Monday, October 15, 6:00 pm, 10-485
Strong Towns: Rising From the Ashes of Suburbia
Charles Marohn
Executive Director, Strong Towns

Following World War II, the United States embarked on the great social and financial experiment of suburbanization. The development of suburbia created tremendous growth, opportunity and prosperity for a generation that had just lived through economic depression and war. But sprawling, automobile-dependent development would prove far too costly to sustain. Today, nearly every U.S. city is grappling with this harsh fiscal legacy. Charles Marohn joins DUSP Visiting Scholar Aaron Naparstek for a presentation and conversation on how America can get back to building Strong Towns.

Monday, October 29, 5:00 pm, 10-485
Sustainable Streets: New York City’s New Public Space Vision
Andrew Wiley-Schwartz
Assistant Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation Public Plaza Program

Andy Wiley-Schwartz is an Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability at New York City Department of Transportation. He was hired by Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn in 2007 to develop a public space program at DOT and develop a complete street design and planning process for the department. In this capacity he developed and launched the NYC Plaza Program to create new public spaces out of existing streets in communities across New York City. Andy joins DUSP Visiting Scholar Aaron Naparstek in discussing the details of the groundbreaking approach to urban planning and design that has led to the construction of more than 50 new plazas and 21 acres of new public space in North America’s biggest, busiest, most politically complex urban environment.

Monday, November 5, 6:00 pm, MIT Media Lab, E14, Third Floor Atrium
Peer-to-Peer Politics: Moving Beyond Left and Right
An election eve conversation with
Steven Johnson, author of “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked World”
and Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler & Susan Crawford

The market versus the state. Big capital versus big government. Just about everything we talk about in politics today revolves around those two poles. What if there’s a third option? Instead of those two, creaky old monoliths, imagine a web of collaboration that’s neither market nor state where no one is in charge because everyone is in charge. In his new book, “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked World,” author Steven Johnson argues that the core principles that apply to the design and function of the Internet could be applied to solving many different kinds of problems, across dozens of sectors, including cities. What if the most powerful tool to advance the cause of social progress is the peer-to-peer network? Join hosts Aaron Naparstek of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Media Lab for an election eve conversation with three leading thinkers on the Internet and society.

Monday, November 19, 6:00 pm, 10-485
Human Transit: Public Transportation for Personal Freedom
Jarrett Walker
Author and Transit Planner

Jarrett Walker is an international expert in public transit planning and policy and the author of the popular blog HumanTransit.org. He consults in North America through his own firm Jarrett Walker & Associates, and is also a Principal Consultant with MRCagney in Australia. In his new book, “Human Transit,” Walker provides planners, policy-makers and citizens with the basic tools, the critical questions and the means to make smarter decisions about designing and implementing transit services. Join MIT Visiting Scholar Aaron Naparstek for a conversation with Jarrett Walker, as he shares his vision of “abundant access,” in which public transit might be brought back to a core purpose of expanding every individual’s freedom to access the riches of their city.

Monday, November 26, 5:00 pm, Long Lounge, 7-429
Chicago Forward: Toward a User-Friendly City
Gabe Klein
Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation

What happens when a tech-minded entrepreneur is unexpectedly chosen to lead a big city government bureaucracy? Gabe Klein was an unconventional pick to head the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation when he was hired back in 2008, by then-mayor Adrian Fenty. He’d been a Zipcar executive. He helped found a local boutique food-truck company. He grew up in a Virginia ashram called Yogaville. But he had never worked in government. Over the next 23 months Klein implemented a program of transformative innovation, rapidly rolling out bike-sharing, new bike lanes, streetcar plans and next-generation parking infrastructure. Now Klein is a year-and-a-half into his second unexpected job in government, as the head of Chicago’s Department of Transportation under Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Join MIT Visiting Scholar Aaron Naparstek in conversation with one of America’s most visionary and inspiring new urban leaders.

