Sponsored bike racks.

When NYC DOT announced it would install covered bike parking in select locations, I’ll admit, I thought is was a pretty stupid idea. The comments on streetsblog, seemed to agree with me. When I researched the matter a little and it appeared that the city wasn’t actually paying for the parking, which seems to be provided under an advertisement agreement with the Spanish firm Cemusa I didn’t feel that much better. (Essentially: the city gets a billion dollars and free bus shelters, and $400 million worth of free advertising, Cemusa gets whatever it can sell the advertising on the bus shelters for.)

Is receiving a covered designated place to park bike worth the intrusion of more advertising? That seems questionable, but moreover I wondered if people would ride their bikes to a shelter, lock it up, and then get on the subway. Today I had the afternoon free and decided to check out the shelter recently installed by the 7 Vernon Blvd – Jackson Ave station. To my surprise the shelter was full! Notably, the four other bike racks were only sparsely occupied.

This doesn’t imply that the bicyclist using the luxury shelter wouldn’t have biked without it, nor were the owners necessarily leaving their bikes there to commute by train, but it implies something. At very least it implies that the covered shelters are preferred to the common upside-down-W racks.

Predictably, they were bikes of such low quality and street value that it is inconceivable a thief would find them enticing. Thus covered shelters appear a popular park and ride enabler for a certain population savvy enough to own a bike no one would think to steal. One subgroup down!

These covered racks have already received an undue amount of attention. I apologize for adding to the coverage. Still, any lingering unexpressed opinions?

Franklin Avenue Bastion of Sharing!

For some reason, the DOT decided to mark Franklin Avenue “Shared Bicycle/Car Roadway” and painted these signs on the roadway. I don’t get it. It may make cars a little more aware of bicyclists, but it still isn’t a street I would recommend taking. Perhaps the DOT thought Franklin was preferable over Manhattan Ave. because there is less traffic. But this very lack of traffic means that cars go faster and don’t pay as much attention as on Manhattan Ave. The double striped median means that technically cars can’t pass bicycles by crossing over into the oncoming lane, but my personal experience suggests cars don’t pay too much attention to that. If the marking makes bicyclists feel more entitled, they might be doing more harm than good.

So what gives? It appears that the DOT wanted to connect the Pulaski Bridge to Greenpoint/Williamsburg in some semblance of a safe way. If this is the case, I don’t think it was a good solution. Taking Franklin works if you live along the western fringe of Greenpoint, and perhaps Williamsburg as far east as Union. But for many others, the temptation remains to bike down McGuiness and thereby save a few (or many) blocks.

I applaud the DOT for making the North Brooklyn bike route this much more seamless, but I am afraid that until DOT does the right thing and adds a bike lane to McGuiness, bicyclists will still be unsafe – whether they follow the bike route or not.

9 miles of bike lanes.

With the addition of the of the bike lane on Bedford between Rogers Ave (2 blocks south of Atlantic) and Division (three blocks south of Broadway), Bedford has become a great northbound street for bicyclists. If you can hold out for three more blocks, Bedford north of Broadway is eminently bikable because cars go so slowing, and Manhattan, the street Bedford terminates at, is tolerable for the same reason.

So why not fix the three terrible blocks between Division and Broadway? For many bicyclists, these are the last few blocks before entering the Williamsburg Bridge, so they seem worth paying attention to. The problem is that there isn’t really any space in the road for a bike lane. Parking spaces will have to be sacrificed if these last three blocks are to be made bike-friendly.

When I went by on a recent afternoon, I counted about thirty cars parked in the space I imagine putting a bike lane. I expect merchants and residents in this mostly Hasidic area would complain if the spaces were removed. But the spaces are actually used pretty lightly until the block directly south of Broadway, and we shouldn’t feel too bad about removing these spaces because along the Williamsburg Bridge approach on South 5th and 6th there is abundant parking.

I think it’s worth it, but I’m biased. It would be a cheap improvement. You think there is any way it could be politically viable, short of waiting for a bicyclist to get killed on these blocks?

