Bicycle Infrastructure

Before an audience of more than 100 people last night, Manhattan Community Board 7 voted 35-0, with five abstentions, for a resolution asking DOT to perform a complete streets study of Amsterdam Avenue, including safer pedestrian crossings and a protected bike lane. The unanimous vote came after a long session of procedural wrangling over the resolution's language, but sets the stage for the agency to move forward with redesigning the street.

After months of meetings, tonight Manhattan Community Board 7 is expected to vote on a resolution asking DOT for a complete streets study of Amsterdam Avenue. Getting to tonight's vote involved months of marathon meetings and debate, and supporters of safer streets can't let up now.

There are two community board meetings tonight on complete streets plans in Manhattan and Queens.

If you ride on the Second Avenue protected bike lane through Kips Bay, you know it can get a little hairy on the way downtown: The section between 23rd Street and 14th Street has no physical protection. On this stretch, the barrier of parked cars yields to a narrow painted buffer, creating an opportunity for illegal parking and offering minimal separation from speeding drivers. Under a DOT plan [PDF], that gap could be filled to create a continuous protected bike lane from 34th Street to 2nd Street.

The Post is doing its best to assign partial blame to the cyclist who was struck by cab driver Mohammed Himon in Tuesday morning's crash on Sixth Avenue, but the paper got Himon to confess that he intentionally stepped on the gas before mounting the curb and hitting Sian Green, the 23-year-old tourist who lost part of her leg.

Leicester is a city of about 330,000 in England's East Midlands region. Like many other cities, it developed big mid-century plans to drive highways through its city center and paved over much of its historic core. In some cases, it even paved over its history: the bones of King Richard III, killed in battle nearby, were recently discovered beneath a parking lot. In the past decade, however, Leicester has unearthed more than just a king; it's also reclaimed space from the automobile and become a model for other cities looking to create more livable communities.

Responding to years of citizen advocacy and a resolution from Manhattan Community Board 12, DOT has proposed bike lanes for a number of streets in Upper Manhattan.

Earlier this week, DOT released its 2012 bike counts [PDF], including a new dataset -- counts from the winter months. The agency has been tallying cyclists in December, January, and February for five years, and this year released the winter counts, in addition to April-through-October counts, for the first time. The data show that warm weather counts at the DOT's screenline (the four East River bridges below 60th Street, the Hudson River Greenway at 50th Street, and the Staten Island Ferry) plateaued in 2012, while winter counts continued a steady upward trajectory.

A short stretch of bike lanes in Inwood has gone the way of the disappearing bike shelter, further reducing the neighborhood's scarce cycling infrastructure.