Monday, December 3, 6:00 pm, 10-485
No Accident: Urban Design and Motor Vehicle Violence
Aaron Naparstek
Streetsblog founder and MIT DUSP Visiting Scholar

If you ever want to kill someone New York or just about any other American city, use a car as your weapon. As long as you are sober, licensed and do not flee the scene of the “accident,” it is virtually guaranteed that you will get away with murder. Around the world, 1.3 million people die in road traffic crashes and 20 to 50 million more are injured each year. It is a massive global health crisis that, for the most part, we ignore. Streetsblog founder and DUSP Visiting Scholar Aaron Naparstek discusses emerging new perspectives on motor vehicle violence and the critical role that urban planners and designers must play in solving the problem.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
City Design and Development
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge

The New Yorker's John Cassidy says the bike lanes on Brooklyn's 8-lane Fourth Avenue are causing intolerable traffic congestion. Except there are no bike lanes on Fourth Avenue.

We’re approaching a new level of anti-bike mania in New York City. Sentiment is so totally divorced from reality, not even the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking apparatus can rein in the mistruths and idiocies.

Exhibit A: John Cassidy’s “Battle of the Bike Lanes.” Here, Cassidy has done us the great favor of producing what may one day be regarded as a seminal document of New York City’s bike lane backlash era.

In the year 2025, when my teenaged children ask, “Why did New Yorkers fight so much about bike lanes when I was a baby?” I will tell them to read this. And since teenagers in the year 2025 will be biking all over the place but won’t be reading anything more than 140 character bursts of text, I’ve put together this paragraph-by-paragraph bullet-pointed interpretation of Cassidy’s first-person essay:

• I know that the “bike lobby” will attack me for writing this — not because what I have written is imbecilic, uninformed and factually incorrect — but because they have no sense of humor.
• All I know about the Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes law suit is what I read in Michael Grynbaum articles.
• I don’t have anything against bikes. I just hate the infrastructure that makes biking possible.
• Biking in New York City was more thrilling in the old days when cyclists were killed by taxis and other vehicles with greater frequency. Now cyclists seem to want it easy.
• I support the movement to improve bike infrastructure. I just don’t like it when the movement succeeds in getting city government to build bike infrastructure.
• I acknowledge that this is the rant of a bitter, angry motorist.
• I have owned six, enormous cars in New York City. They’ve averaged somewhere around 11 miles per gallon.
• Thanks to my cars, I’ve visited virtually every neighborhood in the city. I never could have done that via subway or bike, or… really? I could have?
• Street space should not be set aside for bike lanes. It should be set aside for free parking for my Jaguar XJ6.
• I will now take an utterly gratuitous swipe at the Park Slope Food Coop. Let’s gin up some pageviews.
• I take great enjoyment in my driving, except for the 90% of the time that I am stuck in traffic, searching for parking and growing ever more bitter as cyclists whiz past my immobilized gas guzzler.
• I acknowledge that this is all just an emotional reaction. What I am writing makes no sense whatsoever. I am an economist.
• Now that the city has striped 200 miles of bike lanes on its 15,000+ miles of roadway, we have clearly reached the point of diminishing returns for bikes and bike lanes. As for cars and car lanes — sky’s the limit. As an economist, I see no end to the number of cars and car lanes we can cram in to New York City.
• Every New Yorker should be able to drive his Jaguar into Greenwich Village for dinner, as is my pastime, and find convenient, free parking on a public street near the restaurant.
• All of the snarled traffic on Hudson Street and Sixth Avenue near the Holland Tunnel is the fault of bike lanes and cyclists.
• The horrible traffic congestion on Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue is the fault of the bike lanes on Fourth Avenue. (Editor’s note: In fact, there are no bike lanes on Fourth Avenue.)
• Let the movement to restore Iris Weinshall to the DOT throne start here. Like me, Iris Weinshall was a great friend to cyclists. It says so on her Wikipedia page. Forget the fact that her Bike Program Director quit his job in disgust and she is suing the city to get rid of the bike lane on the street where she lives with her husband U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.
• See how much more modest and humorous I am than those Bike Lobby Jacobins?

If you haven’t visited New York City in a few years, you might be surprised at how much the city’s streets have changed.

In Times Square, a five block stretch of Broadway is now a pedestrian-only zone packed with people lounging at tables in the middle of what was once a gridlocked street. Public plazas similar to the ones in Times Square are popping up across all across the five boroughs.

On Ninth Avenue in Lower Manhattan, the parked cars have been pushed away from the curb to make room for a bike path physically separated from traffic. Bike commuters now have safe passage on a street that once looked and felt like a four-lane highway. Since 2009, 200 miles of new bike lanes, including a number of separated bike paths, have been laid down throughout the city.

Meanwhile, up in the Bronx, Fordham Road has been redesigned to make way for the city’s new Select Bus Service. Crimson-colored dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare collection and automated traffic signals keep buses moving fast and running on-time. As New Yorkers continue their 80-year wait for construction of the Second Avenue Subway, Select Bus Service is also now up and running along Manhattan’s east side and planned for a number of other busy corridors.

Mean streets? Not so much.

These are Sustainable Streets and that is the title of the strategic plan put forward by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. In 2007 she took over a transportation agency was quite literally stuck in gridlock and still pursuing 1950′s-era traffic engineering policies aimed at maximizing the city’s capacity to accommodate motor vehicles.

Four years on, and the results of Sadik-Khan’s strategy are becoming clear: Traffic injuries and fatalities are at a one hundred year low. The number of people using bicycles for transportation is sky-rocketing, growing at a rate of about 25 percent per year. Travel times on Select Bus Routes like Fordham Road have been cut nearly 20 percent.

Economic benefits are starting to show as well. Throughout the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009, street level retail remained surprisingly strong in Times Square and the Meatpacking District, two of the neighborhoods where DOT undertook major redesigns. New York City is getting lots of bang-for-the-buck with these projects. The budget for the entire bike program from 2007 to 2011 cost about as much as this month’s emergency pothole blitz.

And yet, despite the low price, the successful results, and surveys showing that DOT’s projects are mostly popular, the Sustainable Streets agenda, and the woman who authored it, are under attack.

The front line of the battle is Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West where a new two-way separated bike path has riled a handful of wealthy and politically potent opponents including U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and his wife Iris Weinshall, who live on the street.

Weinshall, who also happens to be Sadik-Khan’s predecessor as transportation commissioner, has organized a group with the mildly Orwellian moniker, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes. Headquartered in the penthouse of one of most exclusive buildings in Brooklyn, NBBL has brought high-level political firepower into what would typically be a neighborhood-level issue.

NBBL press releases receive breathless coverage from Marcia Kramer, the chief political correspondent at CBS Channel 2. And Jim Walden, an attorney at the corporate litigation and lobbying firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who was on Chuck Schumer’s short-list for a U.S. Attorney appointment, has taken on NBBL’s case pro bono (or, as some like to say, “pro Chucko”). Walden is threatening to sue the city to remove the Prospect Park West bike lane.

Once the sleepy realm of policy wonks, urban planners and academics, New York City transportation is suddenly the hottest political issue in town.

The tabloids smell blood. Seeming to take the view that bike lanes, public plazas are for hippies and first-class bus service is of no interest to “real New Yorkers,” New York Post columnists now regularly refer to the DOT commissioner as “the psycho bike lady.” They call the new Times Square a “petting zoo” for tourists. And they are blasting a sensible plan to turn dysfunctional 34th Street into a crosstown river-to-river Transitway as “insane.”

Anthony Weiner, the feisty progressive Congressman and an early frontrunner in the 2013 mayoral race, told Mayor Bloomberg that when he becomes mayor he is “going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes.” The Weiner quote was the lede in a notably vicious profile of Janette Sadik-Khan in last week’s Sunday’s New York Times.

Despite the attacks, surveys by independent sources continue to show that Sustainable Streets projects are popular. A 2009 poll by Quinnipiac College showed that New York City voters approved of the new design for Times Square by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. A 2010 survey by Brooklyn City Council member Brad Lander showed that the supposedly “controversial” Prospect Park West redesign enjoys 78 percent approval. You never would have known that if you only read the New York Post.

So, what’s going on here? What is it about a program to make New York a better city for transit, walking and biking that so inflames the city’s political class?

To answer this question, one must look at how the political class gets around town. Politicians, press, police and other privileged members of the political class all very often have one thing in common: An official parking placard on the dashboard of their personal vehicles.

The majority of New York City households don’t even own a car and the vast majority of New York City commuters do not drive. But for New York City’s political class, transportation is a problem to be solved for cars.

A 2006 study by Bruce Schaller found that New York City would earn $46 million per year in additional parking revenue if all of the on-street parking in Lower Manhattan occupied by placarded vehicles were paid for at prevailing parking meter rates. Such a large enough number of government employees drive to work each day that, if they stopped, traffic congestion on the East River bridges would be noticeably reduced.

Space is the ultimate commodity in crowded New York City and a parking placard is the ultimate entitlement of the political class. If you have free parking you can drive. And while every bike commuter is one less car on the road and one more seat available on the subway, many drivers seem to believe that every new bike lane, public plaza and dedicated busway does nothing except take street space away from motorists.

These are the people whom Janette Sadik-Khan has angered and now she is paying the price. If the long-term sustainability of New York City and a safer, more efficient, affordable and functional street system is collateral damage in the attack, who cares? Certainly not the folks with the parking placards on their dashboards.

Lincoln Tunnel traffic in Manhattan a.k.a. "Little Karachi."

Dear Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Goodwin,

I was impressed with the way you smuggled that anti-bike lane crack into your anti-union column the other day. That’s not easy to do. I see why they gave you a Pulitzer:

Our town spends millions to in stall bike lanes and pay workers to shovel the snow from them, even on a holiday weekend. But the same Department of Transportation lets streets and highways crumble until they resemble something from the Third World. Silly me, that’s the point! When the roads completely collapse, we’ll all have to get bicycles because only bike lanes will be passable. And then New York will be a Third World city, with First World taxes, of course

I just wanted to correct a couple of egregious errors you had in there:

1. The total amount that NYC DOT spends on bike infrastructure is miniscule. It barely merits a line item in the city budget. Most bike lanes are made of white Thermoplastic paint striped over asphalt. Most of this striping is done as part of regular street maintenance and repair and folded into existing contracts. Bang-for-the-buck, bike lanes are a tremendous value. DOT is, essentially, creating an infrastructure for an entirely new mode of transport on a shoe-string budget. And most of these costs are paid for by the federal government anyway. Over the next four months, DOT will spend more on emergency pothole repairs than it has spent on its entire bike program since 2007.

2. You say that bikes made NYC seem more like a Third World City. Have you recently visited a Third World city? Or a First World city? Take a look at the streets of London, Paris and Copenhagen — cities that I think we can safely call “First World.” You’ll find that these cities have made major efforts in the last ten years to increase bike transportation, to prioritize and improve buses and transit, and to reallocate street space away from private motor vehicles to pedestrians and public space. NYC is only now just playing catch-up to these First World competitors. Now go take a look at the traffic-choked, streets of Mumbai, Karachi, Bangkok or Mexico City. Breathe in the exhaust fumes. Listen to the honking. Try to cross the gridlocked streets. Or just watch this YouTube video.

You with me?

Now go stand near the Lincoln Tunnel entrance in Manhattan on a hot, sweaty, Friday afternoon in July. Does that really look “First World” to you?

Best,

–Aaron

This was my stream of consciousness as I read New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s staggeringly obnoxious review of the new Frank Gehry tower in Lower Manhattan (I like the building, by the way. Ouroussoff, on the other hand, may very well be the most clueless high-profile journalist currently writing about cities) Nicolai’s text is in block quotes:

A more recent foray, the massive Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, drew the ire of local activists, who depicted him as an aging liberal in bed with the devil — a New York City real estate developer.

Um, yeah, right. Those uppity Brooklyn activists were merely angry that a “liberal” architect was working with a wealthy real estate developer. Thanks, Nicolai, for taking a complex and principled six-year battle over eminent domain, public investment and the nature of urban planning in New York City and boiling it down to an after-school special story line.

it seemed to epitomize the skyline’s transformation from a symbol of American commerce to a display of individual wealth.

Yay?… Oh, wait, he’s just reporting. Good observation, Nick!

Only now, as the building nears completion, is it possible to appreciate what Mr. Gehry has accomplished: the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen’s CBS building went up 46 years ago.

Oh, no, wait. The successful display of individual wealth is exactly what Ouroussoff thinks is great.

Mr. Gehry’s design is least successful at the bottom, where he was forced to plant his tower on top of a six-story base that will house a new public grammar school and one floor of hospital services — an odd coupling of private and public interests that was a result of political horse trading rather than any obvious benefit that would be gained from so close a relationship between the two.

Indeed! How odd that anyone in Lower Manhattan would want or need a school or hospital? What could possibly be the benefit? How strange that the communities around this 76-story, 900-unit luxury condo would ask for public education and health services as part of a multi-billion dollar deal in their neighborhood.

(Mr. Gehry did not design the interiors of the school, which is still under construction, and students may ask why the pampered young professionals living above them get to live in apartments designed by an architectural superstar while they will have to make do with a no-name talent.)

Because no child should be left behind to go to school in a building designed by a “no-name talent.”

Not surprisingly, the two groups won’t be mixing. Residents will enter through a covered drive that cuts through the block along the building’s western side. Framed by massive brick pillars and a glass-enclosed lobby, the space’s generous proportions will accommodate taxis and limousines ferrying people in and out of the building, making it feel more like a luxury hotel than a classic Manhattan apartment building.

This is a good thing?

None of this matters much, however, once you see the tower in the skyline…

See, to Nicolai Ourossoff, the way a building looks is much more important than the way it integrates with a community, relates to the neighborhood, impacts a city’s transportation system, quality of life and long-term sustainability. According to Nick, “None of this matters” as long as the building looks interesting on a postcard view of the skyline.

In daylight the furrowed surfaces of the facades look as if they’ve been etched by rivulets of water, an effect that is all the more dramatic next to the clunky 1980s glass towers just to the south. Closer up, from City Hall Park, the same ripples look softer, like crumpled fabric.

Ooooohhhhhhh!!!! Crumpled fabric! Fabulousss!

(The flat south facade is comparatively conventional, and some may find perverse enjoyment in the fact that the building presents its backside to Wall Street.)

How perverse! A luxury condo dormitory filled with Wall Street executives that “presents its backside to Wall Street.”

The power of the design only deepens when it is looked at in relation to Gilbert’s Woolworth building. A steel frame building clad in neo-Gothic terra-cotta panels, Gilbert’s masterpiece is a triumphant marriage between the technological innovations that gave rise to the skyscraper and the handcrafted ethos of an earlier era.

And yet the power of Gehry’s crumply fabric design (and Ourousoff’s staggeringly limited criteria for evaluating new buildings) is pretty shallow when you consider 75% of New York City’s carbon emissions come from the energy used in buildings. So, while it’s neat that Gehry is using his technological prowess to make crumply fabric building skin, let’s be clear that this building is fundamentally a 20th century statement. An exemplary 21st century building uses technology not only to create a pretty skin, but to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprint, and help to create a healthy, functional, sustainable public realm outside of the building. A critic in Ourossoff’s position has the ability to push architects in that direction. Instead, he chooses to judge a building on a skin-deep level and as skyline eye-candy.

He aims, as he has throughout his career, to replace the anonymity of the assembly line with an architecture that can convey the infinite variety of urban life. The computer, in his mind, is just a tool for reasserting that variety.

Gehry is totally punk — not corporate at all.

His interest lies in the clashing voices that give cities their meaning; it is democratic at heart.

8 Spruce Street will, no doubt, be an outstanding example of the great multicultural democratic melting pot that is the 21st century Lower Manhattan luxury condo. It’s a beautiful vision: Hedge fund managers crammed into elevators with investment bankers, sharing sweaty gym equipment with finance executives, waiting shoulder-to-shoulder in the car-port with J.P. Morgan managing directors. Eight Spruce Street is nothing less than a gigantic, crumply, silver Great American Melting Pot. It’s what the Lower East Side has always been all about.

To the Editor:

Under the leadership of Janette Sadik-Khan, DOT’s public outreach and community responsiveness is vastly improved and so is the safety and inclusiveness of New York City’s streets. If some individuals believe their calls to eliminate bike lanes are falling on deaf ears, that is because most New Yorkers rightfully refuse to return to the bad old days of unsafe streets for pedestrians, cyclists and the city’s most vulnerable.

Mayor Bloomberg should be publicly challenged to create a public health strategy to sharply reduce deaths and injuries from motor vehicles. This means telling the police department to climb out of their bunker of secrecy and obstructionism. The Health Department and the DOT are already deeply engaged in efforts to change things. The police are not. Not only do they refuse to engage in a public discussion about this street safety, they impede overall efforts by refusing to share crash records they have compiled at public expense.

The basis of public health is gathering information about the spread of disease and carefully analyzing ways to prevent it. During his time as mayor, Bloomberg’s public health department has become the best in the United States. Interestingly, Bloomberg has given millions to global efforts fight traffic deaths. Yet, Mayor Bloomberg has not ordered the police department to release up-to-date records on traffic crashes, or to work in a public process with the health department, DOT and experts outside government, to come up with a unified and public approach to further reducing the achingly high number of deaths and injuries from motor vehicles.

…What links these deaths, beyond their human tragedy, is a traffic “safety” ideology that blames victims instead of perpetrators, fetishizes silver bullets like seat belts and bike helmets at the expense of promoting a genuine safety culture, and misdirects enforcement toward trivia and away from the actual sources of danger.

Damned bike lanes.

Hi John,

I was glad to see you writing about the NYPD’s bike crackdown in yesterday’s New York Post. I hope you’ll consider following up with some more reporting on this issue in the coming days. There are lots of interesting questions to explore when it comes to bicycling and the NYPD’s enforcement of New York City traffic law. Here are two ideas I have for additional reporting if you or your colleague Sally Goldenberg are going to be regularly covering the prestigious bike beat…

1. How big a problem are these “brazen cyclists” on NYC streets anyway?
Sure, we hear a lot of bitching and moaning about bikes in the New York Post and on CBS2. But has the NYPD, DOT or anyone else ever tried to quantify the problem? How much pedestrian-endangering red light-running is there anyway? Where are the city’s biggest trouble spots when it comes to bike-ped conflict?

We know New Yorkers are being injured and killed just about every day (like the 35-year-old woman who was run over by a dump truck on the Upper East Side yesterday while legally crossing the street. Did you hear about that one? The dump truck driver stayed at the scene and wasn’t drunk, so it was basically a freebie for him — a clean, legal kill as far as the NYPD is concerned. Can you imagine if she were your wife or sister or colleague? Anyway… back to those damned bikes, right?…) How many New Yorkers are being hurt by these “out-of-control” cyclists that you write about anyway? How big is the problem?

2. How does the NYPD measure success in these bike crackdowns?
Thanks to your big “exclusive” yesterday we know that the NYPD has written a bunch of tickets to cyclists over the last few weeks. But every time one of these crackdowns happens, we hear scores of stories about cops writing completely bogus tickets to cyclists and, in some cases, even apologizing as they do so. We know, at the end of the crackdown, the NYPD simply wants to be able to say: “See, we wrote lots of tickets. The crackdown was a success!”

