City Council

Last week's release of "before" and "after" stats on the Prospect Park West bike lane tells an increasingly familiar story: A DOT redesign has increased cycling while making the street safer for pedestrians and drivers. Since safer streets make it easier for New Yorkers to get around without a car, and since biking and walking are emissions-free modes, it's safe to say that this is good news for the environment.

Think that mandatory license plates for bikes is a bad idea? That it'll drain city resources and put a barrier between New Yorkers and a popular, efficient, and green transportation mode? That bike licensing is trying to solve a problem that only exists in some lawmakers' imaginations? Now's your chance to let Queens Republican Eric Ulrich know.

Looks like Queens Council Member Eric Ulrich has come down with a nasty case of legislative diarrhea. The Post reports on Ulrich's belief that streets will be safer if cyclists are required to ride with ID tags:

Here comes Wal-Mart.

Speaker Christine Quinn's office just announced that the City Council has reached a budget deal with the Bloomberg administration, restoring some services slated for cuts and targeting others instead. There's also one case where the council successfully fought to prevent the city from raising revenue to fund more services. A proposal to increase parking meter rates by 25 cents per hour in Manhattan above 86th Street and in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island got negotiated out of the budget deal, thanks in no small part to vigorous opposition from Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca.

We haven't had the full reckoning promised by the City Council yet, but it seems safe to say that a few things contributed to the uproar over unplowed NYC streets over the holidays: 1) There was a lot of snow; 2) the Bloomberg administration didn't declare a snow emergency, and 3) apparently many motorists could have used the official government declaration telling them not to drive in a fierce blizzard, because stuck and abandoned cars made it harder for plow crews to do their jobs.

So it looks like the lasting media image from last week's City Council hearing on bike policy will be Marty Markowitz's string of non-sequiturs sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things." The routine was allowed to proceed even though committee chair Jimmy Vacca began the hearings with a call for decorum at all times. (Maybe that's what prompted NYC Greenmarket founder and car-free Central Park pioneer Barry Benepe to observe, "The entire process appeared to be staged for the benefits of the loudmouths.")

The definitive account of yesterday's Transportation Committee hearing on NYC bike policy has got to be the stream of tweets from BicyclesOnly, which are still pretty close to the top of his feed if you want to take a look. He reported that former deputy mayor and PPW bike lane opponent Norman Steisel was the first to give testimony, permitted to jump the queue and exceed the two-minute time limit by at least five minutes.