Community Board Puts Brakes on License Law
By Megan Finnegan
The Upper East Side’s Community Board 8 often grapples with how best to share their crowded streets among pedestrians, bicyclists and vehicles, and the board doesn’t shy away from declaring its ideas in strongly worded resolutions. At last week’s meeting, however, the full board declined to adopt a resolution that would ask the city and state to mandate licenses for bike riders.
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Changing Lanes
The pedestrian-cyclist-driver saga is familiar to anyone living in Manhattan today. Pedestrians loathe bicyclists who break traffic laws. At public transportation meetings, some residents have called for bicyclists to get licenses, like drivers. Bicyclists, meanwhile, say they just want a safe place to ride, away from motorists, who in turn often see bikers as a nuisance.
But this decades-old story may be about to change, as the city may install protected bicycle lanes on First and Second avenues. Unlike the painted lanes drawn on asphalt, protected lanes are strictly for bicyclists. Read more
BAD CYCLING BEHAVIOR
To the Editor:
Regarding Bunny Abraham’s letter to the editor (“Peds Need Better Advocate”), I am troubled by Ms. Abraham’s conclusion that the specific illegal cyclist behavior she witnessed means that Transportation Alternatives must somehow condone this behavior and/or is doing nothing to try and discourage it. Ms. Abraham’s statement is incorrect: as an organization, we unequivocally believe that cyclists must follow the rules of the road, which means, among other things, Read more
CYCLIST SCOFFLAWS
With an ever-increasing cyclist population in New York City, a new study by Hunter College found that many riders disobey traffic laws they are required to follow. Almost 50 percent of observed cyclists, which includes recreational and delivery bicyclists, do not wear helmets. More than 70 percent of delivery workers ride without a helmet. While more than half of bicyclists observed rode through red lights, only 13 percent of cyclists were seen riding on sidewalks and 13 percent were seen riding against the flow of traffic.
Wiley Norvell, communications director for Transportation Alternatives, took issue with the study, noting that safer street conditions drop the rate of bicyclist scofflaws.
“It’s our experience that better streets give us better behavior,” Norvell said. “On streets that make no accommodations for bicyclists we see higher rates of infractions.”
And, Norvell noted, there are an equal number of people who use traditional means of transportation and disobey traffic laws.
“These are New York City streets,” Norvell said. “It’s the wild West.”
The study was conducted by three professors from Hunter’s Department of Sociology and Urban Affairs and Planning with the assistance of Hunter students. The results are based on the observation of 2,928 bicyclists at 69 different locations throughout the city during the month of October.