But does writing a bunch of summonses — many of them bogus and tossed when challenged — actually do anything to solve this problem of “brazen cyclists” on NYC streets? The NYPD has made great strides in the last 15 years in using CompStat data analysis to enhance its policing. Do they have any similar data or analysis of traffic enforcement to help get a better handle on these out-of-control cyclists? This would be a great story! I know a lot of cyclists who would also like to see real traffic enforcement happening on NYC streets, not just bogus ticket blitzes.

As Co-Founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community organization and editor emeritus of Streetsblog.org I am more than happy to go on record and give you great quotes for your bike and transportation stories. I’ve got lots more story ideas like the ones above. Feel free to give me a call.

Thanks,

Aaron Naparstek

I’ve been calling 311 and nagging various people in city government to find out why the Sanitation Department, three full days after Thursday night’s snowfall, has not yet plowed and salted the Prospect Park West bike path (Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith says he’s a big fan of social media if you want to get in touch). City government apparently believes that the Sanitation Department did, in fact, plow and clear the PPW bike path on Saturday. Yet, Sunday morning I was still hearing complaints that the bike path was covered in snow and ice. So, I went up to PPW after the Jets game on Sunday at about 10:45 pm to check it out for myself. As CBS2′s Marcia Kramer can tell you, nothing beats good old fashioned shoe leather reporting. Here is what I discovered:

The Prospect Park West bike path is exactly half-plowed.

From Bartel Pritchard Square to 7th Street, the bike path is clear and free of snow and ice. Then at 7th Street there is a big mound of snow in the middle of the bike lane where the plowing stopped. From 7th Street to Grand Army Plaza the bike path is covered in ice and snow, one to four inches thick. It is icy, treacherous and not at all safe or functional for biking. Still, there were quite a few bicycle tire tracks in the icy, snowy bike path near Grand Army Plaza. There are also lots of footprints at the pedestrian crossings and where drivers are trying to access their parked cars. Whomever decided that it’s a good idea not to plow and clear the Prospect Park West bike path is putting cyclists, pedestrians and motorists at risk. Meanwhile, the sidewalk along Prospect Park and the two lanes of PPW’s roadway have been plowed and clear since Friday morning.

Below are photos taken with my Blackberry, Sunday night at about 10:45 pm. This first photo is taken standing at 7th Street looking south toward Bartel Pritchard Square. The bike lane is cleared just like this from here all the way down to 15th Street. Not bad, right?…

Now, I have turned around. I’m standing at 7th Street looking north toward Grand Army Plaza. There’s a mound of snow in front of me where the snow plow has, for some reason, stopped functioning…

Here’s more of a close-up shot of the end of plowing at 7th, again, looking north toward Grand Army Plaza….

One more shot, this time looking south toward Bartel. Why would they do just half a job?…

Next, I headed down to 2nd Street, the spot where I often connect to PPW when I’m biking. In this photo you can see the tire tracks of some sort of motor vehicle. Perhaps, someone drove over the bike path with a plow but somehow forgot to lower the blade down as they approached NBBL Headquarters at 9 Prospect Park West. This is 2nd Street looking south toward Bartel…

Turning around, here is 2nd Street looking north toward Grand Army Plaza. Note how clear and nicely plowed the sidewalk is alongside Prospect Park (the Prospect Park Alliance is responsible for that). While I was taking these photos I noticed two guys biking on the road and another guy biking on the sidewalk. There are definitely people out here trying to use their bikes…

Now, here I am near the front of 9 Prospect Park West at about Carroll Street looking north toward Grand Army Plaza. (Hi, Neighbors for Banning Bike Lanes! Can you see me on your video camera?) You can see from all of the skinny tracks on the path, it looks like people have actually been trying to bike here this weekend, as I was on Friday when CBS2′s Marcia Kramer busted me for riding on the sidewalk…

In this last shot I’m looking south, I think, at about Garfield Street. Note that when the bike path is not plowed, that also sucks for pedestrians, who have to walk across this ice to get to Prospect Park. (Send your slip-and-fall law suit directly to Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon Street, 11201)…