Trucks

The Kent Avenue bike path was not the most hotly debated item at last night's Brooklyn CB1 meeting. That distinction belongs to the rezoning plan for the area known as Broadway Triangle. But DOT's team still encountered some skepticism from North Brooklyn residents concerned about truck traffic. The revised plan [PDF], which calls for a two-way protected bike path on Kent with one-way auto traffic, would divert southbound trucks along a different route.

Sheldon Silver's partial endorsement of the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue plan [PDF], which includes East and Harlem River bridge tolls, offers the best political hope in years for reducing the daily truck tsunami pulverizing downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

Check out this video, via BikePortland.org, on bicycle safety, part of a Portland Water Bureau campaign to reduce truck-cyclist collisions there. Last month, the Water Bureau held a bike safety seminar, which involved cyclists climbing into the cab of a city truck to see (or not see) driver blind spots for themselves.

This handy illustration, courtesy of DOT via "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, should be in the training curriculum for every delivery driver who does business in New York. Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson, who came across this graphic last week, says his appeals to delivery drivers stationed in bike lanes are often met by the excuse that it is not illegal to double park. When a vehicle blocks a bike lane, the law says otherwise:

Streetsblog contributor Ethan Kent sends along this item from CoolTown Studios, profiling what it calls "the contemporary urban delivery vehicle":

This image comes courtesy of TrucksDeliver.org, not the Onion.

From Transportation Alternatives: 

From the National Bike Summit:

We didn't do it.