Month: August 2012

By Nicole Gelinas, City Journal
Mayor Bloomberg’s transportation reforms have unclogged New York’s streets and made them safer.
…
Though drivers in New York City are a minority, outdated traffic engineering long allowed them to reign unchallenged, with clogged streets and too many accidents the results. Over the past five years, however, the city, led by transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, has devised ways to reduce that dominance. Through several new initiatives, mostly outside Times Square, New York has been rationally using its limited physical space to get more people moving more quickly—and that means not in automobiles. New York has achieved its improvements on the cheap. Better still, the changes have saved lives.
…
Another way that New York has tried to relieve subway pressure over the last four years is installing more bike lanes. Today, the city has 270 miles of bike lanes, including 20 miles of lanes in which a physical barrier—a curb or a parking lane—protects bikers from drivers. Commuting by bike has risen dramatically, with 24,000 people pedaling into the core of Manhattan in 2010, compared with 15,000 in 2007. This makes good fiscal sense. It has cost New York City about $15 million, including federal funds, to create the new bike lanes. To give subway riders more room by building more subways, the city would have to spend billions.
…
New York’s transportation policy isn’t just about getting people from Point A to Point B; it’s about keeping them safe from transportation-related injuries. The city is already doing a good job of this, with vehicle-caused deaths in the city plummeting over the last two decades. “The numbers speak for themselves,” says Sam Schwartz, the Koch-era traffic commissioner known to tabloid readers as “Gridlock Sam.” In 1990, accidents on New York City’s streets claimed the lives of 701 people, including 366 pedestrians—more than one per day. Over the next decade, though, the number of people killed in accidents fell 46 percent, and it fell another 38 percent between 2000 and 2011. Last year was the safest ever for New York drivers, passengers, and walkers, with vehicles causing just 2.8 fatalities per 100,000 residents. You’re more than twice as likely to be killed by a vehicle in Los Angeles as in New York; Atlanta is deadlier still.
…
New York’s new bike lanes also enhance safety—not just for bikers but for pedestrians and auto occupants, too. Crashes on city streets that have bike lanes are 40 percent less likely to result in a death or serious injury, in part because the lanes force drivers to go more slowly. Bike lanes also lead drivers to pay more attention to the road. On Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, crashes have fallen 56 percent since the city installed bike lanes.
…
https://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_nyc-transportation.html
***************************************************************************
B’ Spokes: A very well written article, with lots of positive (and a few not as good as hoped) aspects. But what I get from this article is how traffic engineers once thought they had to set the "dial" to maximum driver accommodation on every single street, NYC is finding a lot of benefits on setting the "dial" to maximum for pedestrian accommodation or bicycling accommodation, even if it means taking away space from cars.

B’ Spokes: I have always contended that the [bike|walk]ability depends on what is on the side of the road as much as what is on the road and this post by Kaid Benfield seems to back me up (at least as far as walking goes.) We need planning and zoning that services people and not just cars. We need to pay attention to walk appeal as well as bike appeal. We need to lose the idea that people can/should always [begrudgingly] drive there and that’s all that needs to be done.
For more info and examples: https://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/how_far_will_we_walk_to_someth.html

Today’s tangent comes by way of Commute By Bike’s article: https://www.commutebybike.com/2012/07/27/driver-education-bicyclists-are-a-source-of-danger/

Ted Johnson makes a point and maybe if we did stress to drivers that if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian you’ll end up damaging your vehicle so they might exercise more caution around us.

But my concern is there should be an agreed upon rules for both cyclists and motorists and in driver education is where things start to fall apart, seriously fall apart.

10% of the truth is worse then a lie. As the most insidious lies have some truth in them.

Like what is stated in the Texas Adult Drivers Education site:

Bicycles are required to ride to the far right of the road.

Using only 10% of the words of law law on what we are actually required to do is… errr… um…. well, really, really wrong, there is not that much fluff and extra words in legalese. So ignoring the seven exceptions to this as well as ignoring descriptive words such as “near” and “practicable and safe” that describes how far right we should ride when non of the seven exceptions apply is a very dangerous thing to tell drivers that we are required to obey this 10% of the truth and nothing more, or better stated, falsely stating we are required to obey this lie. (e.g. A police officer stopped a cyclist and demanded that they ride on the 4 inches of pavement on the other side of the fog line. When the cyclist complained the officer responded “You’ve got skinny tires, so what’s the problem?” – Like 4 inches makes a proper bike lane, sheesh! Stating we are required to ride far right just leads to too many problems, we need understanding and a agreed upon set of rules, not lies that further complicate things.)

Once upon time, there was little traffic and roads were built wide to accommodate drunks and trucks and riding to the right mostly worked out. But now there is more traffic as well as lanes that are narrow and there is just too little information out there that states “As a driver, most of the time you are going to have to change lanes to pass a cyclist, even if they are riding far right.”

Too often the unspoken desire of motorists is “We want cyclists to ride far right so we don’t have to bother to change lanes to pass.” I’m sorry but no you just can’t squeeze by and put a life at risk. But more to the point does the statement “Bicycles are required to ride to the far right of the road.” help or hurt the safe passing of cyclists by motorists?

I will strongly assert that human nature is such that we offer more courtesy to someone who is (in our view) lawful then one who is unlawful. Case in point: have you ever driven pass a jaywalker that was just standing on the double yellow line with just inches to spare? But if that person was in a crosswalk you would give a greater amount of space. Similarly a cyclist that is perceived as lawful will get more consideration then one that is not.

Can I give the Texas Adult Drivers Education site some credit in trying to address the above with “and they [cyclists and pedestrians] just do not know the law. … driver’s obligation to create a safe situation by yielding… even if the driver of the car might have the right of way by law.”? It’s rather insulting that they feel that they can incorrectly state the law for cyclists and then accuse us of not knowing the law. Something like the following might be better: “You are required to yield even if you think the cyclist is not obeying the law. The purpose of this course is not to make you an expert on bicycling law [and that’s a shame as well IMHO] but to stress safe driving so you are not a danger to yourself and others.”

I’ll note that too many of these “educational” materials come from national resources, effectively negating any local advocacy effort. So I will assert things like need more attention from ALL cycling advocates.

Two Mornings from Sierra Club National on Vimeo.