City lags behind Chicago, Toronto and Minneapolis in bike parking

A report on "Cycling in New York: Innovative Policies at the Urban Frontier" by John Pucher, Lewis Thorwaldson, Ralph Buehler and Nicholas Klein of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University released Monday found that although "New York City has expanded public bike parking over the past 15 years: from only 600 bike racks in 1996 to 6,100 in 2009....NYC lags far behind cities such as Chicago, Toronto, and Minneapolis, which are far smaller but have much more bike parking than NYC."

Furthermore, it noted that "There are virtually no racks located in or near Central Park, a destination for many hundreds of New York cyclists each day." "Similarly, there is almost no bicycle parking at key public transport hubs, such Grand Central Station, Pennsylvania Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal," it continued.

"The massive expansion of cycling facilities in NYC," the report said, is an impressive political feat considering that less than one percent of trips in New York are by bike....Upon completion of over 200 miles of new bicycling facilities between 2006 and 2009, the City of New York officially declared itself to be the 'bicycling capital of the world'....Yet according to the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, the bike share of work commuters in 2008 was only a tenth as high in New York City as in Portland, Oregon (0.6 % vs. 6.0 %) and a forth as high as Washington DC (2.3 %)....The League of American Bicyclists designates New York with the lowest of four levels of cycling status - bronze - compared to 36 cities with silver, gold and platinum status."

"The number of bike trips has almost doubled since 2000, thanks to vastly expanded cycling infrastructure, including innovative treatments such as cycle tracks, buffered bike lanes, special bike signals, bike boxes [advance stop lines at intersections, and bright green lane markings," the report said.

"Most bike trips in New York," it added, "still require cycling on traffic lanes with motor vehicles or on unprotected bike lanes, which are often blocked by motor vehicles....If the NYPD wanted to, it could immediately enforce rules against motor vehicles in bike lanes and vastly improve cycling conditions in New York overnight....Another important strategy to facilitate more and safer cycling in New York would be to reduce the supply of on-street car parking by converting it to bike lanes. This would mitigate the dooring problem as well."

"Secure, sheltered parking is needed at the city's hundreds of rail stations and especially at major bus, rail, and ferry terminals, where full-service, high-capacity bike stations are the obvious solution."

"One important category of cycling facility that is almost completely absent in New York as well as most other U.S. cities is traffic-calmed residential neighborhoods. The speed limit on all NYC streets is 30 mph unless otherwise posted. By comparison, many northern European cities have reduced speed limits to 19 mph (30 km/hr) on most residential streets."

"Perhaps the city's most important bike-parking initiative," it argued, "is the revision of zoning and building ordinances to require provision of bike parking or access in private buildings, following the lead of Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto."

Although the city is more cyclist-friendly, the study cautioned that not all cyclists are law-abiding: "A Hunter College study analyzed the riding behavior of 5,275 cyclists are 45 intersections in Midtown Manhattan, between 1st and 10th Avenues east-west and 14th and 59th Streets north-south....the study found that over a third of cyclists (37%) did not stop for red lights at all, while 29 % of cyclists paused briefly and continued through the intersection while the light was still red."