Midtown

Last night, DOT closed both lanes of the Park Avenue Tunnel to prepare for the construction of safety upgrades at Park and 33rd Street. That's the intersection where southbound cars exit the tunnel, creating a dangerous blend of speeding vehicles and poor sight lines. From 1995 to 2005, 156 pedestrians and 10 cyclists were struck by cars there, according to CrashStat.

Streetsblog's Brad Aaron -- on vacation in exotic, uh, Midtown -- sends this pic of a newly-striped 34th Street bus lane, looking east from Eighth Avenue. Red lanes on each side of 34th are part of the first phase of improvements to what is intended to become the city's first "transitway." Another witness says the bus lane on the north side of the street hasn't been striped yet.

New York cyclists know that corporate office buildings are often not the friendliest places for bike commuters. Lynette Chang, a.k.a. "The Gal From Down Under," has been recording her attempts to enter Manhattan office towers with her folding bike. In this video she dresses up nicely, folds her bike neatly and tries to visit the PricewaterhouseCoopers building in Midtown. She is rebuffed by a meathead building manager who insists, "you don't ride a bike to a corporate office building" and, leave it outside, since "nobody steals bikes."

Assembly Member Richard Brodsky, archenemy of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, is urging the mayor to seek a carbon tax instead. So he said, following Monday's meeting of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, as reported by Streetsblog and confirmed by at least one other observer.

A week after two cyclists were killed in midtown, NY1 wants to know, in its very limited multiple choice format, what needs to be done to make New York City safer for cyclists. Your options are:

 

The state's highest court has thrown out the conviction of a man who was arrested for standing on a Times Square sidewalk three years ago.

This week's Time Out New York offers advice on the best ways to navigate the city (all of them sans private automobile). In addition to tips on cheating the MTA out of a subway fare and knowing when the bus is better, TONY explains that pedicabs aren't just for tourists.

The top 10 NASCAR drivers drove a "victory lap" around Midtown Manhattan this morning as a part of "Championship Week." While Streetsblog would like to interpret this as an elaborate promotion for the creation of a congestion relief zone, it seems more likely that this is more about selling spaghetti sauce, laundry detergent and mayonnaise and getting a new race track built on Staten Island.