Gale Brewer

Gale Brewer Launches Survey on Columbus Avenue Bike Lane

Since a working group of elected officials and community leaders studied and tweaked the design of the parking-protected bike lane along Columbus Avenue in February, things have been relatively quiet on the Upper West Side.

By Noah Kazis

4:04 PM EDT on September 13, 2011

Now that the lane, which runs from 77th to 96th Street, is a year old and residents have had some time to get used to it, City Council Member Gale Brewer has launched a survey to gauge the neighborhood’s reaction. Brewer supports the lane but wants to see if there are ways to improve the street further.

If you live, work, shop or otherwise travel on the Upper West Side, you can fill out Brewer’s survey here. It only takes a few minutes. The questions ask how the bike lane has affected safety, lawfulness, activity and comfort among all street users. It offers space for open-ended remarks on what works well and what ought to be changed.

Given the Columbus Avenue lane’s relative isolation — it has no north-south connections at either end and doesn’t have a protected northbound pair — it’s important to expand this safe cycling design and integrate it into the city’s network of protected bikeways. Filling out this survey can help move that process along.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.