Bike Lanes

The City Council Transportation Committee held hearings on three bills today, each of which would add more requirements to the Department of Transportation's review process for street redesigns, especially bike lanes.

Transportation Alternatives and the New York Chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians today released a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, signed by 140 medical professionals from a broad spectrum of specialties, praising the city's bike and pedestrian infrastructure as essential to the health of New Yorkers. It's a solid counterweight to the hysteria surrounding the recent Hunter College bike-ped crash study:

After over a year of protests from residents and electeds clamoring for safer streets, next week DOT will present its proposal for extending the First and Second Avenue bike lanes north to 125th Street. The presentations will mark the second time around the community board circuit for bike-ped safety plans on those streets, which were approved by local CBs in 2010 but put on hold soon after.

On Wednesday, DOT outlined a proposal for new Class II bike lanes in Chelsea between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and the Hudson River Greenway. While safe streets advocates welcomed the news, there is concern that their planned location, on W. 29th and W. 30th Streets, may not be ideal for unprotected lanes.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Bert Bunyan has ruled in favor of the city in the Prospect Park West bike lane case, dismissing the plaintiffs' lawsuit on the grounds that they did not file before the statute of limitations had run out. We will have more for you tomorrow, Streetsblog readers. If you care to peruse Judge Bunyan's decision tonight, here it is [PDF]:

Earlier today I participated in a live chat debate on the topic of bike lanes, hosted and moderated by Celeste Katz. The chief sparring partner for supporters of bike lanes was Alex Nazaryan, who sits on the paper's editorial board and joined a group of cyclists for an uneventful ride across the Manhattan Bridge the previous morning.

Today at noon I'll be venturing over to the Daily News' Daily Politics blog to participate in a live chat about bike lanes. The debate, which the Daily News has assigned the unfortunate title "Bike Lanes: Good or Evil," was prompted by the paper's editorials on cyclists using the wrong side of the Manhattan Bridge during the current construction detour. The series seems to have wrapped up today by observing that the vast majority of cyclists obey the construction detour rules, without actually admitting that this has been the case all along.

A new NY1/Marist poll adds to the public opinion research showing a substantial majority of New Yorkers favor bike lanes. The survey found that 66 percent of adult New Yorkers support bike lanes, a somewhat higher level of support than the 59 percent recorded in a recent Quinnipiac poll. So NYC bike lanes are not only more popular than God, they are almost as popular as Andrew Cuomo.

From the Irish Independent: