Bike Lanes

"I'm not against bike lanes," City Council Member Domenic Recchia told the New York Times after forcing DOT to scrap plans for a four-mile painted bike lane along Bay Ridge Parkway two weeks ago. "I believe there's a place for them."

What's a road diet? Quite simply, traffic-calming expert Dan Burden told Streetfilms, "A road diet is anytime you take any lane out of a road."

If Anthony Weiner has anything in common with his mentor Chuck Schumer, it is that he thrives on attention. And now that he's created a niche for himself on the national stage as the unapologetic, in-your-face liberal congressman from Noo Yawk, he's apparently gained a following of disaffected young Democrats who don't necessarily feel represented by yellow dogs and centrist softies.

If a bike lane gets striped and no one is there to report on it, would it still be "controversial"?

DOT presented plans for two Long Island City street redesigns to Queens Community Board 2's transportation committee last night. One, a standard road diet, would calm traffic on 44th Drive by replacing one moving lane in each direction with a painted median and left turn bays [PDF]. The other, a novel design for a single block of 48th Avenue, manages to make four of six lanes into on-street parking [PDF].

Queens Congressman Anthony Weiner has edged a little closer to clarifying his now-infamous "tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes" remark.

If you're on the Twitter, you may have noticed that Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser and communications strategist for Mayor Bloomberg with a long resume in Democratic Party politics, has been tweeting up a #bikenyc storm lately. Wolfson's bike tweets tend to focus on the lengthy record of public support for bike lanes -- all the community board votes and public surveys that for some reason don't get mentioned in the editorial pages of the Daily News or the Post.

After several months of almost uniformly bad press from NYC's major media outlets, the expansion of the city's bike network still enjoys sizable majority support among city voters, with 54 percent in favor and 39 percent opposed, according to a Quinnipiac poll released this morning.

Since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has promised to take his approach to street redesigns, first put into place by the Columbus Avenue working group, borough-wide, Streetsblog decided to check in with him to see just what this process would look like.