Uggh.

By the way, Dr. Hainline, the visibility issue is PATENTLY ABSURD! If you cross at crosswalks, there is no visibility issue! The view of the bike lane is completely unobstructed well before you enter it. That’s what the buffer areas are for. Or are you talking about the 90 year old women jaywalking and crossing between parked cars?

I ask you to truly take a moment to reflect on your HONEST motivations in this matter. Not the ones you’re representing publicly. My suspicion is that your authentic motivations are short-sighted, self-entitled and selfish. Guess what, your property value has most assuredly *improved* due to the addition of the bike lane.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/07/10/dot-bike-director-bombshell-resignation-letter/

We do not dispute Vanderbilt’s argument that lane narrowing and removal (‘road diets’) and increases in bike traffic —in general— may not increase the incident of accidents in some circumstances. But we do maintain that in the specific case of the Prospect Park West (PPW) bike lane, as currently configured, accidents have gone up rather than down.

There are reasons why the specific case of PPW is not typical of locations where accidents have not increased due to lane narrowings, closures, and increased biking:

(1) PPW is not simply an arterial roadway between intersecting streets (as is the adjacent roadway inside Prospect Park, which, we have argued, would be a more appropriate location for a two-way bike lane). Rather, PPW borders high-density residential blocks—with a school and elder-care facility (on one side of the street) and entrances to Prospect Park (on the other). This means that on a less-than-one-mile stretch of roadway, thousands of residents and park-goers are continuously entering or exiting school buses, wheel-chair vans, taxis, or driveways, while dozens of Fresh Direct, UPS, Fedex, USPS trucks, moving vans, and other delivery vehicles are also blocking one of the two remaining traffic lanes. This requires that drivers in the blocked lane continuously shift into a single more-heavily-used traffic lane to avoid the blockage. And since this single lane is now narrower on a significant stretch of PPW, if not the entire street (as our measurements, pace Vanderbilt’s assertion to the contrary, clearly show), there is less margin to avoid car doors opening, drivers or passengers squeezing into their vehicles, parents lifting babies from their car-seats, cars edging into or out of parking spots, or side view mirrors extending from vehicles. These circumstances, rather than producing a “calming feeling,” are more likely to produce irritated impatience, at best.

(2) Pedestrians may in general be safer if they cross fewer lanes of traffic, even if one of those lanes carries bicyclists. But in the case of PPW, when the now-narrower parking lane has been moved in-between the traffic lanes and the bicycle lane, cars block the pedestrians’ view of the silently oncoming bikers (particularly if said pedestrians are short or stooped, as the young, elderly, or wheel-chair-bound often are). This condition is exacerbated when the bikers fail to stop when pedestrians are crossing the lane with a “walk” light, as is too-often the case, or are speeding (ditto). Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that rather than a one-way flow of bikes (to match the one-way flow of cars and trucks to which pedestrians are habituated), the bikes are coming from both directions, called “contra-flow”; because, among other reasons, contra-flow makes bikes move counter to the traffic rules, according to the 1997 NYC Bicycle Master Plan (ref 1), this design should be used only under very special circumstances. In addition to the option of moving the lane onto the adjacent roadway inside the park, making the PPW bike-lane one-way is the other proposal we have made as members of “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes.”

(1) Vanderbilt’s basic argument relies on the perception of increased safety that roadway users (drivers, bikers, and pedestrians) may have when more drivers and riders are using fewer and narrower lanes, because their awareness of other roadway users is heightened. But this perception of increased safety is not what users of PPW have experienced. In a self-selected survey of over 3,000 Brooklynites conducted by Councilmembers Lander and Levin, most people—bikers were the only exception—reported feeling less safe after the bike lane was installed (Ref. 2).

