Today’s Headlines

Ok, I’ll bite Captain. NYC currently get royally screwed by the policies and funding formulas by the regional MTA which favors suburban commuter rail over NYCTA bus and subways. If NYC voters were in the driver’s seat, I can’t imagine how that would stay the same. Most of your post is just a rant against democracy.

I don’t disagree with making the governor or mayor more directly accountable (ala going from Board to Department of Education), but first, I think the MTA needs to be broken down into smaller units so there’s more a sense of local ownership. Then we can think of how to make it more accountable to local voters. As it stands now, the MTA covers too big of a geographical area and across state lines to fully democratize.

The more I read about objections to the new protected lanes, the closer I think we’re getting to a time when DOT might serious consider “my” bike lane design.

I don’t dismiss all these locals’ objections out of hand. In other neighborhoods’ papers and blogs there are many, many articles that are almost identical to today’s DNAInfo piece (I even rebutted one with a letter to my local print-only “Town and Village”) and sure, I do think some of the merchants quoted are simply making up numbers about how much business they’ve lost, but some of their and others’ objections do raise legitimate questions about the lanes’ design, vis a vis safety, parking, deliveries, and who should have priority on parts of road space, and at what time of day.

One thing I don’t like about the new protected lanes on my stretch of 1st and 2nd Aves and, I suspect, Columbus Ave., is that they stagger between segregating and calming, particularly in places like the left-turn “mixing zones.” Segregate bikes from cars, and drivers don’t expect to see bikes up close–but then, bam: mixing zone! where cyclists pretty much have to dance around stopping and starting cars whose drivers are looking at their turn path, not for bikes.

My design is definitely more on the “calming” side of Trasnport for London guidelines linked to above, even though on the avenues where I recommend it, the TfL guidelines would call for “segregating” (because of 85%ile speeds there). But each approach has benefits, and calming helps by getting city motorists more accustomed to cyclists.

I think my design addresses almost all of the objections I’ve heard to NYC’s new protected lanes, and at the same time gives cyclists their own designated space and greater visibility. Please comment on it at its Flickr page (where I really ought to update the rambling explanatory text…):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10798592@N08/1414440531/

Marco, I recognize that turning cyclists’ having to wait in the middle of an avenue at a *green* light is most off-putting part of the design. For that to work, the lane would really have to be kept mostly clear of traveling cars, and I understand that it’s hard for people to imagine that working. But I think it would work, because, if you look at the new SBS lanes on 1st and 2nd Aves, you’ll see that cars really do mostly keep out of them, even though they’re not off on the edge of the road. In my design, the bike/fire lanes would look very similar to SBS lanes.

Furthermore, if you think of all the myriad infringements that cars inflict on bike lanes–even the lousy old Class 2, plain white stripe lanes–the infringement that you rarely saw was plain old DRIVING in them for any real distance.