November 21st, 2019: Ready And Willing

Riding conditions look exceedingly favorable today so take advantage:

Thursday Sunny, with a high near 51. Northwest wind 7 to 10 mph.

Thursday Night Mostly cloudy, with a low around 45. Southwest wind 6 to 8 mph.

Sunrise 6:50am

Sunset 4:34pm

Note upcoming partial closures on the Queensboro Bridge to facilitate drainage cleaning:

As well as work on the Greenpoint Ave. Bridge that could require dismounting:

While you're making notes in your calendar, you might as well add a bike maintenance class to your schedule:

The colder it gets the less appealing the prospect of getting stranded due to a flat becomes.

There are more and more reports of delivery bike thefts citywide, and the 78th Precinct is reaching out to riders:

Always good to see them working with delivery cyclists instead of confiscating their bikes.

The 19th Precinct also continues its round-the-clock bike lane enforcement:

As well as the perennial bike ticketing by the Queensboro Bridge:

This may very well be the most consistent ticketing spot in the whole city, so by now it shouldn't take you by surprise.

Meanwhile, right nearby, Manhattan CB8 wants to undo key changes to 2nd Ave.:

And across town, Citi Bike is deactivating stations in anticipation of the Thanksgiving Day Parade:

No word yet on whether there will be a Citi Bike balloon.

Speaking of Citi Bike, yesterday they announced the creation of a Citi Bike Equity Advisory Board:

The board’s members hail from community groups working in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and include the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, RiseBoro Community Partnership, Healthfirst, El Puente, Upward Upbound, BronxWorks, WE Bike NYC, the Cyclopedia Bicycling Program, Union Settlement, GOLES, and the Lower East Side Employment Program. Representatives from NYCHA, the Department of Public Health, and the Human Resources Administration will also serve on the board.

“Community leaders talking about bike share—and connecting the dots for folks about what it is—is what activates the hardware and makes sure it’s used and loved by the neighborhoods where the stations sit,” says Samponaro.

And on Staten Island, Beryl explored their new home:

Emily Brooke, founder and chair of Beryl, and Phil Ellis, co-founder and CEO, visited Staten Island on Tuesday, meeting with local elected officials and representatives from the DOT to showcase the company’s bikes and begin preparations for their first U.S. rollout this spring.

“We don’t pretend that we’re going to know exactly what’s best straightaway. It’s going to be an iterative process and we’ve got a lot of work to do between now and launch to understand what’s different and what’s going to work," said Brooke.

As for why the city chose Beryl, perhaps they grew tired of haggling with Uber/Jump over forced arbitration.

Regardless, New Yorkers have clearly embraced bike share, so are they ready to take the next step and reject the idea that free car parking is a given in this town:

Well, the mayor's not:

Neither is retired physician Milton Ingerman:

“There’s insanity going on,” said Milton Ingerman, a retired physician who parks on the street on the Upper West Side.

“There are fewer parking spaces now than there have ever been,” he said. “Driving down any avenue, the traffic lanes have been diminished because of the bicycle lanes and the parking areas have been diminished because of the bike rentals. It’s punishing drivers.”

It's worrisome that a medical professional has such a profound misunderstanding of insanity.

Of course, loss of parking is merely a state of mind when you consider that many of the spots that have been "wiped out" in fact serve vastly more people:

The city began squeezing space for cars when Michael R. Bloomberg was mayor, building bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, including in Times Square. The Citi Bike bicycle-sharing service wiped out more parking spaces when it began in 2013 with 332 stations on the streets. It now has nearly 800 stations.

Obviously, dozens of shared bicycles in a space once occupied by a single person's Hyundai is a net gain, but who's counting?

Certainly not prolific anti-bike letter writer Gary Taustine:

As a New Yorker, I’m no fan of Michael R. Bloomberg. He sullied the streets of my beloved city with bikes, drove rents skyward and has a penchant for telling people how to live their lives. But politically he’s as centrist as it gets, and that’s what the country needs.

"Sullied," you say?  Wrong.  The word you're looking for is "begrimed."

But people can change.  Remember Stephen Witt of Kings County Politics, who whimsically compared a loss of car parking to the Holocaust?  Well, after visiting Japan he's coming around...

It made me imagine for just a bit if New York City can actually reclaim parking spaces as public space as Streetsblog shouts at every turn. That perhaps the streets can be utilized for the greater good and transform the roads into a more efficient model, utilizing less of a carbon footprint and create a transportation network where bicycle and pedestrian use along with public transportation become the major modes of travel.

...sort of:

The first answer is for the government to implement street culture change in an almost draconian way. They must not only reclaim parking spaces as public use for more pedestrian and bicycle lanes but also strictly enforce bicyclist road rage and I would argue ban electric scooters and bikes. In Japan, bicyclists slow down for pedestrians.  

Notwithstanding the fact that "bicyclist road rage" exists largely in his mind, actual manifestations would no doubt be even rarer in a New York City with fewer cars and more bike infrastructure.

By why be logical when you can be draconian instead?