If removing thirty parking places is impossible, what about just removing the two south of the entrance to the bridge, so that bicyclist transitioning from Broadway to the Bridge can see where they are going, and bicyclist exiting the Bridge can see if cars are coming?

I wish I could figure out how to have text below pictures in the general body, but for the moment, I will just have to include them below.

Bedford narrows quickly and without warning in an area which is not a big bicycle destination. The buffer almost taunts the bicyclist – just try and stay out of the motor vehicle lane!

This is the most heavily used block for parking – nine spaces will have to be lost.

If the political will doesn’t exist to sacrifice thirty parking spaces to make bicyclists safe, maybe it exists to sacrifice two? These are perhaps the least valuable and most obnoxious spots in the neighborhood.

The technology of bike lanes.

I love these buffers between bike lanes and car lanes. In some situations they might even be better than separated bike lanes. The problem with separated bike lanes, as I see it, is that bicyclists get complacent, they feel safe and let their guard down, and then at intersections they have to deal with cars again, and cars aren’t necessarily expecting them. (I’m thinking specifically of the Ocean Ave. bike lane from Prospect Park to Coney Island.) Buffers, in contrast, offer no physical barrier, but in my experience, work psychological wonders. Cars obey them. Bicyclists are then free to ride in the extreme edge of the bike lane and avoid the threat of car doors opening.

One problem buffers potentially invite is double parking. I guess the thought is that whereas a bike lane by itself might not be inviting, a bike lane plus three to six feet of buffer looks great to someone picking up their kid. My feeling is that yes double parking is annoying, and maybe it happens a little more where buffers exist, and sure cops should ticket for it, but I am not as bothered by it as double parking in other situations. Essentially, as a bicyclist, I am so separated from the car traffic by the buffer, that I feel fine stopping and waiting behind a double parked car until there is a chance to go around them. With just a bike lane, or with no bike lane at all, the instinct is to try and keep up your speed and merge with traffic if you can to get around the double parked car, and this feel dangerous.

I know no one reads this, but in the spirit of inclusion, what do you think?

Theft and bicycles

Bike theft is either the first or second most important deterrent to bicycling (the other being safety). People won’t buy a bike because they know it will get stolen. Or they know they won’t use it much because if they do it will get stolen. Or they do buy the bike, but they don’t use it much for fear of it getting stolen. Or they use it, and it gets stolen, and then they don’t bike anymore. Or maybe then they buy another cheaper bike and use it less because they enjoy riding it less. You might bike less because you have to carry around a heavy chain or lock, or you can’t park safely anywhere near where you want to go. For these and other reasons, fewer bikes are on the road, thus the road is less safe for bicyclists, and thus fewer people ride bikes. There are countless ways that the threat of bike theft decreases bike riding, and ending it should be a priority for those who wish to promote bicycling as a healthy, social, and environmentally friendly form of transport.

One can approach solving the problem from one of two ways. You can take steps to protect the bike from thieves, or you can take steps to remove the threat of thieves. Locks, valet parking, indoor parking parking seek to decrease the threat by making stealing more difficult. These are worthwhile, but I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in decreasing the threat of bicycle theft by pursuing and punishing thieves. The advantage of punishment is that it discourages more theft. A lock might deter the theft of a wheel and the frame, or valet parking might deter theft as long as the bike is in a valet facility, but prosecuting one bike theft is likely to deter many future thefts – by that thief as well as by others who are now alerted to the risk. Freakonomics noted how lojacks decreased theft of cars in this way, and the idea of adapting the concept to bicycles is worth pursuing.

I feel a little weird supporting entrapment, but in this case I am willing to endorse the principle. Assuming bicycle thieves are a very small group who are clued into what is safe to steal and what isn’t, we could mount a psychological war on them. Police could bait thieves in such a way that thieves wouldn’t know what areas were safe. I think this is essentially the strategy retail establishments take. It is generally very easy to shoplift, but stores pay enough attention that the threat of getting caught discourages most who are past that period of invulnerability known as adolescence.

