Bike lane prospects

So while I was out in California for a couple weeks, the NYC DOT finally put in the bike lane along Prospect Park West. There was uproar all through the Slope about the lane, put in the master plan over a decade ago in 1997. Things got really intense earlier this year, when the borough president (Marty Markowitz) asked the transportation commissioner (Janette Sadik-Khan) to kill the project in an open letter. In the last few months flyers were being passed around and posters were being taped up claiming, like Markowitz, that it would eliminate parking spaces, make walking across the street a nightmare, and increase congestion on the street generally.

The first claim hits at the most wide-ranging problem in the Slope, as parking is extremely hard to find and is only becoming more scarce as more and more families come into the area with more and more cars, and more and more parking garages are sold and turned into more and more apartments. The next claim about pedestrian traffic is the most narrow in focus, as it affects mostly the population in the streets closest to the park (some of the choicest properties in all of New York City). And the last claim about congestion is groundless, like the first two--the only difference being that it if you have ever lived in or near Park Slope, you would never make it in the first place.

This is because (to take the last claim first), as only a little experience with the road will tell you, the problem on Park Slope West is not traffic congestion at all but speed, as the planners of the project understood when they made this the foremost goal of the plan. They claimed, rightly, that the actual traffic along the park simply didn't require three lanes of one-way street, and that having three lanes there could only encourage people to rocket along and weave through lanes unpredictably. And this is what people did--wouldn't you? A particularly bad twist to this was that the cab companies which thoroughly infest Park Slope and make it a dangerous place to walk with your children realized it could work as their own personal freeway: thus, just a couple weeks ago, cabbies were shooting along, weaving around on either side anyone going slower than 50, or floating from the left lane all the way over the middle to the right and back again, looking for the street they had to turn down to find the executive they would race that day down into Manhattan or up to JFK. Moreover, it became a thoroughfare for people in other neighborhoods to make their way towards the BQE. Why people didn't get pissed about this, and did get pissed about the commission's decision to reduce the road to two-lanes and force people to drive slower, I guess I'll just never understand. But even in my ignorance I can positively say that the threat of congestion couldn't be the real reason, since the only possibility of it existing on that road was when the commission was trying the stop-gap solution of fiddling with the timing of lights and increasing the length of reds--pending the more thorough solution the plan would provide. This, to the eye of someone who believes that traffic problems are only solved by expanding roads and adding lanes, rather than by incentivizing the use of real thoroughfares (Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, 4th Avenue) or (gasp!) public transportation, I guess might look like congestion. But the view isn't then much different than the person's that would use anything to convince us that any project without immediate benefit to the most immediate parties involved--which tends to be most projects in the interests of the local population--can't be managed, and that we should concludes, like Markowitz, that the only thing worth approving are lucrative projects like the kick-backing corporate orgy that is Atlantic Yards (which at least looked a bit like that before costs, and Frank Gehry, were cut--all without "managing," however). Meanwhile, even though it is too early to tell how the reduction of lanes has affected things in any significant sense, I can say there are many hints of slower speeds already.

In short, even if Janette Sadik-Khan had to basically ram the project past all of the objections, this was thoroughly justified, as the objections were not only groundless but also were made by people with only private interests in mind. This goes especially for local residents who somehow thought (to take up the next claim) the walking situation would be complicated by bikes. While crossing a bike lane is indeed a bit annoying, anyone who enters the park from the west does it already without complaining just to get to the Long Meadow--and on the bike lane inside the park's West Drive which they cross, they have no problem avoiding marathons, races, and all sorts of bike-related tomfoolery. What's a bike lane--which is better than undirected bikes flying everywhere, mind you--to that? Nevertheless, the concern is more global than this annoyance, since the goal of the bike lane involves directing more new bike traffic to this area. But one has to realize that this is done to alleviate the car traffic on Prospect Park West in an even more substantial way than the ways already mentioned: by encouraging biking rather than driving by the park. And one can't complain about too much congestion, as we saw above, at the same time as one complains about every remedy for it--unless of course, what one is really complaining about is any and all traffic along the park except their own. And while the park should be for local use, "local" should not be defined so exclusively as to require no traffic at all coming from elsewhere, and especially from areas so close by that people are using bikes to get where they are going, since they will probably also live around the park (something else is going on when you effectively claim the other sides of Prospect Park are not "local" enough).

But the most astounding thing about the whole bike lane project is the way it put the fears about parking to rest. The planners simply moved the bike lane to run right along the curb, protected by the cars which now park right along the street (and given lots of room on the other side from the extra-wide sidewalk). Everything regarding the cars is exactly the same as it was before with three lanes, only we now have two lanes: the bike lane does not interfere at all with the process of parking or finding or getting a space, as the cars and the bikes don't have to cross each other at all. While no spaces were added (that I can see), none at all were taken away or made tough to access, and it is probable that with more bike traffic into the area, the demand for parking spaces will actually go down.

New problems are sure to emerge, of course. But if the commissioner and everyone involved in the project handles those with a similar combination of creativity and levelheadedness, I'm also sure they will be manageable.