Bicycle Infrastructure

The country’s crisis of crumbling infrastructure could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand bicycle access.

The line to testify at today's Transportation Committee hearing on New York City bike policy was snaking outside into the biting cold well before the 10:00 a.m. start time. More than 70 people signed up to speak, filling up two hearing rooms at 250 Broadway.

In the Netherlands, 30 percent of trips under five miles are by bike.

We've got another highlight from 2010 construction season to share with you. A two-way, protected approach to the Queens side of the Queensboro Bridge bike-ped path has been paved, striped and open for business since the end of October.

Via the League of American Bicyclists, new information is out about how much the feds are spending on bike-ped projects. While federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects is down a bit from last year's all-time high, it still comes in at more than a billion dollars. A third of the money is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which begs the question of what will happen to bike-ped funding once the stimulus funds dry up. We got some foreshadowing last week of what might be in store for bike-ped funding if Republicans cut the transportation bill to the "core program."

We reported recently that the federal government was demanding $2.2 billion back from state DOTs in rescissions -- money that was already allocated to states that they were then asked to give back. Bike and pedestrian advocates were worried that states would disproportionately target active transportation projects for cuts, instead of carving into car-centric programs. They were right.

The state of pedestrian-cyclist relations got some ink in the Times this weekend, in a piece the headline writers chose to run under the banner “The Cyclist-Pedestrian Wars.” That’s a pretty inflammatory choice of words, especially when you consider that the Times style guide still calls for using the non-confrontational “accident” to describe traffic collisions that kill pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists. (Maybe these are the same headline writers who took Robert Sullivan’s 2009 plea for bike-ped solidarity and called it “The Wild Bunch.”)

It’s payback time again for state DOTs. The fine print on the jobs bill Congress just passed includes a $2.2 billion rescission from state transportation funding, and projects to make biking and walking safer are especially at risk of losing out.