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NYC shows the way
If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, or so the saying goes. We’ve been excitedly watching NYC for some time now, and the city has been designated a Bronze level Bicycle Friendly Community since 2007. The city has been installing bike facilities at a jaw-dropping rate, managing over 200 miles in less than 3 years and is still going strong. NYC is inspiring major cities throughout the country and the world. When your work garners the attention of the bicycling masses in Copenhagen, you know you’re doing something right!
Just last week I was treated to a bike tour from the city’s Acting Bicycle Program Coordinator Hayes Lord. Though I’m a frequent visitor of the city, and there seems to be new pathway or separated lane each time I go. On this particular tour, Hayes showed me the 1st and 2nd Avenue separated lanes that were still being installed as we rode by. There is no doubting the impact these types of facilities are having in drawing out new cyclists. That draw is part of the reason for new political support in addressing safety and throughout the city.
While the separated facilities in Manhattan often receive the most attention, NYC DOT has been busy installing and mapping a variety of infrastructure treatments. Using all the tools in their toolbox they’ve helped make it possible to safely bike in all 5 boroughs via low trafficked streets, a system of sharrows and routes, access across bridges, cycletracks, and other separated facilities as well as standard bike lanes. Clarence Eckerson Jr. of Street Films has a great new video showing how his commute uses a mixture of these facilities and how they work.
How does this compare to your commute where you live? Are there examples in the video that could translate into your community?
Jeff Peel
State and Local Advocacy Coordinator
Peel joined the League in March 2008 as a Program Specialist for the Bicycle Friendly Communities program. Peel has a BA in American Studies from the University of Southern Mississippi.
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October 18th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
“they’ve helped make it possible to safely bike”
It’s always been possible to safely bike practically anywhere, acting as a driver and following the standard rules of the road. Much more safety comes from between the bicyclist’s ears than from the road design. Statements like this reinforce the false perception that bicyclists and motorists cannot safely share the road without special infrastructure, and undermine LAB’s education program. Please refrain from perpetuating this falsehood.
October 18th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Los Alamos doesn’t have the issues that NYC has with congestion and complex situations. Thankfully, we do pretty well with dedicated bike lanes on one of our major arterials, low speed limits on some of our downtown streets, and efforts to keep all traffic civilized and within the law. I think an additional bicycle boulevard or two might finish the infrastructure job.
Meanwhile, education and compliance are important. LCI Neale Pickett and I have both seen cyclists doing some alarming things on our new bike lanes. The League needs to tout good behavior and competence as much as it does facilities development.
October 18th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for your comment John. As one of several LCI’s on staff I’m quite aware how our Smart Cycling program teaches valuable cycling skills for riders of all ages and abilities. However, this particular blog post only dealt with one of the E’s- Engineering- and only a portion of what makes up what can be done under that. While Hayes and others in the city would love for me to go down the list of items NYC is doing right, I tried to err on the side of brevity.
As for Education, Transportation Alternative’s ‘Biking Rules!’ campaign (www.bikingrules.org) is reaching cyclists in a new and exciting way that I think we could all learn from. Likewise, Bike New York’s extensive list of courses (http://www.bikenewyork.org/education/classes/index.html) should make any bicycling educator a little jealous!
The reality is that it does take a lot of work across all of the E’s to be a truly great place for bicycling, and NYC is making strides across the board. Their Evaluation shows that while ridership numbers continue to climb, the indexed crash rate has dropped. The new facilities play a role in that. With Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calling for tougher enforcement, hopefully the NYPD will take notice and we can see those numbers decline further.
October 18th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Thanks for the link to bikingrules.org, Jeff, which is good information to use anywhere. That is a lot more sane to look at than the movie preview in today’s NY Times, which breathlessly promotes Big Apple bicyclists behaving like maniacs. I posted a link to that on the LCI list.
October 18th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Thanks for the reply, Jeff. I understand that this essay dealt mainly with the Engineering “E”, and I’m glad to hear that there is also a lot going on the Education realm, and that LAB recognizes it.
Nonetheless, my main gripe is still with the statement I quoted in my first comment. I bristle when I hear someone say that facilities have made it *possible* to safely bicycle. My specific objection is to the use of the word “possible”. This implies that it was not possible before. As an LCI, I don’t believe that, and I hope that you don’t either.
We could argue all day about operational safety issues, perception, and the safety in numbers effect, to try to determine to what extent the facilities may or may not have made it safER (or easier or more comfortable) for various bicycling populations, but I’m sure neither of us wants to that. I know I don’t.
