Park Slope

The notion that New York City housing construction shouldn't be weighed down by mandatory parking minimums got a combative response from some City Council members at a hearing today. Streetsblog will have a thorough round-up of who said what tomorrow morning. In the meantime, here's a quick detour to Park Slope for a related story about how parking rules everything around us.

DOT unveiled its latest Citi Bike expansion map last week, and the stations look significantly more spread out than stations in the rest of the system.

As in Sunset Park, the Fourth Avenue road diet has yielded impressive street safety dividends for Park Slope, including a 61 percent drop in pedestrian injuries. Now, DOT is moving forward with plans to cast its changes in concrete.

Heads up, New Yorkers. You never know when your neighborhood sidewalk will turn into a construction detour for motorists.

A driver speeding north on Fourth Avenue in Park Slope this afternoon ran a red light and struck a woman, leaving her seriously injured before speeding away from the scene. Less than six weeks ago, a hit-and-run driver -- also speeding north on Fourth Avenue, also running a red -- injured a cyclist at the same location before crashing his car and fleeing on foot.

Reader Mike Donohue sends this eyewitness account of a driver who fled the scene of a crash in Park Slope Sunday morning.

Lesson learned? Last week, DOT wiped away the Prospect Park West bike lane for street repaving without installing any temporary cones to preserve the bike route during construction. Drivers parked at the curb, pushing northbound cyclists into oncoming traffic or onto the sidewalk. Now, DOT has demarcated the bike lane with orange cones as it re-stripes the road.

During the warm summer months, lots of New Yorkers decide to hop on their bicycles and head for the nearest bike lane. That's also when the city does much of its street repaving, and new asphalt is coming to Prospect Park West. But instead of maintaining the heavily used bike path with temporary materials, our bike-friendly DOT has decided that one of the city's marquee bikeways will be erased for more than a week during one of the busiest cycling months of the year.

Last month, Wayne Bailey was elected to head the community council for NYPD's 78th Precinct, which covers Park Slope, Prospect Park, and parts of adjacent neighborhoods. Bailey is a veteran neighborhood advocate and a long-time volunteer with Transportation Alternatives who has been involved with the precinct community council for years.