I am not an expert in tackling crime, and I suspect that if it were a priority, the police would be able to come up with some more efficient ways to combat the trade. After all, there have to be secondary markets, these bikes must move between cities, and some storefronts must be complicit. The police no doubt have relationships in the community that they could leverage to suppress the market, if it were a priority. Instead, they currently focus on the hopeless task of combating drug traffic. The difference is notable: there can’t be much money in the trade of stolen bikes, so at least we are not fighting a strong economic impulse as we are in the “war on drugs.”

In addition to baiting bicycle thieves, we need to consider what punishments might look like if they aligned with the actual cost to society of bicycle theft. If you consider the increased fossil fuels consumed, health care expenditure because of increased obesity, the cost of decreased health that never gets a dollar form attached to it, the cost in terms of making our society less social, in terms of leaving a thinner glacier atop Greenland, and in terms of limiting the freedom of those who might wish to bike, the cost gets very high indeed. The damage that a random act of violence does to the walkability of a city street might be analogous. So if we approach the punishment from this perspective, we might come up with something very severe – jail, for years, I expect.

Another way to arrive at the right punishment is to estimate how much punishment would be necessary to curtail the practice. If thieves are making tens of thousands of dollars on the trade, jail for years, or a fine that would pauper the thief for years might be necessary to discourage it. If the thief stands to make a few hundred, this seems like a bit of overkill.

I am a big fan of fines as a first choice because this is more humane, is more effective in that the thief has all this time to explain to other potential thieves how he is still paying off a judgement, because it doesn’t add one inefficiency (the waist of a person’s labor) to another (the theft), because it doesn’t add to our already ridiculous prison population, because as crimes go this isn’t an anti-social crime – it is against property, not people -, and because it costs the state money to lock someone up, and we could pay someone to attend a bike valet parking spot for perhaps the same amount. I think a fine starting at $5,000 and capping out at $50,000 (because at too high a point there is just no possibility of being able to pay the fine back, and it will be ignored) would serve as an effective deterrent. Of course, fines only work as a punishment for people living generally within the parameters of society. If someone is off the map financially – they use check cashing places and have no hope of establishing credit, then this is of little use. Bringing these people into the mainstream should be a major goal of public policy – but that is a subject for another blog…

Finally, there is a phenomenon that skates closely to bike theft that needs to be addressed and allowed for when designing and enforcing punishments for bike theft. This I call bike liberation. If a bike is abandoned, a completely normal person with no anti-social qualities whatsoever may take it upon him or herself to break the lock and adopt the bike for him or herself. There is nothing wrong with this practice, although it can get a little iffy when you start talking about when a bike is clearly abandoned. I once watched a bike near my house that seemed abandoned for months and months and nothing happened. The tires stood deflated and trash slowly filled the handlebar basket and then poured over. It wasn’t a valuable bike, so thieves had little interest, and it wasn’t 100% clear that it was abandoned, so liberators were wary of making a move. Then someone took the seat. Over the next three weeks the bike was stripped, first of the front wheel, then the handlebars, then the brakes, and so on. Liberation can be a great thing, in that it brings cheap parts into use, clears our streets of liter, and frees up bike parking. As long as those practicing it are following a code of ethical behavior (as everyone seems to have in this example) it needs to be separated from theft in the eyes of the law, as (I think) it already is in the eyes of society.

Imagine a world without the threat of getting your bike stolen. It wouldn’t be immediately different world. People get into patterns of thought, and it would take a while for it to dawn on people that bicycling was a more viable form of transit. It would happen slowly, as pedestrian traffic returns slowly to a neighborhood after gang activity has been quashed. Just as realizing you no longer have to fear for your safety can completely change the character of a formerly violent neighborhood – bringing people out onto stoops to loiter, bring parents to parks with their children – no longer having the fear of theft would completely change the character of the city for those who might bicycle.

On the uses of bike parking.

There are a number of different kinds of bike parking – valeted, indoor, inside specially designed plastic containers, and the most common, the curb-side bicycle rack. It is my belief that these racks are widely under and misallocated in New York.

