Park Slope has more bike commuters than any other neighborhood in New York City — and more may be hitting the road soon thanks to new bike lanes, a new study revealed this week.
Virtually everyone who responded to the Department of City Planning survey — a whopping 95 percent — asked the city to build more bike lanes to improve safety for both riders and drivers.
“Cars refuse to share the road with bikers,” one survey-taker wrote. “They tail us, beep at us, speed by at very close distances, and often cut me off.”
Another respondent was more blunt: “I feel like I’m risking my life by riding my bike in NYC.”
Help could be on the way. The borough is experiencing a mini-boom in bike lane construction. The Department of Transportation just laid down a new lane along Willoughby Avenue in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and is planning to go ahead with a much-debated bike lane along Ninth Street in Park Slope.
The Ninth Street bike lane makes sense given the study’s central finding: more people commute by bike from Park Slope than from any other area of the city (see map). A part of the Upper West Side was second on the list.
More Brooklynites might commute by bike if there were more such lanes. According to the survey, the top reason non-commuting cyclists gave for not biking was not, as one might expect, the distance to work, but the behavior of drivers, the traffic and the danger of biking on narrow, bike-lane-free streets.
Statistics show that 225 New York City bikers died in crashes from 1996–2005 — but only one was in a marked bike lane.
“I won’t ride home on Seventh Avenue,” said Sheila, who works at On the Move, a Park Slope bike shop (she did not want to give her last name). “It’s the drivers. They don’t want bikes on the road.”
Sheila said many cyclists tell her about being hit by motorists who drive off without checking to see if the bike rider was okay.
A sizable majority of cyclists said they take longer routes to avoid streets without bike lanes.
But non-cyclists often resist the city’s bike-lane enthusiasm. Some Park Slope residents are protesting the Ninth Street plan, and last year, Community Board 2 voted down the Willoughby Avenue lane that is currently being installed.
One thing is clear from the survey: bikers believe that safety conditions need to improve. “It’s everybody’s problem,” said Sheila. “The cyclist isn’t going to kill a car. A car could potentially kill a cyclist.”
A DOT spokesman said the agency was still reviewing the study, which was released as part of the Bloomberg Administration’s promotion of Bike Month 2007 in May.
