Manhattan

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.

East Harlem residents are outraged by the city's backtracking on plans to bring protected bike lanes to their neighborhood. 

Are New York City's planning commissioners serious about parking reform? An important test case is shaping up on Manhattan's west side, where Extell Development is trying to build 1,800 parking spaces in an area the size of two city blocks.

Two months after the MTA and NYCDOT first presented East Side Select Bus Service to Manhattan Community Board 6, officials were back with a modified plan last night, hoping to get a vote from the transportation committee. After a combative couple of hours, they didn't get one. The committee chose to put off a vote until its next meeting rather than come to a decision. The big news to emerge was the announcement of a specific launch date for the first phase of Select Bus Service on the corridor.

Sorry for the late notice folks, but there's one more public meeting on this week's busy schedule with big implications for street safety, and it's happening tonight. The transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 is expected to draft and vote on a resolution regarding plans for Select Bus Service and protected bike lanes on the East Side. If you want to help support for safer biking and walking, you'll want to turn out for this one.

"You can't control what you can't measure," the saying goes. So to get a better grip on street safety on Manhattan's East Side, Transportation Alternatives started by collecting better data about local traffic collisions and injuries. Last night, a group of Upper East Siders used that information to begin imagining what a safer neighborhood might look like.

Are police starting to take bike theft seriously? In the East Village, officers with NYPD's Civil Enforcement Unit have shut down a bike shop on East 6th Street as the result of what one officer characterized as an ongoing undercover investigation.

New York City's Moynihan Station project has snagged $83 million in grant money from the stimulus law's Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced today.

The pending trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has thrown lower Manhattan into a tizzy, for good reasons. Foremost, of course, is the dread of revisiting the horrors of that day, mingled with fears of new attacks linked to the trial. But there are also concerns that the NYPD's aggressive countermeasures will impede movement, worsen traffic and suffocate the economy of the area, pockets of which never recovered fully from police-ordered street closures and other 9/11 aftershocks. These concerns could be assuaged by a tough, zero tolerance stance on parking placard abuse by government employees.