The curb-side rack provides little extra security over locking a bike to a street sign or some other incidental street furniture. Racks made of square tubing are preferable over those of circular tubing because thieves can’t use a pipe-cutter. Further, a good rack is solid enough that it is not threatened by hack-saws – the labor involved would be prohibitive. But even the best street rack leaves the bike exposed. People concerned with theft won’t leave their bikes locked to a street rack for long periods of time. Shorter periods may be tolerable: there is less of a chance a potential thief will see the bike, and the thief will have less time to find their tools, and manifest the gumption to undertake a theft.

Curbside racks are most useful in contexts that avoid these these limitations, such as in front of stores that people go to for quick errands, and where it might be possible to keep an eye on the rack through the window. Restaurants and cafes can often make use of a bike rack out front. Banks, grocery stores, bodegas, movie rental stores, playgrounds, and tennis, handball and basketball courts can all often make good use of curbside bike parking.

In particular, commercial streets, like Manhattan Ave in Greenpoint, Bedford Ave in Williamsburg, Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, and 5th and 7th Avenues in Park Slope can use a good amount of this sort of unprotected bike parking. As it happens, these streets tend to be particularly congested with pedestrian traffic and it is worthwhile to get parked bikes out of the way of pedestrians. Because of the heavy pedestrian traffic, reallocating the occasional car parking space to bicycle parking is an especially good idea. This can be integrated with a bump-out that serves to shorten the distance pedestrians have to travel to cross the street. The ample pedestrian traffic on these streets also provides an audience for more elegant decorative bike racks.

Curbside racks are mostly about making bicyclist feel welcome. After all, street signs exist in most places in sufficient number to handle the local bike traffic. These sort of racks alone will do little to increase bicycle usage. In fact, success in this modest catagory can be a little discouraging. San Francisco has done an admirable job providing curbside racks, but they are little used. Closer to home, Myrtle Ave in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill is not drawing in bicyclists from other areas simply by having a good supply of curbside racks.

The most common mistake with bike racks is allocating curb-side racks where protected parking is needed. Because of the lack of security, curb-side racks just don’t cut it as a place to put your bike while you are at work for eight hours. Similarly, if you care about your bike, you are not going to want to lock it to a street rack and then get on the subway and go across town. Fortunately, there exists a great deal of potential for other sorts of parking in these contexts.

I suspect that the MTA would fight it on security grounds, but many subway stations have ample space underground in which they could provide secure bike parking. It could be set up in such a way that station agents did nothing except in the rare case they saw a suspicious activity, like someone harnessing a hack-saw, in which case they would call the police. In large-swaths of Manhattan private security guards are epidemic. One would only have to position the bike parking in such a way that it was clearly under the jurisdiction of security guards to make it essentially theft-proof. Of course these guards will be tested, especially at first, but with good design and a precedent of quick punishment for violators, before long the racks will not require much, if any, additional work from those guarding them.

So in conclusion, I am not as sanguine as Josh Benson, Director of DOT’s Bicycle Program, in my feelings about the success of the North 7th and Bedford project to remove parking spaces and install bike racks. It is great because Bedford is a commercial street well-suited to curb-side racks. And it works for commuters who have bikes they don’t care too much about. But I don’t think we should aim to build a system where bicyclists have to choose their bike according to its ugliness in order to avoid having it stolen. I don’t think that is treating bicyclists as well as we can and as well as they deserve to be treated.

Timed bicycle arterial routes (TBARs)

At the Jan Gehl lecture at the JCC in November, he mentioned bike paths in Bogota where the lights were timed in the bicyclists favor so that once you got on the bike route, you might go ten miles without stopping once.

