November 20th, 2019: We Are Traffic

Nothing about the weather should cause you undue hardship on the bike today...

Wednesday Partly sunny, with a high near 47. Northwest wind 8 to 13 mph.

Wednesday Night Partly cloudy, with a low around 37. Northwest wind 8 to 14 mph.

Sunrise 6:48am

Sunset 4:34pm

...and now that the Streets Master Plan is official the long-term forecast for bikes in New York City is looking rather robust:

As for the short-term, expect the current unsettled pattern to continue:

On Staten Island, officials met to get acquainted with the borough's new bike share provider:

And the DOT wants to know where, why, and how you ride:

This past weekend, the Hudson River Greenway detour through Riverside Park claimed another victim, and Streetsblog has the story:

The latest crash happened on Sunday before dark when cyclist Eliana Hecht was tossed from her bike after an off-leash dog darted out in front of her as she descended the hilly detour near the 79th Street traffic circle — an incident she could have entirely avoided had she still been allowed to use the normal flat bike path instead of the inland up-and-down route.

“As a result of what happened to me I now feel that this route is unsafe and that I shouldn’t bike on it anymore,” the scraped-up Hecht told Streetsblog. “The same thing could happen again.”

It certainly makes sense to separate pedestrians and cyclists, but rerouting the latter along the undulating footpaths of Riverside Park is clearly not the answer.  If only there were some long stretch of road nearby that could be partially re-purposed in order to create a bicycle highway...

Yes, highways take a toll on cities far greater than what's reflected on your E-ZPass statement, as Boston is learning:

Gazing optimistically into the future, Mayor John B. Hynes declared on June 25, 1959, that the opening of the Southeast Expressway ushered in “a better Boston.” A freeway that could handle 50,000 cars a day, he said, met “one of the modern challenges of our times.”

How quaint that sounds today.

Hynes may have been right in the moment, but he couldn’t see the hellscape that was coming. Even with added lanes, that same highway gagged last year on a daily average of 200,000 cars. And more keep coming by the day, afflicting Boston with some of the nation’s worst congestion.

That deliberate scratching sound you hear is the Globe's resident avid driver Jeff Jacoby scrawling another column about how bikes don't belong in cities.

Finally, as New York prepares to flood the subway with more police, Washington DC has created a bike lane patrol squad:

A spokesperson for the Department of Public Works says the officers are new hires. Although they will write other tickets as well, they will focus heavily on infractions in bike lanes.

The city says the officers will even have the ability to photograph cars blocking the bike lanes and send a ticket by mail if the driver pulls away before receiving a ticket.

Well, we've got the "cops in bike lanes" part down anyway.  At least it's a start.