[LINK] "Stories from the Big Apple: New York City’s bike lane backlash"

[rfmcdonald]

At Spacing Toronto, Jake Schabas writes about the ways in which New York City's issues with cycling do and do not resemble Toronto's.

It's worth pointing out that the contexts are strikingly different between Toronto and New York City. After all, we're not talking about the odd painted line or loss of a single car lane on Jarvis Street. Installing 250 miles of lanes in five years, as has been done in New York City, should cause a stir. With million-dollar-a-block treatments radically redesigning streets to make them more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists often at the expense of car lanes and parking, there's a good argument that such drastic changes should go through greater public consultation processes.

Local community boards meetings — New York’s hyper-local arm of municipal government established as a way for communities to proactively participate in city issues — are fast becoming the forums for startled residents and local businesses to vent about the changes. And politicians are noticing.

Last November, Staten Island city councillors successfully fought for the removal of a 2.35 mile bike lane on a main street in their borough. Street protests have broken out over a single bike lane along Prospect Park West — a street bordering Brooklyn’s version of Central Park now surrounded by gentrified brownstones. Fights between bike-riding hipsters and Hasidic Jews over bike lanes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn are all too real. Just last week, the idea of licensing cyclists was raised by a Republican councillor in Queens.

Indeed, Republican city councillors are showing their increasing sophistication by arguing that bike lanes should have to go through a lengthy environmental review process that other traffic changes must endure. Such a move would essentially kill the currently expedited process allowing for lanes to be built all over the city at such a furious pace.

Luckily for New York City, anti-bike activists are still playing catch-up. For years now, the City's Transportation Commissioner Janet Sadik-Kahn has openly questioned the place of the car on the city’s streets with the full backing of Mayor Bloomberg. Combine this with a strong mayoral system and Transportation Alternatives, the city's sustainable transportation advocacy group that organizes large pro-bike rallies, fills community board meetings with vocal supporters and overwhelms unfriendly politicians' office inboxes with floods of e-faxes seemingly at will, and those Staten Island politicians still have a long way to go.

Iamskyscraper's comment does more interesting contrast-and-compare between Torontonian and New Yorker approaches to public cycling.

The difference between Toronto and New York is that the government here is very sophisticated and tends to win out with smart, reasoned thinking. In Toronto, situations like the above spin out of control, with lots of finger pointing and weak politicians bending to the squeakiest voice, policy be damned. In New York, Bloomberg has been around long enough to have trained every department to deal in data. You say the new bike lane is slowing traffic? Ok, we'll put GPS in the entire taxi fleet and monitor traffic speeds for a year and see if you are right or not. Not enough parking spaces? Ok, we'll do a turn-signal study and see if we can take some turning lanes out and turn them back into parking. Outer-borough whining about a suburban bike lane? Ok, we'll replace it with a bus lane to see how that works and preserve the idea of giving street space to other modes than private cars. It's quite something to see the NYC govt manage such a hot item in such a chaotic city so effectively. The venting in the articles Jake links to are just part of the march of process.

Jake may be right that at the moment Toronto is still more hospitable to cyclists, ironically, because of the lack of infrastructure that forces cars and bikes to share space and get used to each other. It is indeed still a death wish to ride in mixed traffic on a major NYC street due to the lack of lane use in this town (the paint on the ground is meaningless - traffic "flows" down those big avenues in a way that cannot be described as following lanes). But for recreational biking New York cannot be beat -- just look at the bike map (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikemaps.shtml). You can plan trips hours-long and never have to deal with cars - the connectivity is amazing. As as for parking, NYC is catching up fast. Anyone can request a rack (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikerack.shtml) and laws here now require parking inside office buildings (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikesinbuildings.shtml). Keep your eye on the Big Apple...