Kudos to the Department of Transportation for launching yet another campaign to up the ante on bike awareness. It aims to add 200 miles of bike routes around the city over the next three years, to bring New York up to par with bike-friendly cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. Problem is, similar campaigns in the past have been far from successful.In 1997, the department announced a plan for 900 miles of bike paths around New York. To date, fewer than 300 miles have been completed - even fewer if you consider that a street with lanes on both sides are counted twice. In July, Andrew Vesselinovitch resigned from his position as the DOT's bike program director because of the department's lack of progress; in the past two years, only 15 miles of lanes have been installed while every day more people switch to bikes for transportation.What defines a bike lane? In the true sense, it is an on-street route designated just for bicycles and separated from vehicular traffic by a barrier. These bike lanes are ubiquitous in places like Paris and London. Even in China, whose economic growth has spawned a love affair with cars, cities like Beijing and Shanghai have kept their bike lanes wide and protected by tree-lined mediums. Bike lanes such as these allow cyclists, some who lug around groceries or children, to go about their business without honking vehicles nipping at their tails.My handy New York City cycling map shows all the routes the DOT recommends for bicycling around the boroughs. What it doesn't show are the crater-sized pot holes and slick metal construction plates that typically line such routes. New York, unlike cities abroad, has very few real lanes that are separated by barriers or completely off the street. (Even the Hudson River Path is currently marred by a construction project that at one point squeezes all cyclists and pedestrians onto a dangerously narrow strip.) Painted paths are more abundant because they're cheaper for the city to produce. But as a result many cars treat them as extra lanes or convenient places to double-park, forcing cyclists to swerve into traffic. Police hardly ticket illegally parked cars because, well, they double-park on bike lanes themselves.Most of New York's "bike paths" are those simply marked by sporadic signs along the road. According to the map, Houston Street is a recommended bike route, although it has no lanes actually marked out. Transportation Alternatives and Times Up, a bike advocacy group, have called Houston the "boulevard of death;" three cyclists were killed by trucks in the past 18 months. Bike lanes, instead of signs nailed to lampposts, could have protected the cyclists and made the offending drivers more aware that cars aren't the only things on the road.The Department of Transportation needs to keep its promise to build more lanes, but at the same time step back and examine the state of its current bike paths. In Downtown Brooklyn, where the DOT has scattered some bike route signs, disgruntled drivers frequently shout at me to get in the bike lane instead of taking up space on their street. I would, I tell them, except there isn't one.