I was riveted with the idea for a number of reasons:

• Here was a way to introduce bicycling as a viable means of commuting to the large areas of the city that are not right next to Manhattan. From a social justice perspective, it seems most important to provide services to these areas, which tend to be populated with lower income residents.
• Since arterial routes would be so infrequent – five to seven might be enough for all of Brooklyn and Queens – it might be possible to invest the money to really make the routes safe and enjoyable. This would involve shielding the bicycles from cars, planting trees, providing abundant signage, and keeping the roadway in impeccable condition. A goal of making them “safe enough for an 8 year old” might be feasible.
• Without the stress of having to interact with traffic, people might be able to truly enjoy the other aspects of biking to and from work – like the exercise and natural friendliness.

A month later I am just as excited about TBAR prospects, and I spent this morning thinking where they might go.

• It would probably be safer to put the lanes on big streets, where cross traffic is already used to stopping. If an arterial route were on smaller side streets, and no bicyclists were coming, cars might be tempted to run the light. They also might not be looking for the light as they approach the intersection.
• Bigger streets were also preferred because they presumably could more easily tolerate losing ten to 15 feet to a protected bike lane.
• Parkways lined with trees, like Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway, were natural candidates.
• Flatbush was a natural candidate because it cuts so directly through Brooklyn. It is also a street that is used mostly for local travel, so having lights timed to the relatively slower pace of bikes might not be hugely disruptive. On the downside, it is not exceedingly wide and its commercial nature means that pedestrians and cars looking for parking may interfere with bicyclists.
• Having lived near and commuted by the L train, it seemed clear that one route should essentially mirror that train. In fact, researching which train routes are the most frequented, and designing the routes primarily just to mirror those might be a more logical way to go about this. From taking a quick look at the MTA map, I can imagine a complete arterial system with six routes corresponding to the 7, F, L, A, M, and B trains.

I haven’t traveled much to the distant sections of Queens and Brooklyn, so I don’t have too much confidence in my suggested routes. I offer them as a starting point for a discussion. With that said, I present my map below, and look forward to comments and suggestions for improvements.

I am still working on figuring out how to affix google maps; hopefully this link will work until I find a better method: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=40.677774,-73.894043&spn=0.182781,0.31929&z=12&om=1&msid=100315868348242863310.000441bbfd6ba5651819f

From Marcy to the Rockaways, and back again…

View Larger Map

The high on Saturday was 38 degrees. Most of the day was much cooler. I took the opportunity to bike through Bed-Stuy and East New York, across the Cross Bay Boulevard to the Rockaways. In part, it was an experiment designed to test whether I would notice the cold after a few minutes of strenuous biking. In the event, I did notice the cold, especially my on my face and legs, but not so much as to cancel out the tremendous pleasure of biking on empty trails in unexplored areas.

The trip took three hours and covered a little more than 30 miles. I based my trip of the New York City Bicycle Map. Here is a map of my route. All my comments can be had interactively by looking at the map. Long stretches were extremely well designed for bicycling. Much else was perfectly comfortable to bike along. In general, it was a few small neglected transition areas that felt the most dangerous. In fact, perhaps the most surprising thing is how little investment on the city’s part it would take to make this a seamless ride.

Here are my observations:

The bike lane through Crown Heights, along Dean Avenue and then St. Marks, is just beautiful. Established trees line the blocks of brownstones. In fact, it’s tragically beautiful, since the beauty means that the neighborhood, which is currently about 85% renters (zip code 11213 in census records), inevitably will be gentrified.

The relative perfection of Dean and St. Marks comes to an abrupt end at Eastern Parkway. It was a full mile of winding through treacherous boulevards before I was back on a reasonable bike street. Perhaps I could have chosen a better path. some sort of signage might help with that.

Through East New York, there was little traffic on the streets that the Bike Map encourages using, but there is also no bike lane. Cross traffic frequently move fast and doesn’t have a light or stop sign.

I surprisingly enough really like large parts of these outer areas; they were quiet, the pavement was smooth, trees had space to grow, and the smaller structures reminded me of Portland. But the dependency on cars in these neighborhoods is a real downside. Someday I hope the city will install what I like to call “Timed Arterial Bike Routes”

In my imagination, these are long routes, extending maybe 10 or 15 miles from the bridge that they pass over into Manhattan. All the lights would be timed so that as long as you stayed between 10 and 15 mph, you would only have to stop once every five miles. For these long stretches, safety wouldn’t be a concern. Bicyclist would still have to deal with the hectic nature of city traffic getting to and from the TBARs, but for the long stretch they were on the route, bicycling could be care free and relaxing. Imagine!

