New York becomes bicycle friendly (?!)

Robert Sullivan, writing in the New York Times, tells a remarkable story of how bicycling in New York has changed in the past 25 years.

This is exactly where we are going in Missouri, too,and for the same reasons. The momentum is building, and MoBikeFed members and supporters are a big part of it.
Sometimes, when I am biking, I remember the ’80s, and I shudder. I remember, in other words, when biking was an extreme sport, when, if you were a biker, you had a lot of locks and a lot more nerve. . . .

In those days, when I got into the park, I thought I had really achieved something, in terms not of stamina or increased heart rate, but of survival. Riding a bike in New York was like spelunking or white-water rafting, and in those days, bikers traveled best at night, when traffic was light. In the absence of bike lanes, we looked for parks to move through; we stayed on the side streets, and most New Yorkers then did not believe bikers should be anywhere in the city, much less on the streets. . . .

Stimulus bills with federal money for transportation come and go, but we bikers appear to be staying. For once in our biking lives, New York is really listening to us, helping our numbers grow, with new bike racks, bike shelters, biking incentives (a proposal for an indoor parking requirement for new buildings, for instance) and, of course, bike lanes. . . .

Once, they hated us because we were a rarity, like a rat in the kitchen, a pest. Now, they hate us because we are ubiquitous.

In a 12-hour survey one day last summer, the city counted 12,583 bikers on the Staten Island Ferry, the East River bridges and the Hudson River bike path — up 35 percent from the year before in what Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, called an “unprecedented increase.” Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, estimates that 131,000 bikers in the city commute to work daily. . . .

Today, the Transportation Department has gotten serious about biking, and in just three years, the agency has painted bike lanes (good), constructed bike lanes separated by parked cars (great) and bike lanes separated by medians or barriers (the best) and installed bike signals, bike signs and many bike symbols painted on the street. . . .

Though bikers are hated, pedestrian deaths and injuries on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea immediately declined in the area of the physically separated bike lane, as reported on streetsblog.org, news blog of the Livable Streets Initiative, which advocates creating sustainable cities. In December, Community Board 4 voted in favor of creating a bike lane on Eighth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets.

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