DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg appeared before the City Council's transportation committee yesterday to talk about the state of cycling infrastructure in the city and the de Blasio administration's commitment to The Cause. Trottenberg pledged to build 50 miles of bike lanes each year—the same pace that Bloomberg Politburo member Janette Sadik-Khan made them.
Only 5 of those 50 will be protected bike lanes, which studies show decrease the amount of injuries suffered by all road users by 20%. Only 35 of the 960 miles of bike lanes in the city are protected; 650 are on-street lanes, and 310 are on greenways, parks, and bridges.
"In Manhattan, [5 miles] is the equivalent of about 100 city blocks," Trottenberg said when Manhattan Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez asked why the administration wasn't building more protected lanes. "There's a fair amount of intensive work that goes into a safely designed protected bike lane—work with the community groups, engineers, merchant groups, work that we think is very important."
The administration has already built 43 miles of bike lanes this year, including the protected lane on Lafayette Street. Paerdergat Avenue in Canarsie and Fort George Hill in Washington Heights will soon be getting two-way protected lanes, and Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights as well as 106th Street in East Harlem will also sport lanes.
"Even though there are some highly visible bike lanes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, conditions for cyclists are not good in most parts of the city, which is exemplified by the intolerably high death toll among cyclists this year," Transportation Alternatives' executive director, Paul Steely White, testified.
"The city has seen 18 bike deaths so far in 2014. We can and must bring those numbers down, and building more protected bike lanes an important way to do that as we work toward the goal of Vision Zero."
Trottenberg acknowledged the criticism.
"If we want to accelerate that rate, I think that's a discussion for us at some point. With our existing resources, we think we're moving as aggressively as we can and that New York City is moving more aggressively than any other city in the country." (Though as one advocate points out, Seattle is building more than 6 miles of protected lanes each year until 2020).
Trottenberg also reiterated multiple times that her agency has "been really trying to work closely with the NYPD," and stressed how important their participation is in keeping the streets safe for all New Yorkers. Yet no one from the police department bothered to show up to the hearing. "I can promise you, it's a really active dialogue we're having with the NYPD," Trottenberg said.
Almost all the councilmembers who spoke at the hearing pleaded for Citi Bike to hurry up and expand to their neighborhoods, even if that meant scaring up public funds to do the job. New Yorkers use the bikes twice as much as residents of other cities with bikeshare, and 30,000 of the 240,000 bike trips made every day are on bikeshare.
"For now, the mayor has made it a principle that it is not going to be a taxpayer-funded program," Trottenberg said. "I'm not ready to make an announcement on that today, but certainly we want to press ahead on phase three."
Josh Benson, the DOT's director of bicycle and pedestrian programs, added that phase two of Citi Bike would be in construction "by early 2015."
The DOT also announced a "Bridges on Bikes" campaign that would reengineer bike crossing on bridges, especially the Harlem River crossing. Another pilot will allow cyclists to strap a bike to an MTA bus and cross the Verrazano Bridge.
