Bike Lanes

Earlier this week the Downtown Express injected some common sense into the public discussion about the value of bike lanes. With protected lanes on Ninth and Eighth Avenue now a valued safety improvement after facing some pushback at first, the paper predicted that initial complaints about the new lanes on the East Side will subside once people get used to them:

One of Manhattan's premier public spaces is now safer, roomier, and livelier. DOT officially opened its improvements to the Union Square area today, including new pedestrian plazas and a continuation of the Broadway bike lane into a contraflow lane on the north side of the square.

Central Park Conservancy head Douglas Blonsky wants his park to get a lot more bike-friendly, he revealed at a meeting of Manhattan's Community Board 7's parks committee last night. Not only is he working to create shared use paths that would allow cyclists to cross the park east-west safely and legally, he repeatedly announced his support for removing vehicular traffic from Central Park entirely.

Select Bus Service remains on track to debut on October 10, confirmed NYC DOT and the MTA at a meeting of the project's Community Advisory Committee last night. Bus service improvements along the corridor are as crucial as ever and will be bolstered by camera enforcement, which DOT announced would be in effect starting in November. The changes that take effect in 25 days, however, won't be the full complete streets package originally promised. Above 34th Street, bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands were unceremoniously stripped from the plan some time this spring.

More New Yorkers are riding bikes than ever, but a new report from the Department of City Planning further complicates the effort to precisely determine how much cycling has taken off. The report, which looks only at cycling in Manhattan bike lanes from 2001 to 2008, shows a significantly slower rate of growth than estimates based on other measurements.

The Prospect Park West bike lane has bestowed order and virtually eliminated the raceway conditions on a street where speeding used to be the norm.

John Del Signore at Gothamist got this shot of Flushing Avenue this morning. Looks like phase one of the Flushing bikeway is getting striped, creating a continuous link between North Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge.

Last night Manhattan Community Board 4 voted unanimously in favor of an 11-block extension for the Eighth Avenue bike lane, which would bring the protected bikeway up to 34th Street. In an interesting flourish, the board asked that the extension include separate left-turn phases for bikes and cars.