Bicycle Safety

Thanks to Ian Dutton for these great shots from Flatbush Avenue, where pedestrians are being allotted more space on five side streets from Prospect Park to Atlantic Avenue.

Last year, Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and their neighbors picked up the pieces of a torpedoed bike lane proposal for Lafayette Avenue, showing DOT and Brooklyn Community Board 2 the community's broad support for safer cycling on the busy street. After 1,400 signatures and countless hours of work, Lafayette Avenue from Fulton Street to Classon Avenue was recently striped with a shared lane for bicyclists.

Tomorrow night, the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 7 will take public input on the possible expansion of protected bike lanes on the Upper West Side.

At a press conference at Union Square this morning, DOT and the Taxi and Limousine Commission announced another facet of the LOOK! campaign, a new video and a decal reminding taxi passengers to exit on the curb side and check for cyclists before opening cab doors.

New data is online about the extent of bike-on-ped crashes in New York City, and it adds some much-needed perspective to the public discourse about the "safety crisis" on city streets.

We have word that a major bike-ped link to the Hudson River Greenway in Northern Manhattan will be out of commission later this year.

The great thing about arguments favoring compulsory bike helmet laws is that they tend to stay on topic instead of degenerating into fruitless bickering over cyclists’ interactions with pedestrians, bike riders’ claim to the streets, and other tired subjects.

The NYPD appears to be taking bicycle safety into its own hands, offering faulty safety tips to cyclists on both the First Avenue and Fifth Avenue bike lanes.

Staten Island's Howard Avenue was once known as Serpentine Road. Though the moniker was mostly due to the serpentinite in the hill's bedrock, the road also winds and writhes up Grymes Hill, the second highest point on Staten Island. The neighborhood is home to two college campuses, Wagner and St. John's, the secondary schools Notre Dame Academy and P.S. 35, century-old homes and breathtaking views stretching beyond the north shore to encompass Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bayonne.