Bike Lanes

Today was a milestone for traveling between Brooklyn and Queens: NYC DOT opened the Pulaski Bridge bike path to lots of cheers with a celebratory ride.

One of New York City's most faded bike lanes has gotten its shine back. There's a fresh coat of thermoplast on the Lafayette Street bike lane between Spring Street and Canal Street, which for a while had almost completely disappeared.

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.

The surreal world of Upper East Side bike lane meetings took another bizarre turn Wednesday night. DOT has put forward a simple plan for painted crosstown bike lanes in the neighborhood, but instead of breezing through Community Board 8, it's become a prime example of how even the most basic safety improvements can get bogged down in a series of gripe sessions.

Last summer, a group of Queens residents began organizing as the Queens Bike Initiative. Their mission: to push the city to build bike connections linking their neighborhoods in northern Queens to the borough’s parks. Nine months later, DOT has presented a plan to stripe a bike route on 31st Avenue [PDF], which the Queens Bike Initiative is lauding as the first step toward realizing their greater vision.

If you ever go to an Upper East Side community board meeting about bike lanes, bring some popcorn.

Every street in Long Island City is in line for a top-to-bottom reconstruction, and as part of the project DOT and the Department of Design and Construction are proposing several improvements for walking and biking. Here's the presentation the agencies gave to Queens Community Board 2 earlier this month, showing the preliminary redesigns. The project covers several streets and intersections, and some of the options on the table go a lot farther than others to make walking and biking safer.

Last month, when Council Member Ritchie Torres lambasted DOT's deference to community boards over street safety projects, he anticipated a fight over the agency's plan for bike lanes on Tremont Avenue.