As someone who walks in Prospect Park daily, I am thrilled to see police ticketing bikers who are not obeying the rules. I, and my friends and my children, have almost been hit multiple times by bikers who ride on pedestrian paths and by those who do not stop at the traffic lights. Also, the bikes coming down the hill toward the lake on the Park’s Southside are often going at unsafe speeds, and often do not stop at the light. This is where a woman was nearly killed and was in a coma after being hit by a bike last year. Just because cars can be dangerous to pedestrians does not mean bikes can’t be too. They’re not mutually exclusive. And, I should add, I support bike riding. I am a biker too. The tickets are going to people riding unsafely, as they should.

The cyclist who hit one of two women who were put into a coma two years ago in Prospect Park by cyclists was calculated to being going 50 mph when he mowed her down near the Vanderbilt Playground (it’s a steep hill and blind curve).

There shouldn’t be a light on a downhill. As a bike rider you should realize it’s dangerous to quickly stop from the high speeds attained while descending. It’s also dangerous to keep your speed in check by riding the brake while going downhill as that can overheat the rim and cause blowouts. This is just an awful, awful place to put a traffic signal. NYC should know better. Grade separate cyclists and pedestrians on the downhill sections. It’ll be safer for everyone. And take the stupid traffic signals out everywhere. It’s a park, not a city street. Traffic signals don’t belong in a park. Giving tickets to cyclists for going through red lights at empty crosswalks, which probably accounts for about 99% of the tickets here, isn’t making things safer for anyone.

‘Just as NYC accommodates people who engage in other sports like basketball or baseball, it should accommodate sport riding. ‘

Then go to the velodrome in Kissena Park, which has a more comparable footprint to a basketball or baseball field.

‘Remember the parks are for everyone.’

Parks are emphatically not for every activity. Taking a winding road that pedestrians have to cross to get to park amenities at excessive speed is reckless and doesn’t belong in the park anymore than doing so in a car or an ATV. And no, you won’t be able to get accessible bridges put in for the handful of cyclists who want to ride like maniacs.

Build more (smoother) velodromes funded by cyclists if you want something like that so badly.

There are plenty of places NYC could accommodate sport riding besides in parks. I put forth several ideas on how they could do so in parks. There are many other places they could be accommodated outside of parks, including just building a network of bike highways, which incidentally would also be quite useful for commuter cyclists. The Kissena Velodrome is only for track bikes. The vast majority of riders doing loops around the parks would find riding on a velodrome exceedingly boring even if they were allowed, which they wouldn’t be.

And what’s your definition of maniac? FYI, the speed limit on these park roads is 25 mph. I’ll bet even most of the cyclists you say ride like maniacs aren’t exceeding that by much, if at all. Bridges would make it safer for everyone. Moreover, if it’s as busy as you claim, then using lights means both pedestrians and cyclists get stuck at reds. That’s unacceptable for a place which is supposed to be for recreation. You should be able to walk where you want, or ride where you’re allowed to, without having to stop. Traffic signals are a lazy, half-assed solution which for obvious reasons doesn’t work at that well. Grade separation works 100% of the time, for everyone.

That sounds like it would be ugly as sin and be very expensive. The current set up would work but for a minority of cyclists who don’t want to slow down. Ticket the reckless riders and the they’ll stop.

Tickets aren’t the answer. They’ll just end up riding someplace else where it’ll cause even more problems. It’s a f*cking park, not a city street. Traffic signals don’t belong in parks. The only reason they were put there is because cars are allowed on those roads, which they shouldn’t be. Cars don’t belong in parks at any speed. I hope we can at least agree on that.

So the bridges in Central Park are ugly? Please. The current setup doesn’t work, and it’s not just because of a minority of riders. How many millions is this stupid police dragnet costing? There’s your bridge right there. NYC would rather spend millions paying police to do something which won’t even fix the problem than build infrastructure which will.

