Bicycle Safety

The long-awaited Sands Street bike path, a protected approach to the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge which took a few years longer than expected to go through New York City's construction bureaucracy, looks tantalizingly close to completion these days. It's not there yet, but you can start to picture how this critical addition to the city's bike network will appear when finished. The Department of Design and Construction tells us the whole thing should be paved by the end of the week, weather permitting, and the path should officially open to cyclists next week, after some fencing is added.

Spurred by comments following yesterday's post on Greenway access in Washington Heights, a reader put together this map [download the full size version] of how to get from the Greenway to the George Washington Bridge. It's no straight shot by any means. If the arrows are a little hard to follow, here are the directions:

Last Friday afternoon my wife and I walked the Hudson River Greenway from Morningside Heights north toward home in Inwood. It was nice and warm out, and after a while we wanted water, so just south of the George Washington Bridge we decided to head over to Broadway, where we could stop for a beverage before catching a train the rest of the way. We exited the Greenway at 165th Street in Washington Heights, a route neither of us had taken before. After crossing the pedestrian bridge over the train tracks and taking a trail under the Henry Hudson Parkway and through the woods, this is what we found.

Last week DOT unveiled this conceptual plan for a better gateway to the Brooklyn Bridge [PDF]. For the thousands of pedestrians and cyclists who access the bridge on the Brooklyn side every day, it's a winner.

The Manhattan DA's office is filing charges of criminal mischief against a cyclist, Ray Bengen, because he allegedly caused property damage to a multi-ton SUV in the process of getting doored by the driver. Too ridiculous to be true? Sadly, no. Here's how it happened.

Last week, DOT presented plans for short-term changes that should make Brooklyn's Park Circle more welcoming to those on foot, on bikes and on horseback. The proposal [PDF] comes after a February public workshop on the gateway to Prospect Park raised speeding drivers and inadequate facilities for other users as major concerns.

If you don't care for DOT's new bike safety ads, here's something you'll really hate.

For two days running, the Daily News has reported that recently appointed Health Commissioner Tom Farley feels, let's say, hesitant to ride his bike in Manhattan. Coming on the heels of this week's DOH report on child fatalities -- which downplayed the risks of traffic -- it got us wondering how the agency might influence street safety under the new boss.

DOT today announced a new slate of public service announcements for its "Look" cyclist safety campaign. As demonstrated in this TV ad, the spots are more graphic -- i.e. more realistic -- than the previous line-up (though those ads are currently running online as well), and are reminiscent of PSAs we've seen from abroad. Reads a DOT press release: