx, I think by way of usa.streetsblog.org (a great thing, otherwise). Bicycle boulevards and what-have-you may be perfectly pleasant in places where traffic is calmer and there is a social stigma against honking, but not so much right here right now. My main problem with taking a lane is being honked at ruins my morning, and I’m not interested in hardening myself to pretend it does not. In NYC we have had made much progress even with painted lanes and especially with physically separated ones, so if the road-taking cyclists elsewhere would please leave us to it…

Christian Decker asks; “Also, why doesn’t the city propose putting the bike lane beside the sidewalk and placing a physical barrier between the parking lane and the bike lane.”

Sweeping and maintenance issues. Nuff said.

It really is too bad that those expensive streets are inadequate for cyclists to ride on.

“Vehicular cyclists are still flying the flag? Still? Even after city after city shows that improved facilities lead to high biking rates?

You may feel comfortable riding in the middle of the street but it should be pretty obvious that you are heavily outnumbered by people who prefer to have a space on the street away from cars.”

I don’t really place myself in the VC camp or the facilities camp. I think riders can integrate on city streets, but only if the streets are below a certain speed limit, namely 25 mph (or 35 if the lanes are sufficient wide). I’m fine with Portland’s bike boulevards, as they give a sufficient amount of space to accommodate riders of all styles and skill levels. I’m not okay with being confined to a 5-6 foot path, and being subjected to ticketing if I stray from it.

My recipe for bike-friendliness:

1. Reduce the speed limits for all in-city surface streets to 30 mph.
2. If a city MUST have high traffic arterial roads, ensure that a low speed route runs roughly parallel to it. This would require connecting some disconnected residential streets in suburban areas, either with new sections of street or bike/ped cut-through paths.
3. More bike/ped freeway and railroad crossings.
4. Shared lane markings or “sharrows”.

Chris, you make some valid points, but NYC is a completely different beast, which you should consider when you make a comment.

1) Cyclist are rarely ever ticketed for anything except riding on the sidewalks. It is quite common to see a cyclist riding the wrong way run a red light in front of a cop. They are instructed to ignore it. The concept of being confined anywhere is a complete joke here. You can ride anywhere but the sidewalks if you’re brave enough.

2) The citywide speed limit is 30 mph, but that doesn’t help much when taxis just barely miss brazing your body and a pedestrian darts out from between two parked cars and a delivery truck is double parked in front of you. There is simply too much to be wary if for most people to ride in traffic here.

3) When there is a buffer, most cyclists ride in the buffer, so it’s really a 9 foot bike lane. The main problem, though, is that trucks and cars double park there constantly.

4) Finally, in Manhattan there are no low-volume North-South residential streets. Every street is an arterial with high volumes of traffic. Therefore, in many cases a bike lane is absolutely necessary, preferably a protected one. I am hoping that the city is claiming space for cyclists now with these buffered lanes, with the future intention of creating protected lane with that space. This is what they did on Eighth Ave, and I hope they do it on Seventh Ave in Harlem as well.

Since it seems not obvious and a few here have misread the diagram – the 4 foot buffer in the diagram is not a physical barrier, it is just paint, it must be DOT’s way of representing it. So there is not a raised curb or anything like that.

I went to the CB2 meeting. The presenters from DOT were very professional and were very well prepared for dealing with the several irate “members of the community” usually present at these meetings. The presenters took every opportunity to say that no parking will be affected by the lanes; they must get a lot of flak for removing parking, although in this case many people pointed out they’d actually wouldn’t mind reduced parking or truck loading zones. On the other hand, it was clear that DOT isn’t going to change its plans simply due to community input.

Parking-protected bike lanes were passed over in this project in favor of painted curbside lanes because the streets are too narrow. (A parking protected lane has to be extra wide because of the door zone). Running lanes through the park was excluded because bikes are not allowed in parks.