New York issued a new Street Design Manual. Richard Layman writes of it:
For example, the DC manual outlines a hierarchy of streets, but doesn't provide detailed descriptions and a framework for treating each type of street.
The Times article notes
The manual itself features 6 pages on the geometry of bike lanes and paths. They break bike lanes up into three classes, with two types each.
Class I: Bike Path (think Cycletracks)
Signal Protected Path
Protected Path with mixing zones
Class II: Bike Lanes
Buffered Lane - (pictured)
Standard Bike Lane - what we mostly have in DC
Class III: Bike Route
Shared Lane - with sharrows
Signed Route
So far in DC we've only worked with the bottom three of these types. But I suspect we'll get to more later. There's a lot more to the manual than that, but It would take more than one post to go through it all.
Richard Layman also has a link to a New York Magazine article about NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
"Honk, Honk, Aaah" is interesting in part because of the comments appended by readers. Many are quite interesting, such as asking why is biking called elitist when it is cheap enough for anyone to partake? Another negative comment asks a reasonable question from a mobility standpoint, about taking away for new bike lanes, hundreds of parking spaces in outer borough areas where bicycling isn't prevalent, but response comments are interesting, etc.
From the article:
To her supporters, she is a heroic figure of vision and inspiration—the woman who tamed the automobile and made the city safe for bicyclists.
She lives in the West Village and often bikes to work.
She has fashioned herself the city’s streets commissioner, rather than the city’s traffic commissioner.
Her most visible markings are the bicycle lanes you see everywhere, 180 miles more of them since 2006.
The DOT’s last bicycle-program director, Andrew Vesselinovitch, had quit the year before, writing in the Times a month after he left that “our efforts were so rarely encouraged, and so often delayed, that I came to the conclusion that the department is not truly committed to promoting bicycling in New York.” That may have been mostly Weinshall’s doing, but some say the resistance came from higher up. “I’ve heard from DOT people that the mayor really doesn’t like bikes,” says one biking advocate. “He has that Upper East Side–pedestrian attitude. Getting run over by a Chinese deliveryman—that to him is a ‘cyclist.’ ”
Her chief policy adviser, Jon Orcutt, for example, is a former executive director of Transportation Alternatives, which was founded in 1973 as a confrontational pro-cyclist group and evolved into a more mainstream advocacy outfit. Says one person who has followed New York City transportation policy for many years, “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I am absolutely shocked to see how a group like Transportation Alternatives is literally writing transportation policy in the city of New York—unchecked.”
One early trip took her to Bogotá, Colombia, where the city’s former mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, led her on a five-hour bike tour. But Copenhagen, often called one of the world’s best-designed and most livable cities, has had a particular influence over her. The city center features eighteen car-free areas and several pedestrian promenades, all stitched together by an elaborate network of bicycle and pedestrian paths.
After angry residents intentionally blocked the [bike] lanes with their cars, a self-proclaimed group of “bike clowns” rode through the area in pointed hats handing out fake parking tickets and staging slapstick pileups.
Local business owners say the [wide protected] bike lanes have eroded their profits, preventing their customers from making quick curbside stops and forcing them to find new places to park delivery trucks. Gehl himself was initially unhappy with the design: He thought the bike lanes were too wide but was told they had to accommodate a standard-issue snowplow. And when you look at how the newly designed street gets used—the same amount of traffic in fewer lanes and a surplus of space for a fairly scant flow of cyclists—it can make even an enlightened urbanist wonder whether this was the most efficient reallocation of precious city space. It is certainly getting under the skin of some local merchants. “We’re pissed off,” the co-owner of Chelsea Florist on 22nd Street recently told the Villager.
But perhaps most important, there’s her obsession with the bicycle. Even though cycling is up in the city—levels have doubled since 2000, according to the DOT—most New Yorkers see a bike as a luxury, or don’t have the space to store it, or live and work in places that do not make for a practical commute. In the longer term, a city like New York might reorganize around a more bike-friendly vision, with more dedicated lanes and better routes stretching from midtown into the boroughs. But in the meantime, the transfer of street space from cars and trucks to bikes is a shift in power, one that disproportionately benefits what could be called Bloomberg-voting New York.
Sitting in a West Village coffee shop, Sadik-Khan does her best to refute her critics. “It’s not just about, you know, elite people on fancy bikes,” she says. “That’s one of the most cost-effective ways to get around, and in tough economic times you don’t pay to get on a bike"
If the Broadway plan does succeed, the next step (though Sadik-Khan is not talking this way publicly) will likely be to close more sections of Broadway until one day in the near future the entire boulevard has been converted to pedestrianized open space. It’s hard to characterize how dramatic a change that would be. Imagine a Manhattan with two major parks: one built in the nineteenth century as a confined space of bucolic wonder; the other refashioned in the 21st century as a long, open boulevard slicing the island on the diagonal.
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