Williamsburg Bike Lane Battle Intensifies: "The City Created A Mess"

Brooklyn Councilman Antonio Reynoso railed against a community board in his district at a City Council Transportation Committee hearing on Wednesday, saying the board's members care about "parking over safety," and urging transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg to ignore it going forward.

"You guys proposed a Metropolitan Avenue bike lane. Our community board shut it down," he told the assembled Transportation Department officials. "The Metropolitan Avenue bike lane should happen regardless of what the community board thinks."

Reynoso was under the impression that Community Board 1 as a whole had voted against proposed bike lanes along an industrial mile of Metropolitan Avenue in East Williamsburg [pdf], but what actually happened was that the board's transportation committee issued a report approving it in the spring, then rescinded it at the request of the larger board over a procedural issue, according to member and former committee chairwoman Karen Nieves. Whatever the case, the community board currently has no plans to consider the proposal, and Reynoso spoke passionately of the need for the DOT to do whatever it thinks is best in Williamsburg, board be damned.

"In cases where the evidence shows that [DOT planners are] gonna absolutely improve safety, we shouldn't be asking for anyone's opinion," he said. "It's like, the police officers asking community boards whether they can go to the street to provide safety. Who asks for that?"

Councilman Antonio Reynoso (City Council)

On his way out of the hearing, Reynoso claimed that Greenpoint and Williamsburg's Community Board 1, unlike the other community boards 4 and 5 in Bushwick and East New York, fails to represent its neighborhood in terms of race (he says Latinos are underrepresented), geographic distribution, and crucially, number of stubborn drivers. He said opposition to Citi Bike locations, bike lanes, bike corrals, and even new below-market-rate housing too often get caught up on the issue of losing parking spots.

"We should never be talking about parking over safety," he said, adding, "I'm getting letters left and right [from CB1] about parking and not putting in bike lanes."

Trottenberg, on hand to tout the achievements of the Vision Zero initiative to reduce traffic fatalities to zero by 2024, was diplomatic about the community board criticism, saying that her peers in other cities envy New York's system of neighborhood panels.

"It works better than you might think when you're in the middle of it but we take your point," she said. "If we think there's something central that needs doing, we move ahead."

Reynoso is a cosponsor of a bill, introduced last year, that calls for sweeping reforms of the community board system. The city's 59 boards weigh in on city proposals including rezonings, street redesigns, and liquor licenses, and though their opinion is only advisory, the DOT has scrapped numerous plans for bike lanes and traffic-slowing measures when faced with board opposition.

Currently, community board members are appointed biannually, with Councilmembers and the relevant borough president each getting picks to serve two-year terms. It's not uncommon for board members to serve for decades. The reform bill calls for term limits, recruiting for diversity and relevant qualifications, and screening for conflicts of interest, all issues that would ultimately be up to the borough presidents to implement. Reynoso said he is working on another piece of community board reform he could not yet discuss, and stressed that CB1's intractability on bike lanes is a symptom of a broken system.

His spokeswoman Lacy Tauber chalked up the dysfunction in part to "nepotism" driving the appointment process.

This much is certain: CB1 cares a great deal about parking. Last month, board Transportation Committee members decried the location of a Citi Bike station at Graham Avenue and Conselyea Street that they said was made without consultation, and hurt small businesses by taking up much-needed car spaces. Last spring, the board voted against four bike corrals, saying that too many parking spaces had already been lost to road-safety improvements. And a liquor license review committee chairman said that as far as new hotels being built in Williamsburg goes, "The biggest issue is traffic and the parking spaces that they are going to take away."

Of course, we can't leave out the time a former board member called Bloomberg a "nanny, soup Nazi mayor" over his DOT's bike lane expansion.

(Matt Baron Photography/Flickr)

Testifying before the Council committee, Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White chimed in on the side of going over community boards' heads: "We have to get to a place where safety is not negotiable with local NIMBYs. We have to get to a place where these routine, life-saving improvements are done as a matter of course, not as a result of a broken local community board process."

Filled in on Reynoso's criticism, CB1 Transportation Committee co-chair Simon Weiser was defensive, but unapologetic about his stance on bike lanes:

To hear this from a public official about a community board is kind of upsetting. It's true that we're not voted on, but our eyes and ears are on the community. We know better. We're in the trenches. We hear the concerns. [...] I think that the city has gone berserk with whatever they can, making the streets intolerable. It's not just the parking, it's the traffic. The bottom line is, they're not going to take away deliveries; they're not going to take away car services. This is all gonna stay. So they're just making it intolerable for people to live.

Every avenue cannot have a bike lane. They have to let people live. Bike lanes belong on side streets, not on every single avenue. The city created a mess putting these bike lanes all over. Then they go, "Oh, a biker got killed! A biker got killed!" Sure a biker got killed. Not every single street has to be a bike lane. All these bike lanes doesn't help.

Weiser said that the board members are people from "all walks of life," and that they are more qualified than the Transportation Department to decide what works well for city streets.

"[DOT engineers] are hired for one reason: 'Hey you, make this into a bike lane. Make this into a one-way.'" he said. "They're not trained, 'Oh let's try solutions.' When they were hired for the job, they were hired to do the bike lane."

The Vision Zero campaign includes education, traffic enforcement, and physical overhauls, of roads and city vehicles. It has had mixed results so far. In 2014, Vision Zero's first year, the city logged 139 pedestrian fatalities, the fewest since the city started keeping track in 1910, and 257 traffic deaths, the second fewest, according to the DOT, but deaths on Staten Island were up from 11 to 19.

Last month, the agency completed the city's 1,000th mile of bike route, a figure that, though impressive, includes shared-road arrows, lonely "Bike Route" signs, and dirt paths. Tickets to drivers for speeding and failure to yield skyrocketed in 2014, in part because of last fall's speed limit decrease and 120 new school-zone speed cameras, but complaints remain about disproportionate enforcement of cycling violations, and cellphone-driving tickets are steadily declining. (The NYPD was conspicuously absent from the hearing.)

Councilman Stephen Levin's district also includes CB1's turf. He wouldn't criticize the board directly, saying it "has the right to opine," but that in the end the DOT should "err on the side of safety." Karen Nieves, a voice for road-safety on the board, said that "the community board should have input." Despite their disagreement, she said she knew where Reynoso was coming from and that "his heart is definitely in the right place. Safety trumps parking."

The issue of road safety was not entirely abstract at the Council hearing. Debbie Kahn, mother of Seth Kahn, who was killed by a bus driver while crossing the street in Hell's Kitchen in 2009, testified that she was happy that Manhattan's Community Board 4 worked with the Department of Transportation and Transportation Alternatives to redesign the intersection of Ninth Avenue and 53rd Street.

The addition of landscaped medians and parking lanes "immediately had an impact on reducing pedestrian and cycling injuries in the neighborhood, " she said. "But it shouldn't take a death to redesign an intersection."