Bike Lanes

Transportation Alternatives will officially kick off Bike Month tomorrow with a morning ride down the 9th Avenue cycle track. The ride will start at 9th and 23rd Street, and will end at the 14th Street pedestrian plaza, where there will be a press conference to highlight Bike Month events. Word is DOT Commish Janette Sadik-Khan will be on hand.

Last month, Slate Magazine's SlateV asked viewers to submit entries for the "stupidest bike lane in America." Responses poured in -- many from outside the U.S. -- and the honor went to a lane in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is so useless that the markings were removed before the Slate crew got to it.

Earlier this week, the Forum For Urban Design announced the Red Hook Bicycle Master Plan Design Competition, offering cash prizes for the best proposals to "re-imagine Red Hook as the most bicycle friendly neighborhood in all of New York."

 Slate takes the short ride down what one of its editors calls "the stupidest bike lane in America," which leads Los Angeles cyclists for about one block before dumping them into Westwood traffic. Know of any of these in New York?

Over the next week or so, community boards in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn will take up planned livable streets projects, as described below.

Almost six months after DOT installed "controversial" new cross-town bike lanes on the Upper East Side, Manhattan's Community Board 8, which opposed the city's plan for lanes on 91st Street, has formed a "91st Street Task Force."

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.