Protected Bike Lanes

About 70 people showed up for a screening of the documentary film Contested Streets and a follow-up conversation on transportation issues last night. Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Assembly member Deborah Glick were not among them, both claiming last minute conflicts. The event was hosted by Manhattan Community Board 2. 

For years, Livable Streets advocates have pleaded with New York City's Department of Transportation to just try new things. Do street design experiments using temporary materials. Give new ideas a shot. If an experiment doesn't work, take it down, redesign it, improve it or, heck, just restore it to how it used to be. What do we have to lose? If we don't start figuring out new ways to design and manage New York City's streets, all we're left with is a future of ever-increasing gridlock, pollution and honking.

The unprecedented new physically-separated bike path running along Chelsea's Ninth Avenue has already been set up using temporary materials. The Department of Transportation is billing it as New York City's "street of the future." New York 1 reported yesterday:

With city workers pouring concrete in the background (and StreetFilms' cameras rolling), New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced pedestrian and cyclist improvements for Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza yesterday. The plan calls for 11,000 square feet of new, landscaped pedestrian islands, a separated bike path, new crosswalks and pedestrian signals.

The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT's Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface. 

The Department of Transportation revealed plans for New York City's first-ever physically-separated bike lane, or "cycle track," at a Manhattan Community Board 4 meeting last night. The new bike path will run southbound on Ninth Avenue from W. 23rd to W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Unlike the typical Class II on-street bike lane in which cyclists mix with motor vehicle traffic, this new design will create an exclusive path for bicycles between the sidewalk and parked cars.

I will not be able to attend tonight's big meeting in Brooklyn so I really hope that someone will ask DOT about this and report back on what they say: