Could change actually be good?

Of course not. But with my ear to the ground, I do hear some footsteps of improvements. This plan for (Manhattan's) Broadway (all of 7 blocks).

And a few car-free "Summer Streets."

And unrelated, I bought a bicycle drink holder for my friend who likes walking down (Astoria's) Broadway with a gin and tonic in her hand (her open-container secret? carry real glass, then nobody stops you!)

But I was thinking how cool I could be biking with a drink holder. That and a Radio Shack transistor radio dangling from my neck broadcasting the Mets game (that part I actually did once, biking late to Shea). But to complete the makeover, I'm going to need some really thick stage glasses, white tube socks to go with my sweat pants, and some funky-ass B.O.! It's going to rock.

Operation Barrier in Effect

The NYPD has implemented an innovative, some would even say brilliant, approach to keep motorized traffic from driving in bike lanes. It's called Operation Barrier. And since the NYPD's trial run on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, reported incidences of cars illegal driving in the bike lane have dropped to zero. Outstanding! Keep up the good work, officers. I look forward to such continued successes in the future.
I got this picture from Streetsblog.

A tri-borough improvement!

The Triborough bridge just got better! Much better. Like so many blog writers, I bitch a lot. But then there's a lot about which to bitch when biking in NYC. So it's great to see something better (especially just days after I complained that nothing was better).

I was riding to West End Ave and 94th St today. For variety, I decided to take the sketchy Triborough Bridge. I thought it might be shorter (it is, by a half mile, but wasn't any faster). But I like variety. I even like sketchy. Plus the view from the top of the Triborough, above traffic, without a chainlink fence, looking down at the beautiful and under-appreciated Hell Gate Bridge (did you know the Sydney Harbor Bridge is modeled after our very own Hell Gate Bridge?), it can't be beat. And dag, it's a long way down.

Even leaving aside the outpatients, I've written about the problems of this bridge before, but now there's something new. It's a huge project and a huge improvement: A nice new exit ramp from the Astoria to Wards Island part. This means the worst part of the ride--the nasty next to highway traffic mile--is gone!

Meanwhile there's still a lot of surface construction, so if anything right now the ride is worse than ever. But one day the construction will be done and it will be great.

Sort of. There's still no real signage actually telling a rider how to get from one part of the bridge to another. The Triborough is actually three bridges, and on bike, you go up an down all of them. And it's not easy to figure out how to get to them. So I've made a map. I hope this helps somebody. The more bikes that ride over this bridge, the better for all bikes. And, oh yeah, technically riding your bike over this bridge is prohibited. What a city...

You can zoom on these. The green is the new ramp! The blue is the bad part that doesn't exist anymore. The white line is the ground-level connection between the Queens bridge and the Harlem bridge.

Finding the Manhattan/Harlem/125th Street connection (it actually drops you off on 126th St, but whatever) is tough. Coming from Queens and following the white line, make a left into what looks like the access road to a municipal parking lot. Turn before the green garbage trucks. Then look left for the ramp under the bridge. One you find it, there is actually a sign.
(click on picture to zoom.)

Last time I checked, you can also ride on the south side of the Randall Island to Harlem bridge. But I don't see any advantage. And last time I did, there was a small homeless encampment on the south side. Not really biker friendly.

Also, you may be tempted, but you can't get through the golf course on the west side of the triborough.

There is also a pedestrian bridge on the southwest corner of Ward Island to East Harmlem (El Barrio). I've never been over it because it's up most of the time. It connects to the projects (East River Homes) at what would be E 103rd St.

More uplifting moments from today's ride: how damn beautiful so many Harlem brownstones are. Biking through Central Park (with one eye on sexy joggers). I love New York!

My Bike NYC Master Plan

Instead of just complaining, I thought I'd actually be constructive and show what we want (that's the royal we, of course).

[Before you go on, take a quick and wild guess as to how many north/south traffic lanes there are spanning the width of Manhattan at 57th St.]

As it stands now, every time I bike, I am never in a bike lane. Not even the paint on street kind. There just aren't any coming from Astoria and going anywhere in the city. There's just not there. Screw the city's master bike plan. It won't happen and even if it did, it's not that good. Lines of paint don't cut it.

I don't need miles and miles of disconnected bike lanes. I want a few good lanes: separated from parked and moving cars, free of pedestrians (the dirty secret of good bike lanes is that as soon as you make them good, people start walking their dogs in the bike lane, making it a bad bike lane).

Here's what I want. I added all the orange lines to the map. Those are my two-way dedicated bike lanes. Each one would replace one lane of traffic. Notice it's not much.

On north/south streets in Midtown, there are 109 lanes for cars! Wow. I counted them (thanks to Google Earth). I had no idea. That's a lot of pavement, about the width of 7 football fields smooshed together. And they say there's no space! Bullshit. Two lanes for bikes is nothing. If it weren't so much work, I'd draw a third lane on my map just on moral principle.

I don't need a bike lane door-to-door. But I do need a bike lane for the bulk of my ride, the part though high-traffic areas. For the short parts, I can manage on each end. For bikes to be the answer, people have to be able to commute on a dedicated bike lane for most of their journey.

Here's the beauty of my plan: it's easy. It doesn't take much. In Manhattan, basically two north and south bike lanes and a couple of cross-town lanes. You don't *need* a bike lane every block. It would be nice, but I'll settle for never being more than a mile from one. Then you can get where you're going. That's the key.

Here's what's important:
1) They've got to be two-ways. Because that's what bikes need. And that's what delivery bikes do (who don't more people care about the safety of all the Mexican and Chinese bikers who bring you dinner?). It takes up less space to make one two-way lane than two one-way lanes. And going a long avenue out of the way is too much to ask a bike going a few blocks.

2) Bridge access is the most important thing for getting into Manhattan. You need to cross the East River safely and legally (and in style). How is a novice biker supposed to exit the Queensburo Bridge in Manhattan and do something planners apparently never though of, head south? It can't be done legally and safely.

Ironically, heading South can be done somewhat safely but illegally, as most bikes do, by going the wrong way under the bridge on 1st Ave and then going west to Second Ave. Avoid the secret car entrance and heading briefly into traffic (usually there's very little). Here again there already is space for a bike lane, if only they could find somewhere to store those Jersey Barriers blocking the way.

Legally, you have to bike too many blocks out of the way and then risk your life and slow down traffic by biking through the main car entrance to the bridge. Crazy. Even by car-planning standards.

3) Allow bikes to actually commute through Central Park. Not just bike around the loop, like bikes and cars do. But bike both ways, like people want to bike. I bike by Central Park every time I go to work and I don't ride through the park. I can't. This fact shocks even jaded non-biking New Yorkers every time I tell them.

You're only allowed to bike through the park clockwise. To go west, I have to go up to 72nd St., so of course I don't. To go east, there's no bike entrance to enter the park from Columbus Circle. So I don't enter. And remember this park is one those "green" lines on the official map. Ha.

4) Access to the West Side path. It's a good path. But between pedestrians, cars, and bikes going very fast (like me), it's not ideally. Still, the problem is there's no good way to get to and from the path, especially down the Village where I'm usually going if I'm on it.

Last but not least, can we stop bike maps from printing any lines where there is actually nothing to help bicyclists? The official NYC bike map has lots of dotted red lines, implying you should bike there routes. You shouldn’t. The map “borrowed” and photoshoped above has red lines around the U.N., giving the illusion that there’s some reason to actually bike on this route, like a bike lane. There isn’t. I understand that it’s nice to pretend the route is complete. But it’s not. That’s the point.

Building a Better Bike Lane

AV has kindly brought my attention to a great article in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. Building a Better Bike Lane. I've been known to read three newspapers a day (not every day). Online I scan another half dozen. And I just don't get the Journal. But they do occasionally have a good article or two.

There are great pictures here: Where to Buy Dutch-style bikes. My Amsterdam bike is a Batavus Barcelona. What's yours? Sorry, but it's hard not to gloat when you have a sweet bike waiting, very patiently, in Amsterdam. And though there's nothing particularly Dutch about the Barcelona (other than it's made by Batavus), the Barcelona just happens to be the best one-speed bike in the world. Fast. Sporty. Solid.