Ciclovia New York City

New York City recently announced that this August they would close some streets for a little while over the weekend to auto traffic. They

will create a car-free zone on three Saturdays in August, along a 6.9-mile stretch of streets through Manhattan, from the Brooklyn Bridge, north to Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. Cars, trucks and buses will be banned on the streets along the route from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Aug. 9, 16 and 23. The mayor was careful to describe the initiative, called Summer Streets, as an experiment.

Mr. Bloomberg and the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said the idea was to make the streets a haven for walkers, cyclists and others. Fitness, dance and yoga classes will be held along the route, and there will also be places to rent bicycles. The plan was reported in The New York Sun on Monday.

Cyclists who were asked about the initiative on Monday were generally enthusiastic.

The idea isn't new - and CommuterPageBlog has the full break down of North American Ciclovias -  but it will be the highest profile closure in the United States (if not the world). If it's a success (some combination of high use, low traffic impact and increased business along the route) it could spread a la velib. Which leads into the fact that Governor's Island in NYC now has free weekend bike rentals available (they call it bike share, but I think bike share has to have multiple pick-up/drop-off points and be designed as transit. This is more recreation).

There is definitely a need for more places to recreate in NYC as seen from this "Rockatansky in Central Park" article from NY magazine.

Runners, not surprisingly, see cyclists as out-of-control maniacs orbiting the park at terminal velocity. And the cyclists’ vivid, skintight plumage doesn’t help, to say the least. On a recent Saturday morning, Jerry Macari, a running coach and the owner of Urban Athletics on Madison Avenue, had a dustup with a cyclist on the west side of the park near 79th Street, as he stood on the sidelines of a running race. “He’s whizzing by me and screams, ‘You’re an a****** for being in the lane!’ ” Macari recalls. Not to be outdone, Macari lobbed an expletive back. “The reality is, the bikers feel safe because they’re riding away when they yell something at you.

The conflict between bikers and dog owners is, if anything, even more fraught.

“The type of personality who is attracted to cycling or triathlon is an addictive personality,” Karim Pine, Cadence’s marketing director, tells me. “I always say there is very little difference between an endurance athlete and a heroin addict. It’s the same type of person who has to hit that button again to get that buzz.”

But it's surprising they're banning cars from Park and Lafayette and not Central Park

There’s one issue about which runners, cyclists, and dog owners are in full agreement: cars. For years, Transportation Alternatives, the bicycle-advocacy organization, has been waging a campaign to banish cars from the park. “We’re incredulous that we don’t have a car-free Central Park already,” Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul White tells me. “The anger you see in the park is similar to the ire you see in Park Slope with the double-wide strollers. Our view is, Don’t get mad at the stroller moms. Get mad at the city for providing such limited car-free space.”

While many in the city might view this as a desirable outcome, last summer, as a concession, New York’s Department of Transportation expanded the car-free policy in Central Park by an hour per day.

Comments

[Jack]

Wow, here's an uninformed psychiatric opinion:

"The type of personality who is attracted to cycling or triathlon is an addictive personality"

I ride because I like it! If that's an addiction, then I'm also addicted to: eating, reading, listening to music, playing piano, writing code, writing, volleyball, dinner with friends, movies...

[HM]

I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the Mall on my bike via Memorial Bridge on I-day. The bridge and Independence Avenue had no vehicular traffic and things were very light on Constitution too (prob cause it was just past the afternoon parade). Ciclovia DC!