Brooklyn

When I first met Brian McCormick, Milton Puryear and Meg Fellerath in the spring of 2002, they were picking up trash and planting tulips alongside a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway off-ramp in Cobble Hill. I asked them what they were up to and they told me they were working to create a waterfront greenway for Brooklyn -- a linear park running from Greenpoint to Red Hook. I didn't have the heart to tell them they looked like a gang of juvenile delinquents paying off 40 hours of community service for shop-lifting. Clearly, these people were either insane or visionary.

With the city promising to improve mass transit via congestion pricing revenue, Gary Reilly, author of neighborhood blog, First and Court has started a petition asking the MTA to restore express subway service on the F line and to extend the V line for local service to Brooklyn:

Adrianne Pasquarelli profiles New Yorkers who commute by bicycle for Crain's New York. You have to subscribe to read the entire article, but here she introduces Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, cyclist:

Ian Dutton of the Houston Street bike safety initiative snapped these photographs of yet another never-before-seen street design feature here in New York City. This is what's called a "Bike Box" at the  intersection of W. 9th St. and Sixth Ave. Bike boxes allow cyclists approaching the intersection with a red signal to position themselves at the front of the line of vehicles. This makes bike travel faster and the right turn onto northbound Sixth Avenue safer.

This Thursday will be the opening reception of "Livable Streets in Brooklyn," an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. There will be a presentation by the Grand Army Plaza Coalition (GAPco) about the community-driven process that has been underway to re-envision Grand Army Plaza. And the Department of Transportation will discuss its recently announced plans for bike and pedestrian improvements.

The Shuttle, as seen from Brevoort Place.

Last night, Brooklyn's Community Board 6 narrowly voted in favor of a resolution supporting the Department of Transportation's plan to put Park Slope's 9th Street on a "Road Diet."

Across the Park, a blog dedicated to Brooklyn's Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, notes the striping of new bike lanes on Lincoln Road and Maple Street, just to the east of Prospect Park. We assume that this is meant to be read with an ironic tone, though, you really never know in Brooklyn these days:

A third-grader was hit on her way to school here two weeks ago.