The CityFix: Sustainable Urban Mobility
Submitted by Jonna McKone on December 1, 2010
New York City's new-ish First Avenue bike lane.
On November 22 and November 23, 2010, The New York Times gave biking in New York City significant coverage in print.
The paper wrote about the city’s plans for a cross-borough bike share system. And then a day later how the transformation of the 200 miles of city streets in the past few years to accommodate bike lanes has resulted in a heated “backlash.”
We’ve been writing about and support New York City’s successful bike initiatives and EMBARQ, the producer of this blog, released a video on the bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure spearheaded by New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The City is instituting mass transit expansion, including bus rapid transit and policies for more healthful and livable communities to bring a balance in modal usage, improve quality of life and ultimately diminish the dominance of personal vehicles on the City’s streets.
Yet, according to the Times article, business owners and drivers in Manhattan have erupted in discontent over the eliminated parking spaces and difficulty of making deliveries caused by new bike lanes on Columbus Avenue. And in Staten Island, lanes were removed on Capodanno Boulevard to “better meet Staten Island’s unique transportation issues.”
Perhaps, as Streetsblog’s Ben Fried points out, the article overstates the tension between bike lane supporters and detractors, pitting one group against the other without giving the issues their due explanation. The New York Times reporter J. David Goodman is inconsistent in his explanation of the conflict. First he states, “the opposition to the city’s agenda on bicycles has far less organization and passion than the bicycling advocates, but it is gaining increased attention.” Taking on a different tone, later in the article he says that surging bike ridership has spurred “simmering cultural conflict between competing notions of urban transportation.” Fried calls out Goodman’s poorly researched examples of “dissent” to bike lanes like an anti-bike lane rally in the Lower East Side he chose not to cover in Streetsblog because it “drew more reporters than bike lane opponents.”
Rather than pointing to conflict, Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, more accurately described the complicated issues as New York surges ahead with infrastructure changes. Stringer says it’s a lack of education and attention to safety that causes a misuse of the lanes. “We’ve got seniors who think bike lanes are walkways. We’ve got police cars using bike lanes as a quick way around town.” He continues, “We’ve got taxi cabs pulling up so close to the bike lanes that a passenger gets out and actually doors a cyclist.”
And then there are the cyclists who hop onto sidewalks, ride against traffic and cruise at dangerous speeds. For those riders, NYC DOT has a campaign called “Don’t be a Jerk” that it released along with a set of cycling rules.
A New York City DOT posted promoting safety in bike lanes. Photo by scottmontreal.
One commenter on TheCityFix described his concerns:
For all its candy coated political correctness & college town nostalgic dreams, cycling in Manhattan’s over-congested streets is dangerous & often out of control. Not the least of which it is unregulated, unenforced & totally uninsured . . . NYC cyclists rarely use bike lanes, ride in any direction they please, yell at pedestrians to get out of the way and basically are on power trips with no regard for anyone. There is even an ever growing, non-gender specific, macho cyclist subculture that promotes bikes without brakes & gears…
And indeed some bikers who want to ride fast even oppose the lanes. We found a video by a biker who said the new First Avenue lanes are dangerous because she wasn’t able to go fast enough.
In the wake of all this, the City Council will hold a hearing on bicycling on December 9th to address the needs of cyclists and other road users as well as how NYC DOT has worked with community boards to review large-scale road changes. And police are cracking down on biking traffic violations. (Bikers must follow the same rules, markings and traffic signals as motorists.)
Paint on pavement lanes as well as protected lanes that move the car-parking lane away from the curb have improved safety for bikers and shifted the paradigm of what a sustainable and livable city is. More people are biking than before and the City is finding more of an equilibrium between cyclists, pedestrians, mass transit riders and cars on the streets. Traffic calming measures makes streets safer and more usable for walkers and riders and clears up space for expanded surface transit. Although injuries and fatalities increased for riders in 2010 compared to 2009, daily biker ridership has increased dramatically, meaning rates of injuries are dramatically on the decline.
New York is a city of such diverse street activity that compromise is required. Even though a subset of biking culture is about breaking the rules, bike lanes and city streets must accommodate all types of mobility.
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