It might be time to give the streets of Morningside Heights a serious makeover.
Last week, the Upper West Side Community Board 7 passed a resolution requesting that New York City’s Department of Transportation prepare a proposal for protected bike lanes on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues—a major victory for several neighborhood organizations that have been fighting for two years to make these avenues safer and greener.
Groups that advocate urban cycling, including Transportation Alternatives and the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign, have banded together to overhaul the traditional set-up of a Manhattan avenue: speeding vehicles sandwiched in-between parked cars bordered by sidewalks.
These activists argue that cyclists don’t have a clear, protected space in this car-centric infrastructure, and biking through traffic too often becomes a battle for survival.
Tila Duhaime, a community organizer for UWSSRC who regularly rides her bike in Manhattan, said that instead of this chaotic war zone, the group envisions protected bike lanes in which cyclists ride through a lane directly adjacent to the sidewalk and protected from traffic by physical buffer zones. Cars would be parked on the other side of the buffers.
A similar proposal died in the CB7 transportation committee two years ago, but this time it got to a full board vote and passed with a 28 to 7 approval.
Protected bike lanes have recently transformed 8th and 9th Avenues into throughways south of 59th Street. The new CB7 resolution prompts the city to investigate the Upper West Side further and will ultimately produce a comprehensive report. The neighborhood could see these lanes as early as spring of 2010, Lisa Sladkus, community organizer for Transportation Alternatives, said.
According to Nicole Garcia, a Department of Transportation spokesperson, the DOT will be partnering with CB7, working with local business improvement districts, and launching a study to collect and analyze traffic data for the neighborhood. It is too early to offer a timeframe for the project, she added.
“This benefits everyone who lives and works and plays here. I am confident that this is not just for bikers,” Duhaime said, adding that the buffer zones create shorter crossing distances for pedestrians, which could be particularly useful for elderly or disabled residents.
Nancy Lipsey, the director of outdoor Jewish adventures and advocacy for Hazon, came out to the recent CB7 meeting to offer an endorsement from her organization. “We want to take back the streets,” she said.
On a personal level, she said this would better her routine bike trips through Manhattan. When forced to weave through traffic, “I feel like I take my life into my own hands,” she said.
For some, this is actually an opportunity to change the dynamic of the neighborhood. “It makes people interact. You actually look people in the eye,” Sladkus said of a more bike-friendly community.
According to Garcia from the DOT, the protected bike lanes on 9th Avenue have been very successful, with a 50 percent increase in the number of cyclists, and a 50 percent decrease in injuries to all street users since the lane was first installed.
Opponents of the resolution said that there were still many questions that need to be answered, and several dissenters raised concerns about lost parking spaces, congestion from business deliveries, and increased speeding cyclists.
“How did we pick these avenues? Did we look at alternatives?” Monica Blum, president of the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District, asked. Blum, a biker herself, said that she is interested in exploring the idea but that the proposal was too much, too quickly.
“This is not the way to do careful decision-making that could affect everybody,” she added later, adding that she was concerned for the commercial deliveries in her district.
But George Beane, a landlord for several retail spaces on Columbus and Amsterdam, said that his commercial tenants would appreciate the lanes because more bikers would bring increased foot traffic and spending dollars to the Upper West Side.
Beane—a 65-year old local resident who has been biking on a daily basis in this neighborhood for 40 years—added, “Not everyone has to have a station wagon to pick up their groceries.”
For Leonard Spisaky, a taxicab driver in the city for the last six years, the bike lanes have been a bit problematic.
“It’s different. It is not easy,” he said of his new maneuvers to pick up and drop off passengers on 9th Avenue. He said he wouldn’t mind bike lanes on Columbus and Amsterdam, as long as he can
pick up riders without getting in trouble with the police. “If they are going to give me tickets, then I say no.”
Helen Rosenthal, chair of Community Board 7, acknowledged that more research is needed—which she said is exactly what the passed resolution mandates.
She added that she felt the board was motivated by the huge turnout at the CB7 meeting, including an 11-year old boy who bikes from the East Side to the West Side to get to school and a 90-year old woman who said that it was difficult to make it across the street.
“I think that there are people in our neighborhoods who want to see a safer biking experience, and safer in the 21st century,” she said, adding, “People believe that other cities, major cities, have been able to achieve this, so why not give New York a chance?”
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