Do you ride around the city shaking your fist at, cursing at or tweeting photos of bike lanes blocked or otherwise ruined by construction sites? Here's some great news: You can now get paid by city taxpayers to document these crimes against safe cycling and force contractors to correct their infractions.
The Department of Transportation is hiring a pair of inspectors for its bike lane unit, which is charged with checking out construction sites that spill into bike lanes to make sure that contractors provide safe temporary bike lanes, per Carlina Rivera's bill passed in 2019. The listing says the job also includes following up on other people's complaints "regarding roadway defects, check building operations to ensure that contractors comply with DOT Rules and Regulations; inspect all roadway/street openings made by utility companies, plumbers, contractors, and other agencies."
And whomever gets hired for the full-time, year-round slot will do it all on a DOT-issued bike, possibly for six hours at a time.
The pay? Ranging from $33,019 to $37,972, depending on whether you already work for the city, with your paycheck rising to $51,891 if you keep at the job for four years.
In addition to the pay, you'll have the adoration of the city's cycling community, who need government support to ensure that street work doesn't turn their normal commutes into dangerous descents into the depths of driver decadence. Of course, you'll need to make sure that you follow through when writing up construction companies for ignoring the law, unlike, say, this DOT inspector who claimed that a construction project that spilled into a contraflow bike lane on Johnson Street wasn't violating any laws. The job is especially important though, because sometimes shoddy street work or haphazard construction sites aren't just annoyances, they can cost cyclists their lives.
In Queens, for instance, the city let a shoddy road repair job on 40th Drive in Elmhurst just sit there untouched until Lin Wen-Chiang hit a divot in the road and died in early 2022. And at the end of May, police said cyclist Carlos Martinez was killed when he suddenly fell off his bike as he rode near Bruckner Boulevard and East 136th Street in the Bronx. But on a visit to the site of the crash, Streetsblog found that the road was cluttered by a Con Edison work site that spilled into half the roadway and was supposed to be finished by November 20, 2021.
To apply for the job, click here and enter 533063 in the Job ID field.
(h/t Laura Shepard)