Back to the specific ride on Saturday. The bike lane along the Jamaica Bay Wildlife refuge is great. It is protected from traffic and you can go super fast. Then it ends without warning, and a few feet later is a high and abrupt curb that you have to get off your bike to go off. At the very least some signage would make this safer. Better yet – continue the bike route!

What a bicyclist is to do upon exiting the Crossbay Blvd. is not at all clear. It is not the most dangerous intersection, but confusion is always dangerous. Some striping and signage would help hugely.

The Cross Bay Blvd and Marine Parkway bridge can each loose a lane. That they are tolled is great, but they cut through the ecological gem of the region, and we can do better.

Rockaway Beach Blvd. is smooth sailing and nicely paved, but there is nowhere for bikes. It seems to be a big bus route, so why not make the right lane just for buses and bikes? This brings up a question I have been mulling – do buses and bikes ever share lanes? Is it a good idea?

The entrance to Jacob Riis Park is a big wide loop and is terribly dangerous for bikes. Some simple painting would go a long way towards making this safer.

There is no signage regarding how to get onto the Marine Parkway Bridge, or where it goes. There actually is a nice bike path, but I almost got in a car lane, which would have been suicide, because it is so unclear. Cheap signage/painting would make this a lot safer.

When you are at the top of Floyd Bennett Field, you are shunted east by the bike path. To go to Flatbush, you have to go along a pedestrian path that is poorly paved, not marked at all, and there are various dangerous intersections where cars are going fast, have no idea that they are going to have to interact with bikes/pedestrians, and the curbs are high so you have to get off your bike. It is a nightmare, and serious improvements could be made for pennies.

It is evident from taking this bike trip that the nature aspect of these parks is not very highly appreciated (only the golf course was populated) and not very well funded. If I were in charge I would try and spend some money to emphasize that nature is what these areas are about, they are not just a quick way to drive to Brooklyn from Long Island. Towards this purpose, I get rid of concrete as much as possible, have more opportunities for people to learn about the nature that they are passing through, and get rid of/slow down car traffic as much as possible.

Finally a tangent about Flatbush Ave:

Flatbush is neighborhood street that just happens to stretch the whole length of Brooklyn. That suggests to me that you don’t want to allow cars to take it for more than a couple blocks. You might want to allow buses and bikes to use it, though, and parking seems reasonable since there are so many businesses – you might have some people that need to parking to pick up stuff. But you should make all the parking metered or delivery/pickup only/or handicapped. A bus lane might be nice. Wider sidewalks could be nice. More than one lane each direction of car traffic is not necessary. Right now there are two lanes each direction and two lanes of parking. I am not great at this. At very least install a bus lane that bikes can share. But maybe buses don’t need to go that fast, in which case, you could have wider sidewalks and a protected bike lane. That would be nice, but traffic would be stalled, and there isn’t any subway running under Flatbush, I don’t think. But traffic really shouldn’t go faster than 15 mph because pedestrian traffic is so thick. Whatever we choose to do with Grand, we should do the same with Flatbush. I like the idea of making this kind of street as pleasant to walk along as possible, easy to cross the street, with spacious sidewalks, and slow traffic. Traffic necessarily will be a little hectic, but we can make it a little less stressful. It seems to me like parking takes up an unreasonable amount of space in this picture. I mean, two whole lanes doing what? If you got rid of parking, you could have the expanded sidewalks, bus/bike lane, and car lane. No good, though, because the traffic would move too fast. The way to do it is to have one bus/car lane, parking, protected bike lane, and expanded sidewalks. Traffic will be at a standstill constantly, but the only people who will drive on the street will be people who are going a few blocks, which is what we want.