Cyclists: Here's the Take Away—Be at the 66th Pct Community Council Meeting

Many loose ends poke out when talking about the NYPD’s stricter enforcement of bike laws.  To begin with, the biggest question is how many pedestrians are actually injured in  bike/ped  accidents.  Currently there is no firm info, although the NYPD kept these records in the past (1987–93) and released them on a monthly basis (i.e., “number of crashes, number of injured peds, number of fatally injured peds") according to Charles Koumanoff, a former Transportation Alternatives leader.

But the NYPD doesn’t release its crash and ticket data anymore, and it just killed a proposed change to the NYC administrative code, Local Law 120, “Saving Lives Through Better Information Bill.” That bill would have required it to post crash data  on the NYPD website as regularly as it does CompStat figures.  Two new proposals are before the City Council, Local laws 370 and 374, that would make NYC DOT (Dept of Transportation) the responsible agency.



Here are some crash figures that Streetsblog arrived at:
“According to a spokesperson with the State Department of Health, an average of 81 pedestrians are hospitalized annually as a result of bicycle collisions, across all of New York State. That comes to about 1 out of every 200,000 New York residents.

"I don’t have an exact apples-to-apples comparison with traffic injuries, but the Department of Health reports that statewide, from 2004 to 2006, an average of 312 pedestrians were killed, 3,446 were hospitalized, and 12,104 made emergency room visits each year as a result of motor vehicle traffic.”

The big concern is whether the NYPD will enforce bicycle safety laws “effectively”  or as just another way to harass cyclists.  Already there are stories of squad cars trailing cyclists in Central Park ready to pounce on a wrong move.

Some  precincts have handed out bike safety brochures to their neighbors. In case you don’t have one,  Transportation Alternatives has a 2-color pocket-sized one,  “BIKING RULES:  A NEW STREET CODE FOR NYC CYCLISTS.” Another can be downloaded from DOT’s web site http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/biketips.shtml

According to Streetsblog, “Police could enforce norms that make sense—no wrong-way riding, no riding through crosswalks when pedestrians have the right of way, no biking on crowded sidewalks. Or they could catch people in dragnets, ticket every cyclist who treats a red light as a stop sign, no matter how cautiously, and otherwise harass people without actually encouraging safer behavior. What’s it going to be?”

Another point Streetsblog makes: : We’ve written here before that from a public safety perspective, more cyclist enforcement only makes sense as one piece in a broader effort to police traffic safety, especially by targeting the most dangerous behavior on the street, like motorist speeding and failure-to-yield…"

Most important,  it argues, you have a say in this discussion.  Attend your local Precinct Community Council Meeting: "Each precinct holds one every month—a public forum to convey your concerns to the officers who police your neighborhood.”

The 66 Precinct meeting is 7:30 p.m., Thursday, January 27th at Community Board 12’s office, 5910 Thirteenth Avenue.