Park Slope

We missed it in the run-up to the holidays last month, but this item in the Brooklyn Paper is worth a longer look. DOT has announced its intention to implement some safety fixes at the northern end of Grand Army Plaza.

All About Fifth, the blog of Park Slope's Fifth Avenue BID, posted a plug today for Roadify, one of several emerging applications that hope to help drivers find parking through the use of mobile devices.

Union Street in Brooklyn has a problem: The queue of cars waiting to drive through the intersection at Grand Army Plaza sometimes stretches as far as the eye can see. The bottleneck, which causes a lot of horn-honking, crosswalk-blocking, and other hazards, is intimately connected to another problem: Grand Army Plaza is a spinning vortex of traffic draining the life from what should be Brooklyn's premier public space.

A reader sent in this photo from Park Slope, where restaurateur Irene Lo Re has been railing against the Fifth Avenue bike lane.

A reader sent this photo to Streetsblog soon after we reported that Park Slope restaurateur Irene Lo Re had asked for the Fifth Avenue bike lane to be removed. According to Lo Re's theory, which few other merchants seem to buy, the bike lane was causing delivery costs to rise. We saw this photo and thought there might be some sort of detente on the horizon. Maybe someone had reasoned with Lo Re and convinced her that a nice environment for pedestrians and cyclists is great for business at Aunt Suzie's.

The most telling answers at Transportation Alternatives' District 33 City Council candidates forum came after an audience member asked point blank for the debaters' stance on congestion pricing. "I can’t support a candidate who’ll support congestion pricing," said the questioner, Dave Reina. "I think it's punitive, and there are more creative solutions out there. Who’ll stand up against it?"

A crowd of about 75 Brooklynites turned out for the Transportation Alternatives City Council candidate debate last night, despite the muggy mid-August heat and un-air-conditioned PS 321 auditorium. They were treated to a substantive discussion of transportation policy that went deeper than "bike lanes: good or bad."

In Democrat-dominated New York City, much of the electoral action happens on primary day. This year's primaries are fast approaching: Voters go to the polls on September 15, four weeks from tomorrow. Contests for City Council seats, the Manhattan District Attorney's job, borough presidencies, Public Advocate, and City Comptroller will by and large be decided on that day.

DOT contractors are putting down new bike lane markings on Park Slope's Fifth Avenue this afternoon. In addition to refurbishing the original bike lane laid down in 2004 and the sharrows installed in 2006, the crews are adding reinforcements, like the chevron markings through the intersections pictured below.