Bicyclists who live in, and travel through, Downtown Brooklyn perhaps picked up a faint tremor in the air last Wednesday night when, at a public hearing of Community Board 2, the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) presented its plans for five new miles of bicycle lanes on streets in Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill - a plan that would effectively link the Navy Yard to Prospect Heights. The CB2 board room fairly buzzed with opinions about the new plans.Ryan Russo, Downtown Brooklyn Transportation Coordinator for DOT, gave a PowerPoint slideshow detailing on a street-by-street basis the particulars of the plan to members of the public and to a well-attended and attentive board, who were convened for their last meeting of the fiscal year. Attentive, but not entirely receptive of the DOT's plans, as it happens.Russo began his pitch by referring to New York City's "Bicycle Master Plan," an ominous title for a benign 1997 report that formalized Bicycle Network Development project, a federally funded joint effort of New York City's DOT and Department of City Planning to increase bicycle ridership throughout the city.The Bicycle Master Plan calls for route designers to identify major destinations and "travel corridors" for cyclists, and to incorporate those areas into their overall plan for a citywide network of bicycling facilities. Russo said that Fort Greene and Clinton Hill were some of the "major bicycle generators" in downtown Brooklyn, having such destinations as Pratt and Fort Greene Park, and also being the home of many people who commute to the city by bicycle. Given the imperative of the Master Plan, Russo argued, this part of Brooklyn, which currently has few options for cyclists, is well due the attention.Another motivation for implementing the Master Plan in this area, Russo said, is to address a need to provide a safer route for cyclists between the Manhattan Bridge and Prospect Park, which bookend an area of particular challenges for two-wheelers, including the Scylla of Flatbush Avenue, and the Charybdis of Atlantic-Pacific, two high-traffic areas with dangerous intersections for cars, as well as cyclists. DOT wants to help cycling commuters avoid the central Business District as well, and generally "try to entice cyclists to more bicycle-friendly" streets.Furthermore, the new north-south routes will link green spaces in Downtown Brooklyn, giving a more official route for recreational cycling between the waterfront, Fort Greene Park, Cuyler Gore Park, Grand Army Plaza, and Prospect Park.The specifics of the plans, as Russo demonstrated with numerous illustrations and maps, will create a northbound bicycle lane on Carlton Avenue between Flatbush and Flushing Avenues; a southbound lane on Cumberland Street/Washington Park from Flushing Avenue to Pacific Street; a contra-flow bike path on Carlton Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street; and an eastbound lane on Willoughby Avenue, extending from Washington Park to Classon Avenue.DOT will also perform what Russo called "a little more dramatic change" on Carlton Avenue between Park and Myrtle avenues by converting it from a one-way northbound street into a two-way street with a twenty-foot striped median and parallel parking and bicycle lanes on both sides of the street.The five miles of bike lanes Russo presented may amount to a small percentage of the Master Plan's ultimate goal of a network of 900 miles of bicycle facilities citywide, but those miles are known intimately by the members of the public and CB2 who were in attendance at Russo's presentation. During the period of public comment, there was unqualified support for the new lanes from Noah Budnick, deputy director for Advocacy for Transportation Alternatives (TA), a non-profit citizens group that advocates for alternatives to vehicular transportation. He said TA is "very supportive of the plans" which they think will provide "very good connections to the bridges" and "will encourage more people to ride bikes."But everyone else who commented did so with suggestions and qualifications to DOT's plans. Mark Anders, a local resident who said that he has ridden his bike between the Navy Yards and Prospect Heights "at least 2,500 times" in recent years, provided the meeting's only "boots on the ground" report of what riding the streets is like. He was enthusiastic about the DOT proposal, but asked that planners give a bit more attention to the notion of making Cumberland its southbound route.Anders claimed that, from experience, Adelphi provides much better and safer access to the Yards and to Atlantic Avenue. He warned that Cumberland Street at Atlantic Avenue is "really bad" for bicyclists, and recommended that DOT consider instead his preferred path through Fort Greene: Adelphi to South Portland to Flatbush.Even as speakers during both the public comment period and the closed board discussion went into more minute detail than Anders about specific streets and routes affected by DOT's plans, clear points of issue surfaced. The 25-foot-wide pathway that crosses Cuyler Gore Park is currently used only by pedestrians and, under the DOT initiatives, will soon be shared by cyclists. Frederick Anderson of the Fort Greene Association, which he said "very much supports" the DOT plan, asked for a reconsideration of this proposed mix of park-goers and cyclists. Ernest Augustus, a member of CB2, thought the Cuyler Gore crossing was ill-conceived and asked, "Can we reexamine this?"Another hot potato was the notion that introducing bicycle lanes to streets is a "traffic calming" measure at all. The focus of this issue settled on the planned conversion of Carlton Avenue between Park and Myrtle into a two-way street. Though the plan will change the block's present mix of parallel parking on one side and perpendicular on the other to a more sensible parallel on both, and will establish clear lines of transit on the 70-foot-wide