City Planning Pushing New Bike-Friendly Rules
Prompted by an email alerting us to the creation of a new Department of City Planning portal, we stumbled across an announcement from earlier this month of new regulations regarding bicycle parking in new building in the five boroughs. Citing a lack of adequate and safe parking as a major factor in people not biking…
Prompted by an email alerting us to the creation of a new Department of City Planning portal, we stumbled across an announcement from earlier this month of new regulations regarding bicycle parking in new building in the five boroughs. Citing a lack of adequate and safe parking as a major factor in people not biking to work, City Planning approved a text amendment on March 4 that would “require indoor, secure bicycle parking in new developments, substantial enlargements, and residential conversions.” In addition, “the regulations would apply to multi-family residential, community facility, and commercial buildings, including public parking garages, in all zoning districts.” For more details, check out the slide show presentation or the text amendment. As Streetsblog pointed out at the time, the City Council has until late April to vote on the measure.
CMU – hope you don’t get hurt riding without a helmet. I’m one of those people who would have been killed or severely injured without a helmet – way back in 1990 in my case. I don’t advise anyone to unnecessarily avoid risks, but there’s no reason to unnecessarily take risks either. BTW if bikers get hurt without a helmet, should we expect our taxpayer-funded emergency rooms to pay for their medical care?
Also do you have evidence that non-helmet-wearing bikers aren’t being killed in droves, other than anecdotal? Granted, we don’t hear about it in our news, but why would we even if it was happening? I can see the headline: BURKINA FASO CRACKDOWN ON BAREHEADED BIKERS…
And now back to grading homework – will return to Brownstoner this evening.
helmet study: http://www.helmets.org/henderso.htm
ride w/o one. i dont care. hope you dont have a spouse or kids though.
CMU – just ride without a helmut if you want. But don’t try to make it into a principalled stance – you aren’t going to convince anyone.
Everyone sees things thru the lens of their own experience, but it would behoove you to also read carefully. Note I said I travel slowly. It’s those spandex speeders you need to direct your anger towards; I do too.
The probability of my hitting someone on Carroll street while riding reverse is ZERO.
Helmets: Please see ample evidence of their non-utility. EVERYONE has anecdotal evidence of a person injured/killed without a helmet. As I said, there are 100’s of millions of cyclists world over who do not wear them. They are not being killed in droves. Helmets discourage cycling (see Australia eg).
The Richardson mention is illuminating. So now we need to wear helmets when skiing? When will it end? There’s actually a study saying that wearing helmets while driving (a car) reduces a small number of fatalities. The truth is, cycling or other accidents will happen. People will get injured or killed, and being paranoid about risk-avoidance (that’s you, DIBS, it’s even more strange for a non-cyclist to be so overly concerned about us) is not the answer.
But all this is noise compared to the rubbish about “more accidents and hazards” if there is more cycling.
“Cars are much easier to see than bikes” Not if you opened your eyes maybe.
This is a nice addition to the zoning resolution.
I do agree with the above poster in that there needs to be a more concerted effort to reduce the amount of cars on the road. The bike lanes are a joke. If a six year old can not safely use it, it is not a safe bike lane. Bikes need to be separate from vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
“What’s wrong with you?”
man, that would be a WHOLE seperate, long thread 😉
Cars are more dangerous than bikes but they are less chaotic and more carefully regulated.
Also, the cars are already here and the problems and grievances relating thereunto are well understood.
The city is trying to increase bike traffic while not doing anything to curtail car traffic.
I mean, there is the magical mystery fantasy that when someone starts biking they stop driving, but in NYC when someone starts biking it usually means they stop walking.
So the end result is:
Same number of cars on the road
More bikes on the road
More accidents and more hazards for pedestrians
Most of the people who complain about bikes are pedestrians.
Cars are much easier to see than bikes (esp. bikes that go the wrong way on the street, run red lights, ride outside the bike lane, weave in and out of traffic, or ride on the sidewalks).
Pitbull,
“is it wrong i love jumping in front of A-holes on bikes to make them swerve out of control?”
…. and into the path of traffic? or just out of control scraping across the pavement and into the hospital?
Is this what you really want? What’s wrong with you?
“watch out multi-family brownstone owners….how you gonna get bike parking inside your building.”
Posted by: Petebklyn at March 24, 2009 10:12 AM
Brownstone/row houses are exempt.
From slide 14 of the DOT presentation:
Residential waiver:
>waive requirement for buildings with 10 or fewer units
>calculate requirement by individual building segment (e.g rowhouse) rather than building lot
Example
>Rowhouse on a single zoning lot (21 units in an R7 district)
>Requirement waived, each building is 10 units or less