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I've been a good man at least I tried to
be just a rolling minstrel wherever
they'll have me from the tunnel of
Manhattan to the hills of Hollywood I've
been on the roll and on the go in every
way I do
we gotta say
with
they play the song
and the best time don't let
but we've got a good thing going on
and that's a good bag
so I've been riding a bike in New York
City for over 25 years and believe me
I've seen a lot of bad biking conditions
but things have improved so much and now
it's possible to ride an almost
continuous stretch of protected bike
lanes greenways and bridges for 25 miles
from here in Brooklyn's Borough Hall
through Manhattan up to the Bronx
Randall's Island Queens and then through
Brooklyn for a continuous loop so we're
here with a group for transportation
alternatives to learn a little bit about
the history of how these white planes
got in we're out here on J Street in
Brooklyn
it's the accessory to allow bicyclists
to get to the Manhattan Bridge a lot of
bicyclists all visa to get to the
Brooklyn Bridge this protected Lane went
in in 2016 we are really really happy
about this
pacer used to be a mess there's a ton of
New York City Transit buses that run the
route so this was huge during the a.m.
peak j3c is about 34% bike share and it
has a total bicycle volume of about 2400
a day
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so we're leaving Brooklyn now about to
go over the Manhattan Bridge and we're
going to be some of the nearly seven
thousand daily cyclists that ride over
the during peak season the Manhattan
Bridge is an icon of New York City but
for decades cyclists could not cross the
Manhattan Bridge in 2004 VOT gave
cyclists their own pathway on the north
side of the Manhattan Bridge
once New York City d-o-t started adding
proper infrastructure in and around the
Manhattan Bridge cycling food
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so this is the Christie Street bike lane
it's a two-way protected bike lane it
connects 2nd Avenue to the north and
Manhattan Bridge to the south it was
laid down at the end of 2016 it's on the
park side you're not conflicting with
deliveries you're not conflicting with
vehicles and drivers and so it was
really a common-sense solution looks so
much safer right now there are a lot of
really great improvements for
pedestrians and cyclists just standing
here for half an hour waiting I see so
many people passing by already even
though this just opened not too long ago
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[Applause]
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so we've been riding up the first avenue
protected lane which the lap carts were
completed this past year but it's an
incremental progress all the way up the
East Side of Manhattan here we have the
connection to the 59th Street bridge is
over five thousand cyclists that are
coming into Manhattan and leaving
Manhattan through this stretch this is a
bottleneck where cyclists need to
connect up two important northbound and
southbound thoroughfare so this allows
them to make those connections we're
standing here at 116th Street
symbolically very important for the
completion of the East Side bike way
first and second Avenue is a continuous
protected bike path this facility took
so much work from so many people to get
built and every time we thought we had
won the necessary approvals we had the
community support from the politicians a
new roadblock came up when we had to
fight it and here in East Harlem we had
to go through three votes through the
community boards the cycling rate up in
East Harlem are much higher and very
similar to go down below Houston Street
in the East Village
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versus the Willis Avenue Bridget
reopened in 2010 it's one of the main
connections for bicyclists in the Bronx
to get into Manhattan we're really
excited we have a campaign for the
Harlem River bridges to include all our
bridges not just this one last year we
did a commuter bike station we counted
over 300 people chasms just in one hour
in the morning we estimate probably
about two to three thousand people cross
over this every day by bicycle so that's
really important for the Bronx the
connector is this Greenway that connects
the Bronx to Randall's Island the
connector itself is about a quarter mile
long it goes over the Bronx kill which
is about 50 feet of a waterway and that
being covered by a bridge allows the
access to the connector in people in the
South Bronx access to a green area
Randall's Island has barbecue picnic
areas ball fields soccer fields and
concerts it's a great place to be
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we are right now in Vernon Boulevard in
North webqueen story along Island City
it's two miles of bike lanes almost all
protected two-way right on the curb
it carries about five six hundred
cyclists every single day created I in
2008 it was painted single lines on
either side of the road Beauty came back
made it a two-way protected lane for
most of the stretch they came back three
years later in 2014 and out of the
jersey barrier he's a great way to get
from the north end of Astoria all the
way down to Long Island City and the
Pulaski bridge we're in the middle of
the Pulaski bridge the bike lane was
completed in April 2016 it's the main
bike pedestrian connector between
Brooklyn and Queens Long Island City and
Greenpoint and where we're standing now
is the sidewalk but used to be the
shared bike and pedestrian lane really
wasn't legal it's bourbon walk your bike
and at a certain point after we started
our campaign the city took down the sign
that they block you life and this is
also a bascule drawbridge which made
creating this event bike lane really
unusually complicated it's no longer
stressful you know people could walk in
these people can bike in pieces no
conflicts anymore we're here in Kent
Avenue in Williamsburg and this bike
lane itself is special because it was
the first on Street physically protected
segment of the Brooklyn Queens
waterfront Greenway which is a plan to
ultimately have a physically protected
bike lane from the northern tip of
Queens up in Astoria all the way down to
Red Hook and Brooklyn was installed in
2009 it was a mile and a half at the
time for this bike lane this was pretty
much just kind of an industrial back
street that nobody really thought about
so it really speaks to how a bicycle
project like this can really transform
an area where's the foot of the
Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn and it's
the true multimodal crossing with
motorists heavy rail Subway's
pedestrians and cyclists report as of
last year there's been over 7500
cyclists as days using it
cycling over the bridge has doubled in
the past decade and it's still on a
steady uptick every year and if you come
here on a nice warm summer day you'll
feel like there's 7,000 feet for an hour
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[Applause]
going on
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well at the end of our ride almost 25
miles almost all of it was our protected
bike lane bridges and Greenway and we
had a good time right
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[Applause]
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