By Karen Matthews
Associated Press
And Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — New York City, with its convoys of cabs, miles of subway track, fleets of fume-belching trucks and hordes of harried commuters, is a long way from Davis, Calif., with a University of California campus and not much else.

But the concrete jungle and the college town were both honored recently by the League of American Bicyclists for bike friendliness.

New York City’s bronze medal from the Washington-based bike group represents an endorsement for the city’s efforts under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to promote cycling for a cleaner environment and a healthier populace.

“The way we think about transportation and how we use our limited street space is changing,� said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city transportation commissioner.

The city is installing 400 to 500 bike racks a year and plans to have more than 400 miles of bike lanes and paths in place by 2009. There will then be 1 mile of bike lane for every 10 miles of road; the ratio is now 1 to 15. In San Francisco it’s 1 to 7.

In Brooklyn, among the most popular bike routes are Shore Road, Ocean Avenue, the Belt Parkway, the bike paths through Prospect Park, the bike lanes on the East River bridges, and others. A Brooklyn “Greenway� with both walking and bicycling paths is now in the planning stages, and would run from Newtown Creek down Kent Avenue in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, around the Navy Yard, through the planned Brooklyn Bridge Park, and along the Red Hook and Sunset Park waterfronts.

In Williamsburg, the city reduced the space for car parking in favor of bike parking — a first — when it widened the sidewalk to fit nine new bike racks over the summer.

“It’s better because people used to chain their bikes to trees and house gates,� said Pedro Pulido, an architect who parked his bike at one of the new racks last week.

A seven-block length of Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue is now being remade into the city’s most bicycle-oriented stretch of roadway ever, with a bike lane separated from car traffic by a paved buffer zone and a lane of parked cars. Noah Budnick, deputy director of the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives and a Brooklyn resident, said the parking-protected bike lane is “the next step that advocates have been asking for, for years.�

Bloomberg also has proposed legislation to make it easier to bike to work by requiring commercial buildings to provide bicycle parking.

“According to surveys the number one reason why people who want to bike don’t is that they can’t park their bikes indoors,� Budnick said. “You just can’t park your bike on the street all day in New York.�

‘You Have To Be Alert’
“You have to always be alert,� said Barbara Ross, who bikes to work and volunteers with Time’s Up!, the environmental group that promotes a group bike ride called Critical Mass. Budnick himself was involved in a serious crash several years ago as he bicycled eastbound on Sands Street, a popular bicycle route that leads to the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge.

A study conducted last year by the city departments of health and transportation found that 3,500 cyclists were injured by cars between 1996 and 2003 and 225 were killed.

Following up on its analysis of those accidents, New York City announced a $1 million public service ad campaign last month to remind drivers and bike riders to watch out for each other.

It was New York City’s commitment to study bike crashes and prevent them that persuaded the League of American Bicyclists to bestow its bronze medal. (Davis, which has an old-fashioned bike on its city seal, is the only platinum-level community. Another college town, Palo Alto, Calif., is gold.)

Andy Clarke, executive director of the league, called New York’s 2006 survey “the most extensive study that we know of� into bike accidents.

The city also is promoting safety by giving out thousands of free bike helmets, which are required for children and for bike messengers and delivery workers.

Transportation Alternatives says there are 130,000 bicyclists on the road in New York City’s five boroughs daily. Because New York is the nation’s largest city at 8 million people, that’s more total cyclists per capita than any other U.S. city can claim.

But according to Census figures, just 0.5 percent of New Yorkers ride bikes to work. That compares to 2 percent in Seattle and San Francisco and a whopping 34 percent in Copenhagen.

How much higher could New York push its number of bike commuters?

“We can certainly do better,� said Sadik-Khan, who visited Copenhagen a few months ago to study the Danish city’s bike-promoting policies.

If there are obstacles, there are also advantages to New York for cyclists.

It’s flat, it’s relatively temperate and you can bring your bike on the subway.

Thousands of bike messengers and food deliverymen weave through gridlock Manhattan traffic daily. “It’s the fastest mode of transportation,� said Sarinya Srisakul, vice president of the New York Bike Messenger Association, noting that it can take half an hour to traverse 10 Midtown blocks by car but just five minutes on a bike.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law.
Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net

Main Office 718 422 7400