stretch of Carlton where currently, as Anderson of the FGA attested, "cars jostle about" all over the road, many in attendance did not see the logic in the conversion.Cheryl Goodman, a local resident, said she failed to see how making Carlton narrower by adding a striped median and two bike lanes would at all calm traffic. Instead, Goodman argued, changes such as this will only "create bottlenecks" in an already overcrowded area. Augustus echoed Goodman's concerns and added that cars on Flatbush tend to veer right on Carlton to avoid traffic during rush hour, and there's far too much activity on that street for it to be safe for anyone. "This won't calm traffic, but will create traffic backup," she insisted.CB2 member John Harrison then spelled out what came to be the largest bone of contention of the night. Harrison asked Russo pointblank why DOT would try to solve Downtown Brooklyn's substantial traffic problem by introducing another problem - bicyclists.There were several speakers who criticized DOT's plan, including CB2 member Anthony Ibelli, who referred to cyclists as "thugs on two wheels" who "go right through lights and run down pedestrians." They argued that cyclists as it is do not obey traffic laws, and therefore do not deserve any favors in the form of more bike lanes in the neighborhood.Verdell Bivens of CB2, wondered if DOT had taken pedestrian safety into consideration. "On Cumberland between Greene and Atlantic," she said, "where we have gardens and a senior residence, many seniors are out walking to go to the mall, and bicycles can be hazardous to them because they're not as quick" to react as other pedestrians might be. Resident Cheryl Goodman worried about the safety of children walking to and from school on Sand Street where she lives, and thought that kids would be less safe crossing streets with more cyclists on them.The co-chair of CB2's Transportation Committee, Nancy Wolf, said that she lives two doors from Henry Street where she witnesses that the bike lanes there "keep the cars where they belong" and do provide a calming effect in that they "make people go slower." But Wolf echoed the concerns of others in stating that cyclists do not observe traffic signals and lights.General murmurs of agreement throughout the meeting indicated that two-wheelers who cut through traffic, ignore stop lights, and zip through intersections have not provided the cycling community with a very good reputation among these parts.Board members Patrick Killackey and Sidney Meyer tried to separate the issue of cyclist etiquette and law-abidance from the creation of new bike lanes. Meyer said he doesn't believe we need to stop the creation of new bike lanes "just because there are bad bicyclists."Russo attempted to placate the multiple concerns of those in attendance by saying that DOT is not "throwing bikes to the wolves to calm traffic," but rather wants to put "cyclists in a space that's predictable, and motorists in a space that's predictable." The purpose of the project, Russo said, is to make a bike network for cyclists and make street riding easier and safer for them on streets that they are already using anyway. A few hazardous bike-riding apples should not be allowed to spoil the entire barrel, he argued.Mirroring Russo's claims, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, Paul Steely White, when reached by phone this week, said this in response to CB2's concerns about dangerous bicyclists: "The vast majority of bicyclists are law-abiding citizens doing their city a good turn by reducing air pollution and decreasing traffic on streets. The minority who disobey laws and sometimes purposely antagonize pedestrians unfortunately give the misleading impression that everyone on a bike is a 'risk-taking scofflaw.'"Quite contrary to this image of an "intrepid young man" who rides the streets looking for unsuspecting pedestrians to mow down, White asserts that more and more bicyclists are "regular people" - families and more "mainstream" people who are taking their kids to school and commuting to work. White said that studies prove that "there is a discernible safety in numbers effect" with bicycling: the more bikes there are on the streets, the safer street biking is. And further, the more opportunities there are to ride bikes - in the form of bike lanes, for example - the more those law-abiding, mainstream, regular riders will take to two wheels for recreation and commuting.Nevertheless, CB2's final vote represented the overall hesitance of the board toward DOT's proposal. On a motion to approve the plans with the caveat that the DOT should give closer studies made to the particular problem areas including Cuyler Gore Park and Carlton Avenue, with an added follow-up study on pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicular safety after implementation, the board voted 16 to 15 against, with two abstentions. The motion therefore failed, sending a lukewarm "not in my backyard, thanks but no thanks" message to DOT.Though community board votes do not have any binding influence on lawmakers and planners, they do serve as weathervanes of public interest and are considered significant advisory bodies. DOT spokesman Chris Gilbride said, "We meet with community boards because they are the best way to get public input," and noted that CB2's vote was not an out-and-out rejection of DOT's plans, but a rejection of a motion to support those plans. Indeed, this decision, Gilbride affirmed, gives DOT valuable feedback on the specifics of its bike lane proposal, and that such feedback "will certainly be taken into account."Despite the board's failure to support the DOT plan, and despite rumor that has sprung up since the CB2 meeting in the local bicycling community that the lanes are due to be canceled if significant public support is not shown, there is no indication that DOT will scrap its plans for the proposed bike lanes, which are due to be completed this autumn.