(2) Vanderbilt questions the validity of “eye-witness reports” of collisions, notes that there is no control for the severity of these accidents, and wonders why “before” observations were made if there was no concern over safety issues prior to the installation of the bike lane. While it is quite true that the available data do not allow us to control for the severity of accidents, the observations reported to us by eye-witnesses after the installation of the lane are the only data that we or anyone else has to go on. We have never called them “statistics”, but they are valid field-report cases. The pre-lane data are those reported by the NYS DMV from NYC Police Department records. Despite our Freedom of Information requests to NYC DOT for post-lane safety data, none have been made available. The pre-lane data show PPW to be the safest street in that part of Brooklyn; no fatalities were reported for a decade or more, but official data for 2010 are not yet available. In just six months since the lane was installed, however, there have been well over a dozen reported accidents of varying types (car-to-car, biker-to-pedestrian, car-to-biker) and a fair number of biker-pedestrian accidents that have never been part of official figures (though the Transportation Committee of the NY City Council is considering asking for them to be required), so determining if these have increased will be a challenge.

(3) A further safety risk is due to decreased accessibility for emergency vehicles due to lane blockages. This situation is exacerbated during snow events such as we have experienced in recent weeks. We would be happy to supply photographs taken after the recent blizzards to show how plowed and unplowed snowdrifts worsen the problems we mention above.

Vanderbilt closes by lamenting the fact that “unfortunate[ly]…this letter is signed by a former DOT commissioner, and an academic — who should both know that it is evidence and analysis, not vague ‘eyewitness’ reports and random testimony, upon which good science, planning, and safety interventions are made.” To which we can only say that Vanderbilt’s own use of the studies he cites to support his case (“there is no significant crash difference between 10-, 11-, and 12-foot lanes on urban arterials where the speed limit is 45 mph [or less]”; “most recent research reports that wider lanes on urban streets have little or no safety benefit, at least to the extent that safety is measured in terms of empirical observations of crash incidence”, et al.) reveals an inability to distinguish between correlation and causation and a failure to understand that scientific reasoning does not permit acceptance of the null hypothesis in support of a conclusion. In his arguments, Vanderbilt also boldly generalizes conclusions from studies of road configurations (freeways, rural and small urban roads) quite different from those on PPW. However, the traffic engineering literature (including some studies cited by Vanderbilt) makes it clear that varied dynamics for different road environments can markedly influence the results from redesigns intended to increase safety. None of the studies cited were done in conditions like those we describe above for PPW. This leads to Vanderbilt’s failure to account for the operationally significant differences between the studies he cites and the PPW-specific situation.

Vanderbilt’s concluding assertion that we “are not trafficking in empirical evidence, even as [we] allege that the NYC DOT’s data ‘[produce] more puzzlement than enlightenment’” is similarly planted in quicksand. DOT has failed to provide any sufficient detailed data to document their assertion that traffic speeds on PPW prior to the implementation of the bike lane were unacceptably high, that speeds and accidents since implementation of the bike lane have been significantly reduced, or that bicycle usage (particularly of commuters) has increased to the levels claimed. NBBL’s data, on the other hand (which we have offered to share with the DOT) clearly support assertions we have made, for example, that video-taped counts of bike-lane ridership for the same days DOT purports to have measured are only about half of what they have claimed (Ref 3).

Louise Hainline, Norman Steisel, and Iris Weinshall

Ref 1: New York City Bicycle Master Plan (1997), p. 52, http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.shtml
Ref 2: Levin/Lander “PPW Results Final Release,” p. 18, http://bradlander.com/ppwsurvey.
Ref 3: Norman Steisel to Deputy Mayors Harris, Steel, and Goldsmith, 12-14-10.

@BarbChamberlain

The report is available as a free pdf download here:

http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/research/reportsmcenter/

Please feel free to distribute the link!

The progress and dynamism that we are currently seeing right now in New York City transportation policy is happening specifically because Weinshall is no longer there. She had to be removed from that job before this progress could take place. It is not surprising that she would assert these non-facts. Weinshall was never particularly interested in facts, analysis or policy even when she was DOT commissioner.