Braving Double-Parked Parents, MS 51 Students Bike to School in Droves

4:50 PM EDT on May 23, 2012

Bike racks set up for MS 51's annual Bike-To-School Day are filled with students' wheels.

Based on this picture of rows of temporary bike racks, all filled, it looks like MS 51's Bike-To-School Day was a big hit (photo via Lara Lebeiko of Bicycle Habitat, which provided volunteers for the event). Escorted rides, or "bike buses," took students from Sunset Park, Carroll Gardens and Windsor Terrace/Kensington to the Park Slope school and back. During the day, a bike skills and safety course helped teach the students how to ride on their own.

MS 51 has been holding a Bike-To-School Day event since 2010. Check out Streetfilms' coverage of the school's first year of festivities here.

But even a coordinated effort to promote biking to school didn't eliminate one of the most persistent perils on the route to MS 51. In the morning, Fifth Avenue is a mess of double-parked parents dropping off their kids out in front of school. The bike lane in front of the school is routinely impassible, and today was no exception, as the below photo from Streetsblog reader Car Free Nation illustrates.

It's great to see a city school promoting cycling to its students. To keep them riding, though, it looks like the city needs some traffic enforcement.

Double-parked cars block the Fifth Avenue bike lane before school starts.

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.

Stay in touch

More from Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog USA Highway Boondoggles

Highway Boondoggles 2023: Salt Lake Shenanigans

Plans for a major freeway expansion based on over-inflated traffic projections are a wrongheaded way to deal with the region’s rapid population growth.

December 3, 2023

Cycle of Rage

Cycle of Rage: Mayor is Failing the Leadership Test on Congestion Pricing

Purely for political and self-serving purposes, Mayor Adams is attacking congestion pricing — and, in doing so, is undermining the implementation of a program that he has long claimed to be a "strong" supporter of.

Gersh Kuntzman

December 1, 2023

MTA

New York City is Down One MTA Board Member as Mayor Fights Congestion Pricing Fee

Sherif Soliman, who was appointed to the board only last year, quietly resigned on Sept. 22, and the mayor won't get a new person on the panel until next year.