Important Meeting Tonight on New L.E.S. Bike Lanes

5:36 PM EST on December 6, 2006

Manhattan Community Board 3's Transportation Committee is holding a public meeting on the new bike lanes on Grand Street in the Lower East Side tonight at 6:30 pm at 273 Bowery (at Houston St.), University Settlement, Room 1. Details here. It is important that some bicycling advocates show up to this meeting. From Transportation Alternatives:

In November, the NYC Department of Transportation added a grand new bike lane all the way across Grand Street, from West Broadway to the FDR. It's a solid improvement that'll make Grand Street safer for the many cyclists who already ride there, and since it makes a nice connection to the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River Greenway, it'll encourage even more people to ride bikes.
But now some members of Community Board 3 (East Village and Lower East Side, and generally very supportive of cycling) are demanding that the Department of Transportation remove the bike lane! They appear to have no good reason other than they just don't like bikes.

Someone might also want to mention that the new bicycle stencils already seem to be peeling off of the asphalt.

Photo: Jason Varone

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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