MILESTONES FOR BIKING AND WALKING IN NEW YORK CITY
Bike Share Ditches the Dock
Welcome to five-borough bike share — sort of. In an attempt to spread bike share citywide without spending any money or political capital removing parking spaces for bike share stations, Mayor de Blasio piloted independent dockless bike share systems in every borough this summer. While the pilots looked set up to fail, with low bike densities and a lack of citywide integration, this summer’s experiment was at least a tacit agreement with something TransAlt has been saying for years: New Yorkers want bike share in all five boroughs.
Mayor de Blasio Disses N.I.M.B.Y.s to Save Skillman
After a driver killed cyclist Gelacio Reyes on 43rd Avenue in Queens last year, a head-spinning series of political reversals pitted the community board and local politicians against the community itself. At first, local leaders stood with Reyes’ widow immediately after his death to call for a redesign of 43rd Avenue and its sister street, Skillman Avenue. The neighborhood applauded the proactive stance, but the support of community leaders was short-lived. When a few “not in my backyard” types complained about parking spaces lost to the planned protected bike lanes, these same leaders did a 180, suddenly opposing the safety improvements. TransAlt’s Queens Activist Committee launched a full-scale campaign to demonstrate neighborhood support, including major rallies, thick stacks of petition signatures, and a human-protected bike lane on Skillman Avenue. While the community board voted down the Department of Transportation’s proposal to make the streets safe, Mayor Bill de Blasio got wind of the massive community support demonstrated by TransAlt’s Queens Committee and decided that the project would proceed. Hey N.I.M.B.Y.s — sorry not sorry.
TransAlt PeopleWay Becomes City Policy
When news of the L train shutdown leaked in 2016, the response from New York City’s political class was low on solutions and heavy on Chicken Little. Ignoring the hysteria, TransAlt got to work, pulling together a coalition of affected riders and coming out early with a bold solution, which we called the PeopleWay — a bike- and transit-centric car-free route along the L train corridor. Our ideas were immediately branded unrealistic pie-in-the-sky idealism. But after a two-year campaign, those ideas are now city policy. When the L train goes dark west of Bedford Avenue next year, TransAlt’s PeopleWay will light the way, with protected bike lanes on Delancey, Grand, 12th, and 13th streets and dedicated bus corridors, car-free for most of the day, to match. We don’t call it idealism. We call it being right.