But those questions are to some degree independent of just whether it is aquately safe to bicycle *without* the infrastructure, and I say it is. Yes, you should know what you’re doing (and I think infrastructure doesn’t really change that very much, certainly at intersections), and it is sometimes less comfortable, but is it POSSIBLE? Emphatically YES, through visible and predictable participation in the traffic flow as a vehicle driver.
The knowledge level around this point is so low in our culture that anytime we say that facilities make it *possible* to bicycle safely, implying it was not possible before, we are doing all bicyclists a disservice, by reinforcing the culture’s bias (including that of many bicyclists) that “bikes and cars don’t mix” and thereby decreasing their perception of our right to the road. We can and do discuss (ad neauseum) whether facilities make it relatively safer, or more comfortable, or increase numbers, but let’s at least not say facilities make it *possible*. That’s going too far. I think it’s a false and harmful statement.
October 18th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Thanks again for your thoughtful response John. I think, perhaps, you are reading more into the commentary than was intended. At no point did I say or even imply that bikes and cars don’t mix, nor would I ever support the notion that a network of dedicated facilities equates to less access to public roads. That claim is often as dubious as the one that roads can’t be safe without such facilities.
Whether it’s their innovative facilities, breadth of their education programming or sheer numbers in many of their encouragement efforts, NYC has some wonderful examples for all of us that seek to accommodate or encourage more and better bicycling.
October 18th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
One item that needs to be noted here is that New York City, and especially Manhattan, has a dense network of traffic signals that essentially control every crossing location for a separated pathway such as the ones on 8th & 9th, and now on 1st & 2nd. Also, the one-way nature of these streets greatly simplifies signal phasing to accommodate a separate/concurrent bicycle movement.
However, if these facilities are transplanted to locations with uncontrolled intersections and driveways, there may be operational and safety issues. Signs and markings may not be sufficient to change road user behavior to anticipate and react to cyclists in unexpected locations which may be hidden from view, depending on design. Using a layout similar to the one in New York City (where the path runs separated up to the cross street and to the outside of dedicated turn lanes) in locations without signals at each intersection or driveway could be problematic.
October 22nd, 2010 at 3:29 am
“they’ve helped make it possible to safely bike”
I understand the desire to make bicycling safer, but I wonder whether this is the right way to do it.
Separated facilities such as the ones highlighted in this post are intended to make room on the road for bicyclists, as if they didn’t belong in “car lanes.” But the only “car lanes” are on highways, such as some freeways, on which bicycling is prohibited. Elsewhere, bicyclists are allowed to use travel lanes just like any other driver.
On streets with two lanes in each direction, the right lane should act like a wide bike lane when a bicyclist is present. Since drivers of faster vehicles have another lane to pass, there should be no problem.
There is a common misconception on our roads that bicyclists must “stay out of the way of cars.” But if bicyclists simply asserted their right as drivers to use the right travel lane and if motorists treated bicyclists as drivers of vehicles, then there would be no need for separated bicycle facilities.
October 27th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Let’s take a step back and look at how cycling works in different places.
Where there are no bike lanes in a city, almost no one bikes, and doing so safely requires skill, respect, and attention from both cyclist and driver. If only one of every three hundred drivers is either unskilled, disrespectful, or inattentive, the cyclist’s life will be threatened many times on the morning commute.
Where there are bike lanes it’s a little better and a few more brave cyclists will come out to ride in the city, but not very many.
In places where there’s an extensive network of interconnected separate bikeways (or cycle tracks), as many as half of a city’s commuters bike to work (Copenhagen: 55% commute by bike within the city, 37% of commuters from the suburbs go by bike).
When a city installs cycle tracks, the number of cyclists just explodes. This is what happened in Copenhagen and other northern European cities when they installed cycle tracks, and it’s happening now in a few North American cities, including New York.
October 31st, 2010 at 1:47 pm
The Copenhagen comparison is apples vs. oranges.
Denmark has an entire social and political engineering program going (as do other European cities) that couple treating bicycles as serious transportation with sky-high gasoline prices and other government efforts to drive down (pardon the pun) the use of the private car and has done so since the oil embargos of the seventies. Not to mention, most of these nations are small, compact, and pancake flat.
Until we see that level of total war on the car in the U.S. (fat chance), you just can’t make that simple a comparison. Its not simply a case of cause and effect with bicycle infrastructure alone.
Cycling infrastructure should be built so it encourages cycling and if there is a market for it, but more importantly, so it encourages competent cycling. Until more people in the cycling advocacy movement start paying attention to folks like John Allen (see his recent blog post about an intersection in Washington, D.C.), I am worried. You sure don’t see support for the John Allens of the world in the People for Bikes web site.