Protected Bike Lanes

We've got an addendum to today's news about Prospect Park West bike lane demonstrations. City Council members Brad Lander and Steve Levin have put up a survey to see what their constituents think of the re-designed street. The questions get pretty detailed but it only takes a few minutes to fill out.

Mark next Thursday on your calendars. It's a critical day for one of the city's most innovative livable streets projects. If you care about safer streets, it's going to be an excellent time to respectfully show your support in public.

The state of pedestrian-cyclist relations got some ink in the Times this weekend, in a piece the headline writers chose to run under the banner “The Cyclist-Pedestrian Wars.” That’s a pretty inflammatory choice of words, especially when you consider that the Times style guide still calls for using the non-confrontational “accident” to describe traffic collisions that kill pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists. (Maybe these are the same headline writers who took Robert Sullivan’s 2009 plea for bike-ped solidarity and called it “The Wild Bunch.”)

City Council Member Jimmy Vacca has made several public shows of support for street safety initiatives since taking over as chair of the transportation committee at the beginning of the year. To draw attention to the statewide complete streets bill, he stood with Speaker Christine Quinn at 23rd Street, using the Ninth Avenue bike lane as backdrop. He appeared with Quinn, Mayor Bloomberg, and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan at last week's big pedestrian safety announcement. And he told Streetsblog in an interview this spring that reducing speeding is one of his top priorities.

After a lot of great advocacy from the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance and a down-to-the-wire vote at Community Board 7 this spring, DOT crews are laying down the first on-street protected bikeway above 34th 59th Street, on Columbus Avenue between 96th and 77th. Streetsblog contributor Ken Coughlin sent in these pictures of the painting and striping in progress last Friday.

Last Saturday, a group of volunteers with Transportation Alternatives set up a table on East 117th Street, gathering handwritten letters urging Mayor Bloomberg to extend protected bike lanes up to 125th Street, as originally planned. I've been meaning to write up a short dispatch about it all week. After a short period where we've seen some highly sensationalized bike coverage on CBS2 (last night's installment being the exception), grand theories about bike-related culture wars in the Daily News, and equivocating from Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith about the administration's commitment to street safety improvements north of 34th Street, lets get back to the basic reasons why the way we allocate street space matters.

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.