Bicycle Safety

Plans for new bike and traffic-calming facilities in Harlem will go before Community Board 10 tomorrow night. As we reported last month, DOT intends to replace one lane of auto traffic with a buffered bike lane on Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard between W. 118th and W. 153rd Streets [PDF], completing a direct marked route between Central Park and the Macombs Dam Bridge.

After a contentious few months full of clowns, scantily-clad women, illegal billboards, and community board strife (since resolved), we may finally be approaching the denouement to the city's most talked about bike lane drama. The Brooklyn Paper reports on the latest Kent Avenue development:

A reader reports of another NYPD cyclist crackdown, this time on the Lower East Side.

From Streetsblog San Francisco contributor Chris Carlsson: 

Compared to downtown Manhattan, the bike network in Harlem is on the patchy side, with only a few on-street lanes. Safer streets are on the way, however. Last week, DOT presented plans for a buffered bike path on Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard to a neighborhood forum put on by Community Board 10. The new lane would run from 153rd Street to 118th Street, connecting to an existing route that feeds into Central Park.

This morning City Room wrote up a study published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention that examines the factors behind cyclist fatalities in New York City. Nearly all the data derives from a groundbreaking 2006 report on bike injuries and deaths [PDF], the joint effort of several city agencies that preceded a major expansion of New York's bike network.

The reconstruction of East Houston Street will include wider medians, bigger sidewalks, fewer traffic lanes, and a new bike lane. But instead of installing a physically protected path for cyclists, the city plans to paint a buffered, Class 2 lane. The project, which received funds freed up by stimulus spending, will go out to bid this summer.

How fast do cars travel on Prospect Park West? Criminally fast. All the time. Members of Park Slope Neighbors clocked cars routinely exceeding the 30 mph speed limit -- including one sociopath racing at 65 mph -- during a ten-minute stretch earlier this month. Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue form a one-way pair funneling drivers to and from the free East River bridges and the Prospect Expressway, a configuration that makes for hazardous conditions. Last summer a school bus driver struck and killed cyclist Jonathan Millstein on Eighth Avenue. A few weeks ago a 57-year-old pedestrian was nearly killed a couple of blocks away from the Millstein incident. Parents are afraid to walk with their children across the corridor's dysfunctional intersections. NYPD enforcement is sorely lacking.