Bike Lanes

Not only are Portland, Oregon's new bike boxes to be accompanied by a motorist safety campaign, they're also making them hard for drivers to miss at street level. Note the "Get Behind It" sign to the right.

Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition has been digging through the Municipal Archives and look what he found: a 1938 memo from Robert Moses to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia about the need to create a network of dedicated bike paths in city parks. Moses's reasoning looks odd to modern eyes, in part because he argues for bike paths as a purely recreational amenity. His rationale for bike infrastructure fails to see cycling as transportation (sound familiar?), choosing instead to segregate bike facilities from the street network.

As a candidate for a livable streets makeover, Columbus Avenue is a no-brainer. A block from Central Park, it is home to the American Museum of Natural History and sports a string of active ground floor businesses, but the street itself is a classically car-oriented corridor: three moving lanes sandwiched between two parking lanes. The Columbus Avenue BID has been working with Project for Public Spaces to make the street itself more of a destination -- to create a walkable, transit-oriented "spine" running from the museum to Lincoln Center on Broadway.

From a Streetsblog tipster comes this shot of five of the city's 142,000 placard-bearing vehicles parked in the bike lane on Lafayette Street between Franklin and White.

A Streetsblog reader named Jessica sends along yet another story of the NYPD's failure to treat bike commuters as full-fledged citizens of the City of New York: 

Streetsblog received this tip last night:

Even before the NYPD identified a hooded cyclist as the this morning's likely Times Square bomber, two reports of bike commuters being ticketed and harassed by the police have already hit the Streetsblog inbox. Perhaps it's just that the weather's getting nicer and more people happen to be out on bikes but at least one cyclist says an officer told him that the police are gearing up yet another organized "crack down" on cyclists.

An organized ride on one of Portland's bike boulevards.