By the way, tickets will actually make the problem worse. The vast majority of those ticketed here aren’t problem cyclists. The tickets will discourage them from riding. The fast, reckless riders will ride regardless. All tickets will do is decrease the percentage of non-problem riders who might have a calming effect on the reckless few. Remember the police here aren’t chasing down cyclists who fly at 30 mph through crowded crosswalks. They would have to stop munching their donuts to do that. Rather, they’re nabbing slow, easy to catch riders going through red lights at empty crosswalks. I fail to see how anyone is going to benefit from this. And they’re not even giving pedestrians tickets for crossing on red, or out of the crosswalk. I wouldn’t condone this any more than giving cyclists tickets, but at least if they did this the enforcement would be even-handed.

Did they repave it? Alright well before they repaved it nobody was ever there to care, so I and others took road and mountain bikes there frequently, never had any problems. Did they fix it up after that rich guy failed to get the velodrome stadium put in in Brooklyn Bridge park? If you want people to be able to race their bikes then build a few more, they are a more comparable footprint to other facilities, and they give people a place to race, something that doesn’t belong in parks. You can still get a good workout around central or prospect parks, just slow down on the downhill segments instead of pedaling faster.

Not everything is a right. Riding your bike as fast as you can down a hill and around a curve isn’t a right. If there’s nobody in the crosswalk or about to enter it let the bikes go through the light, all I want is them to slow down a bit so that if someone is in the crosswalk, or about to enter it they can stop and yield to the pedestrians who have, and should have, the right of way.

From your posts it seems like your ideal is infrastructure that guides people to behave in a safe manner. That’s never enough though. There are always a few outliers that behave recklessly, endangering themselves and others. People aren’t perfectly rational, and infrastructure is only 90%. The last 10% requires enforcement. The minority of cyclists that feel the need to race down a hill? They should be targeted for enforcement. That doesn’t mean that the ones who slow down but still go through a red light when the crosswalk is empty should get pulled over. But the dangerous cyclists should. Grade separating any one crossing might not cost much, but to do so across the entire city would cost a fortune.

One of the downsides of being in the same place as millions of other people is that you have to give up a certain amount of freedom in order for everyone to get along. You can’t play your music as loud as you want, you can’t drive as fast as you want, or cross the street whenever and wherever you want. And some activities are too dangerous, or too expensive, either in financial terms or in the costs they exact on those nearby, to be appropriate in the city. So compromises have to be made. In some cases, like the guy who was racing around Manhattan, or those who want to race around on their dirt bikes and ATVs, on the streets or in the parks, activities should be prohibited entirely. There’s no feasibly way to allow them in the city. People who want to get a good workout on their bikes? That’s different. PP and CP have room for that to a point. Go as fast as you want uphill, but ease up for the downhill stretches. The number of people who aren’t satisfied with that is going to be small. It’s not worth it to build bridges just for them. On the list of unfunded municipal priorities, putting in a bike bridge in prospect park so cyclists never have to slow at all is pretty far down.

I’ll add that there are a few hills I don’t mind seeing people try to race down, conditionally. The bridges. The condition being that nobody is nearby. You can see that going down a straight bridge. You can’t see it going around a curve.

Can’t give cyclists the right of way around prospect park. Curves too much, so pedestrians won’t have a line of sight to see a bike at some park entrances. Most bike lights aren’t bright enough to shine around a bend. There are just a few crossings in a lap around the park, what’s so wrong about asking someone to not race down a hill around a bend? If you want to train for a long distance race, maybe NYC isn’t the place for you. We don’t accommodate nascar drivers here either.

If there are so many people who want to race then build a velodrome that allows people not on fixed gear bikes, and if it’s just a few, then tell them to get a track bike for Kissena.

I don’t know much about sports cycling, but I know enough to tell that road racing and velodrome racing are completely different sports. Besides the differences in equipment that have already been mentioned, your suggestion is like telling marathoners to go do their 20-mile runs in a 400-m track. Not likely to work. Even if you built a velodrome specifically for non-fixed-gear bikes, very few people would want to use it.

If marathon runners don’t want to keep the safety and comfort of other road users in mind then they should be on a track or a treadmill. And guess what, plenty of people training for marathons spend time on treadmills.

