Behold the Prospect Park West Bike Lane!
Huge news, courtesy of a Park Slope tipster: The much-anticipated and hotly-debated Prospect Park West bike lane is upon us. Evidently the lines, shown here in this photo, were laid down just this morning. Photo by Joanna Oltman Smith
Huge news, courtesy of a Park Slope tipster: The much-anticipated and hotly-debated Prospect Park West bike lane is upon us. Evidently the lines, shown here in this photo, were laid down just this morning.
Photo by Joanna Oltman Smith
And for the record, the 185,000 was in 2008 and biking skyrocketed another 80% in 2009.
Latest figures (now half way through 2010) I’ve heard are 400,000 daily commuters on bicycle.
Your logic is really flawed, someguy.
Are you suggesting that the remaining 7,815,000 own cars?
And bicyclists should (and do) have a large say because they are much more eco-friendly than your oil guzzling tank which may have just ruined the Gulf of Mexico for all eternity.
Further diminishing the utility of the park bike line is the fact that it’s closed from 1am to 6am.
Also neither 8th Ave, 7th ave, or 6th ave in Park Slope have bike lanes. Installing one on heavily trafficked and narrow 7th ave is unlikely.
In fact PPW is the only avenue between 4th ave and the park that had 3 lanes of one-way traffic. 8th ave only has two lanes, but no one complained about them not being enough. Now both 8th ave and PPW have the same amount of lanes.
The nytimes recently published an article about a study detailing the methods that NYers chose to commute to work. Unfortunately, according to this study very few New Yorkers use a bicycle to get to work – under 1%. A shocking 21% drive alone to get to work.
Some would interpret these statistics as proof that bike lanes cater to very few. I see them as proof that we can do more to approach cities like Copenhagen, where 50% use bikes to get to work.
***Pardon me, but why are bike lanes needed at all on Prospect Park West when there is a REALLY wide bike / runner / walker lane just inside the park?***
The bike path inside the park is one-way. Prior to this bike lane there was no good, safe way for cyclists to travel northbound along the PPW / 8th Avenue corridor aside from riding on the PPW sidewalk, which pedestrians do not appreciate. Now you can bike from Windsor Terrace to go shopping or drop your kid off at school in Park Slope. If it works, that means less traffic. Less cruising for parking. I think that’s fantastic.
*** Talk about a huge waste of money in tight economic times!***
The cost of this project is negligible. It’s not even a capital project. It’s just a “signs and markings” project. It barely rates as a budget line item. And if it doesn’t work, PPW can quickly and cheaply be restored to the mini-superhighway that you seem to want it to remain.
***I doubt that we can really go back to the horse and buggy age, as delightful as that was. (Diptheria, polio, smallpox, measles, and whooping cough were also a real blast.)***
Are you f’ing kidding? If anything, the automobile is 21st century NYC as polio and whooping cough was to 19th century NYC. Likewise, the progressive reform movement that is making NYC more bikeable and less automobile-dependent is the direct descendant of the progressive reform movement that brought public health, safety and sanitation to NYC 110 years ago. You need to go visit a city like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen or Portland, Oregon and let us know if you think those cities’ bikes and street car systems are dragging them back into the 19th century or pushing forward into the 21st. Those cities transportation systems make NYC look downright Third World.
So when are they going to ban all vehicles, bikes and cars, from parks. The sooner the better.
185,000 cyclists.
8,000,000 commuters.
looking at these numbers, I am left with one question. How much of a say do you think you should have?
And a cool chart:
http://www.good.is/post/biking-is-way-up-in-new-york-city-again/
No Tyburg6, I did not. Do you really think people livery cars, cabs and everyoneelse will go slower because there are less lanes? Or that they won’t weave in and out of lanes to go around slower cars?
50 mph+ really? I drive it all the time and there simply aren’t enough green lights in row to go that fast.
As for being a troll on streetsblog: Trolling (as I understand it) is trying to elicit a response, my posts are responses. They may be inflammatory but they are truly how I feel. Just because I am passionate about an issue and fall on the other side of it than most of Brownstoner’s commenters does not make me a troll. And it doesn’t make me wrong because I disagree with you.
“Just because the paths are there doesn’t mean the culture has changed.”
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DOT announced a 35 percent increase in commuter cycling. Overall, cycling in the city has doubled in the past six years.
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Bicycles are on the rise in New York City, where more and more people are making bikes a major part of their transportation diet. City officials say it’s the fastest-growing mode of transport.
“The number of cyclists has jumped by 80 percent in the past decade — to 185,000 among the more than 8 million city denizens.
City officials say they’ve worked to make the city more biker friendly. They note the hundreds of miles of marked bike paths created in recent years, safety awareness campaigns and handouts of free helmets to unprotected cyclists.”
Bicycle accidents have decreased as the amount of bikers increased, according to officials. Over the same amount og time, accidents have dropped by nearly 40%.