That’s a nice freebee for Walden and NBBL. They missed the statute of limitations but still get to try their case. OK. But will this really speed things up?

The City’s attorneys should have every reason to expect that Jim Walden is going to continue to throw up procedural roadblocks, delays and abuses of legal process to keep dragging this thing out. Now that the case is being tried on the “merits,” Walden’s going to have even more material to work with, more needs for discovery, more people to subpoena, more data to call into question and more ways to drag this thing on into the next mayoral administration. This will allow him to move away from the abstract “trial project” issue and really kick his media smear campaign into full gear.

For Walden, NBBL and their despicable p.r. agent Linda Gross, the goal here is a trial-by-press-release. As long as the case drags on, they get to keep pressing their case in the media. It doesn’t matter that the case is garbage and the bike lane is a success and enjoyed by most of the community. The court case is just a means to the ends of smearing the current management at DOT and making it impossible for them to build new bike infrastructure in NYC. So, Walden will, I believe, continue to find ways to drag this thing out and keep his media campaign alive.

Another great day in court for us today!

To celebrate afterwards, we went around knocking ice cream cones out of the hands of little kids.

Sooo fun!

I’m so exhausted by this! Retire and move to Boca, already, if you want suburban speedways! 

As I sat behind and next to Louise Hainline and her gray-haired friends at the court hearing this morning, I couldn’t help but imagine them all on bicycles, enjoying one of the safest bike lanes in Brooklyn. It wasn’t a fantasy as much as a fond recollection of months spent in Groningen, NL observing hundreds if not thousands of seniors enjoying bicycle trips for shopping, errands, coffee with friends and touring.

If the Seniors and Neighbors drop this absolutely silly lawsuit, so that DOT can continue its work of expanding the network of protected bike lanes, perhaps they too can get to experience the pleasure, convenience and health benefits of bicycling.

People need to start thinking out how the whole livable streets movement lasts after Bloomberg departs. JSK has become the target for politically ambitious Dems who are staking out positions for 2013, and the people reading the tea leaves don’t think he’s going for a fourth term (nor should he). I would hate to be on the wrong side of a post-Bloomberg tidal wave that takes Bike and Ped-friendly public space back to Giuliani days.

I must say, I’m ambivalent about the tactical decision to let go of the limitations defense and let the case be decided “on the merits.”  Because the “merits” here are not the merits of the Prospect Park West bike path.  They are the merits of the view that bike paths do not implicate local conditions sufficiently to merit environmental review.  And from a results-oriented point of view—which clearly is the view on which the NBBLrs have been operating—vindicating the DoT’s ability to manage bike lanes without environmental review may be a problem for livable streets advocates come 2013. 
 
Because of the excellent community organizing done by PSN and others in park Slope—a neighborhood with one of the highest cycling rates in the city—we have in the case of a PPW bike path a livable streets project with genuine popular support, as shown in the pools conducted by two different local elected officials.  But part of the support stems from the particular community we are dealing with, and the fact that there was a widely-felt need for traffic calming at this particular location, with excess capacity on the roadway so that the impact on motorists was limited.
 
What happens if a new DoT in 2013 decides to begin removing existing livable streets projects, the merits of which are not a clear-cut as those of the PPW path, in neighborhoods where residents are not as supportive of livable streets infrastructure to begin with as in Park Slope?  A win for the DoT “on the merits” in the current NBBL suit will be a powerful obstacle to attempts by livable streets advocates to use environmental review as a tool to keep those projects in place.  The negative environmental impacts of removing, say, the 8th and 9th Avenue bike paths are obvious, in terms of increasing pedestrian and cyclist injury rates and in other ways, but a “win on the merits” in the NBBL suit means that advocates for retaining those paths would not be able to use a legal challenge as vehicle for raising those negative impacts as a reason to retain those paths.
 
Disposing of the current NBBL suit on limitations grounds might mean that NBBL-like groups would bring timely environmental review challenges to new livable streets projects launched over the remainder of the JSK administration, but that doesn’t worry me so much because (1) I expect DoT will do the requisite minimal of environmental review in support of any new projects, and (2) it may be that we are not going to get any more new significant livable streets projects from the JSK administration (putting aside the possibility of bike share, or improvements in Greenways, parks, and recreational facilities that are unlikely to draw the opposition of on-grid projects). 
 
This may be a situation where we should be “careful what we wish for,” and perhaps take the same results-driven approach as NBBL.

Re: message from me below.  I feel sorry for the NBBLers, who don’t realize how much better their lives could be if they rode bicycles.

I agree.  And I’m worried at the state level that Cuomo still hasn’t signed the Complete Streets bill that passed both houses of the legislature unanimously.

Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article saying that she supports bike
lanes but everyone in the neighborhood opposes the Prospect Park West
bike lane, is now linked on planetizen at http://www.planetizen.com/node/50472

This
is another chance for people to comment on the article.  I have added a
comment saying  that a poll found that the majority of neighborhood
residents support the bike lane and that hundreds of people rallied to
support it. 

This is the same  Elisabeth Rosenthal who wrote a
front-page article in the Times saying  that the goal of European
transportation policy is to “irk” drivers and make them so “miserable”
that they shift to alternatives.

(sorry to repeat this comment.  I posted it on today’s news before I realized that there is a post about the PPW bike lane, which is a more appropriate place for it.)