My suggestion of the velodrome is for the few inconsiderate cyclists that are unwilling to slow down around curves enough in a park for people to safely be able to cross the street. PP and CP aren’t their own personal training grounds. They should get rollers or on a velodrome if they don’t want to be considerate to pedestrians.

Use your hand to “wave” them across the way I’ve seen school crossing guards do. After a brief moment of surprise that you’re letting them cross, it usually works.

On another note, I typically only do this if the pedestrian has the legal right of way. Most of the time pedestrians expect passing bikes to not stop or slow down for them. In all honestly, when I’m walking I tend to let bikes go by even when I do have the right-of-way. It’s less time consuming for me to briefly stop walking to let them pass than it is for me to wait for them to slow or stop (assuming they do). There’s even a good rationale for this. In many cases where no mechanized traffic controls exist, such as in the air or on the water, faster vehicles generally have priority over slower ones for the simple reason it takes them longer to stop and get back up to speed. It makes sense to apply this logic to bicycle/pedestrian encounters. The only time it doesn’t make sense is when the stream of cyclists is continuous and pedestrians would have to wait indefinitely if cyclists didn’t stop. I doubt the perimeter roads in Prospect Park or Central Park are ever that busy but I could be wrong.

Usually I establish eye contact then sweep my arm across handlebars in the direction they’re going. If I’m stopping for a light, I say ‘It’s your turn’ pretty loudly. A smile helps. Pedestrians get it about 80% of the time. In the park, it’s more complicated because I don’t know who’s behind me or whether they’ll stop. One of the problems with the whole bike-lane system is that if you’re the first one to the red light and you stop, you have no idea whether the riders behind you will stop also.
Another problem is that most pedestrians who are non-cyclists have no idea what it takes to bring a bicycle at speed to a halt. People will walk in front of you against the light (or any survival sense) because they think of bicycles as slow-moving. there’s not much to do about that.

Way to extrapolate from one picture. I’ve seen them ticket mostly white cyclists. My sample is very limited, but at least it’s more than one! And if we are going to extrapolate based on single observations, what about Alec Baldwin: was he stopped for cycling while black too?

Problem is educated, liberal white people seem to feel like it’s politically correct to freak out and act extra dorky when they see a bicycle coming. It’s a lot nicer riding in the hood where people completely ignore bicycles coming up on them, they’re so much more predictable and it’s very easy to just ride around them no matter who actually has the right of way.

You post signs that you need to completely stop before passing a red at any intersection where lines of sight are compromised due to construction. That solves the problem.

However, lines of sight shouldn’t be compromised by trucks parking near intersections, except for construction purposes. It should be illegal to park within 75 feet of an intersection in NYC regardless of whether or not we ever gave cyclists the legal right to pass red signals. Lines of sight are important for crossing pedestrians. Vehicle parking shouldn’t take precedence over safety.

?

NYS law says if you go through a yield sign without stopping, hitting a pedestrian in the crosswalk or a vehicle in the intersection ‘shall be deemed prima facie evidence of…failure to yield the right of way.’

Any cyclists who tried to bring such a case would find that he wasted his time and money doing so.

If traffic comes around a corner and you want to make it clear to the cyclist that it isn’t safe to proceed just put up a sign saying cyclists cannot proceed through a red light, similar to no turn on red signs outside of the city.

Yeah and especially going after cyclists in the park is like shooting fish in a barrel. Also I wonder if anyone would like to organize protests to try to encourage NYPD to actually enforce the speed limit. Or is it impossible for them to do so on city streets where illegal speeds can’t be sustained for very long?

In my local park, Ft. Tryon Park, we’ve been trying to get NYPD to ticket speeding cyclists for years. In that park, pedestrians and cyclists share a path (cyclists aren’t actually allowed), and teens (usually) speed down the steep hills at incredible speeds. Just in the last few weeks a dog was trampled and a guy just walking was badly hurt.

But of course, this is uptown…and the NYPD doesn’t care.