Bicycle Infrastructure

After months of debate including criticism from cyclists who want a physically-separated bike lane built on dangerous Houston Street and local car owners who want to protect their right to cheap on-street parking, a freshly painted green bike lane was spotted on Prince Street late last night at the corner of Mott. As Ariel Sharon used to say, there's nothing like "facts on the ground" to end an argument. Though, come to think of it, they're still arguing in the Middle East.

Courtesy of commenter Steve, we have an update on U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and her anti-bike comments from this past summer.

Clever hedge fund managers have figured out ways to make money off of weather futures, the electricity grid and quite a few other unlikely sources. What I want to know is if anyone can help me find a way to invest my retirement savings in bicycling in Portland, Oregon. According to the latest numbers, it's a serious growth industry.

The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT's Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface. 

The Department of Transportation announced the installation of a buffered bike lane on Fifth Avenue in this month's NYCycles, a monthly e-newsletter produced by DOT on cycling issues.

The Department of Transportation revealed plans for New York City's first-ever physically-separated bike lane, or "cycle track," at a Manhattan Community Board 4 meeting last night. The new bike path will run southbound on Ninth Avenue from W. 23rd to W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Unlike the typical Class II on-street bike lane in which cyclists mix with motor vehicle traffic, this new design will create an exclusive path for bicycles between the sidewalk and parked cars.

Bicycling advocates: On the agenda of this evening's Manhattan Community Board 2 transportation committee meeting is a plan to expand bike parking in SoHo. It would be very helpful to have a handful of people who live, work and visit SoHo on hand to make sure the committee knows how important parking is for bicyclists. Here are the details:

StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson has been in Davis, California the last few days, filming one of the premier bicycling cities in the United States. Clarence has a preliminary report and some photos up on the web site with a StreetFilm yet to come. It's worth a quick look.

Luc Nadal of the Institute for Transportation Development Policy sends along these photos showing some of the exciting new things happening on Parisian streets these days.