Today’s Headlines

  • Water Main Break Leads to Fearsome Glimpse of Life Without Major Subway Lines (Post, DNA, City Room)
  • Times’ Take on Declining Bike-on-Ped Injuries: “Higher Number” of Peds Hurt By Cyclists
  • More Coverage of Hunter Study: Village Voice, Daily News, Transpo Nation, and — Drumroll! — the Post
  • City Deploys Contractors to Keep Bikes and Peds From Fighting Over Brooklyn Bridge Scraps (News)
  • The Longer Talks Drag on Over Borough Taxi Bill, the Less Likely Cuomo Will Sign It (News)
  • Would NYC Show Progress on Transpo Emissions If Albany Had Passed Road Pricing? (Transpo Nation)
  • Midtown Bike Tickets Nearly Quadrupled Since 2009 (Post)
  • Safety in Numbers: Cyclists Volunteer to Help Take Back the Night From Park Slope Sex Attackers (News)
  • State Housing Commish, Political Scion, DWI Perp Darryl Towns Loses License for 6 Months (City Room)
  • Get to Know Rising NYC Star Noah Budnick, TA Deputy Director (City Hall)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

  • carma

    yesterday really was a commute from hell. midtown traffic was frozen, the highways im sure were extra backed up as people try to avoid midtown, so buses wasnt an option for sure.
    then on top of that almost every subway line had issues.  4/5/6 was more crowded then usual, abcd all had problems due to the water main, and switch problems at queens plaza caused my commute to be miserable as well on the queens blvd line.if anything biking WAS the only option that would allow you to get to your destination in time.

  • Larry Littlefield

    I’ll have to admit, I just don’t get the outer borough street hail plan.

    There are very few locations outside Manhattan where someone could make a decent living, and not waste a ton of gas, cruising for fares.  If this plan were enacted could I walk up to 10th Avenue in Windsor Terrace, stick out my hand, and expect a cab to show up?

    It makes more sense to me to have specific locations people could walk to, where the existing livery industry — the whole thing — was allowed to pick up people who had not called.  Probably located on local commercial streets, and at major shopping locations and/or entertainment and recreation areas where those arriving by transit might want a ride to take packages home.

  • Anonymous

    NYDN BK Bridge Story: “On one side of him, biking commuters whizzed by, some a blur of Spandex. On the other, camera-toting tourists seemed oblivious to anything outside the viewfinder.”
    Seriously, what is the obsession with spandex?  I rarely ever see spandex wearing bikers in my morning commute.  And so what?  It’s such lazy reporting to always focus on this.  It’s like an attempt to paint biking as the sport of the rich, so that bikers garner even less sympathy then they already do.

  • vnm

    Larry, 

    Right now, should you see a livery car, and attempt to hail it, the car would be prohibited from picking you up. Although, that ban is not enforced AT ALL, which is why I see it happening every day. Livery cabs don’t have meters, which leads to a third world-style bargaining situation where you never know if you’re getting charged a fair price. They don’t have a uniform look like yellow cabs do, which creates confusion about what kind of car is what. Unlike yellow cabs, they contribute nothing financially to the MTA. The biggest problem with current livery cab fleet is that the cars are driven recklessly, aggressively, and way too fast. I am not sure if the bill would be able to solve that last problem.

  • Anonymous

    More effectively, there was a pedestrian manager at the Brooklyn plaza of the Manhattan Bridge.  I over about 8:45am.  While as I rode, I saw a handful of pedestrians walking Brooklyn-bound, I didn’t see a single person walking Manhattan-bound on the south side path.  So in this instance, I can see the manager working successfully.

  • Better signs on the Manh Br might help also. There are no BIKES ONLY signs until you go up the stairs to where the
    path begins. cc @nyc_dot:twitter 

  • Eric McClure

    I made two round trips over the Brooklyn Bridge on Friday, for the first time in a long time.  The first was Manhattan-bound around 8:30 a.m., and back out around 10:30 a.m.  The second was Manhattan-bound around 8 p.m., and back out at about 11 p.m.

    On all four segments, conditions were far better than I had expected, given the drumbeat not only in the tabloids, but frankly, in Streetsblog’s comments section, on occasion.  I maybe rang my bell three times total, and each of those was answered by a “sorry!” from a pedestrian and a corresponding “thanks!” from me.  Sure, there were a handful of cyclists riding too fast downhill (IMHO), and an oblivious pedestrian here and there, but largely, especially given the construction-exacerbated narrowness of the path, the whole thing was just fine.

    Should cyclists get a lane on the roadbed, leaving the path exclusively to pedestrians? Sure. Is the current situation some kind of hell on earth? Definitely not, if my trips Friday were any indication.

  • Mike

    The problems on the Brooklyn Bridge are largely confined to vacation season, which tapers off dramatically after Labor Day.  Go see it in the summer sometime; it’s insane.

  • wkgreen

    On days when I bike to work from Park Slope to Lower Manhattan I take the Bklyn Bridge before 9AM going when the crowds are usually manageable, but I always go out of my way and take the Manhattan Bridge in the evening coming back. On Sun., on the TA Century Ride, however, I made the mistake of coming back over the Bklyn Bridge at about 4PM. There was a veritable wall of pedestrians the entire way, and “insane” does not adequately describe it. Although cyclists and pedestrians generally cooperated to make it work, one hapless tourist trying to snap a photo made the mistake of suddenly stepping into the bike lane in front of the bike that was in front of me sending both of them crashing down to the boardwalk and me to a sudden screeching halt. Fortunately it was on the uphill and not the down, or we could have had another statistic for the next Hunter survey.
     
    As to whether or not it’s some kind of hell. It depends on the time of day, the day of the week, the time of year, and your level of tolerence, but on one Sun. afternoon in Sept. the volume of people crossing both on foot and on 2 wheels was simply amazing. Something really should be done. I don’t know how it would work, but a lane on the road bed would be great.