Upper Green Side

Letter to CB 8 on Cycling

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Dear M. Barry Schneider and Charles Warren and the CB8 Transportation Committee

I was very pleased to see that Community Board 8 included safer cycling routes in its District Needs Statement for Fiscal Year 2007 (http://cb8m.com/overview.cfm)

I would like to continue the discussion that we started in February about bringing safe buffered and protected bike lanes to the East Side. Working together with a small group of volunteers we have collected about 1000 signatures on a petition for north/south protected bike lanes to be installed on First and Second Avenues. Many of the people I spoke to in the neighborhood in the process of collecting these petitions believed that the bike lanes were a minimum standard of safety that should be provided to cyclists. I strongly believe that these bike lanes would not only provide safer routes for cyclists within and through our neighborhood, but could also help prevent many of the current illegal sidewalk riding that currently occurs. I also believe that it will serve to calm automobile traffic.

Furthermore the June 1st edition of “Our Town” newspaper had a whole section devoted to biking issues, which included discussions of illegal sidewalk cycling, unsafe conditions for cyclists on the road and tips on how to prevent bike theft. They also wrote a well thought out editorial on what is to be done to making biking safer for everyone:

“Bikers deserve bike paths, safe spaces to ride on city streets. We cannot call ourselves innovative until we have set aside a dedicated areas and not just a path along the rim of the island. For Environmentally-friendly bicycles to take center stage in our consciousness and in the solutions of our transportation questions, so too bike lanes must take up valuable real estate on our thoroughfares, main and otherwise. The Mayor and the city council should do what they can to make this happen. And while they are at it, bikers need spaces to store their bikes, for a few hours or a full workday….Bikers and non-bikers, with a little help from their political leaders, should be able to put together an agenda of mutual benefit. That will improve the ride - and the walk - for all of us.”

Please let us know when we can address this topic again and hopefully put together such an “agenda of mutual benefit” in a well crafted proposal to CB 8, the DOT and other interested parties to make cycling safer for everyone in our neighborhood.

In addition, please feel free to call upon David Snetman at Transportation Alternatives for more on their working cyclist program (http://www.transalt.org/campaigns/bike/working.html) to combat illegal commercial cyclists.

Sincerely
Glenn McAnanama
Founder, Upper Green Side