Like Rasputin's poison and bullet-riddled body emerging from the icy Malaya Nevka River, the lawsuit filed against the Prospect Park West bike lane refuses to perish. In two weeks, opponents of the lane will try to persuade a judge to keep their fight alive. Meanwhile, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog has crunched the numbers and found that despite the NIMBY protestations of Seniors For Safety and Neighbors For Better Bike Lanes, the PPW bike lane hasn't meaningfully impeded vehicle traffic.
To arrive at this conclusion (the same conclusion that the DOT reached, but as the lane's opponents will attest, an "independent" look at the data never hurts) FiveThirtyEight analyzed the city's data and found the volume-to-capacity ratio of traffic on Carroll Street and 11th Street before and after the bike lane was installed.
The volume-to-capacity ratio takes the Average Annual Daily Traffic data and divides it by the road's capacity to see how "full" the road can get before it hampers traffic flow.
The DOT's study also found that as motor vehicle speed decreased after the bike lane's installation, so did the number of accidents. However, taxpayer-funded legal fees keep piling up.
