MyBikeLane

I stumbled across this site and am in awe at the uselesness of this site.

How can anyone honestly live in NYC and expect the streets/bike lanes to free/clear all the time? Your expectations are unreal. You think UPS or FEDEX workers care about any of this? You think the "violators" care about their "violations"?

I appreciate the bike advocacy aspect of your work but this site is 100% useless and waste of time for a small nitch of geeks with cameras pissing/moaning to eachother. This site does nothing, nobody sees it, nobody will ever care.

Get real and stop wasting your time. Sorry, but its true.

dear embittered sir or madam,

you are correct. enforcement is a problem, and not due to a lack of awareness. consider what level of enforcement would be required to have a real impact on peoples' decision to block a bike lane. the vast majority of violators, as i think this site shows, are delivery vehicles who would have no problem absorbing multiple tickets a week in order to continue their deliveries. nypd could not realistically achieve enforcement beyond that -- a few tickets here and there. it comes down to the fact that this portion of the streetscape is experiencing a legitimate conflict of uses. a more reasonable cause (as opposed to raising awareness of violations) would be strongly advocating for new bike lanes to be installed curbside, protected from traffic by a row of parked cars. it works well in other cities/countries and the level of safety to us riders goes way up.

And yet, I have city employees such as yourself caring enough to actually find the site, register for the site, and write a trolling flame bait post.

Try trolling w/o the insults and maybe you'll get me to debate you on the issue.

What is funny is that this is a city employee, posting from a tax payer funded city computer. Talk about wasting time and tax payer money. I should file a FOIL request for their logs to find out exactly who this person is.

interesting
i was just excited to find a place where i can post fotos of bike lane abuse, so it cna be archived and documented somewhere. It becomes more than just me pissing/moaning to my bike friends.

And just a grammatical issue i have with the word "but"

This phrase "I appreciate the bike advocacy aspect of your work" is totally negated ny everything placed after "but"

-"this site is 100% useless and waste of time for a small nitch of geeks with cameras pissing/moaning to eachother. This site does nothing, nobody sees it, nobody will ever care."

So really this person doesn't care about bike advocacy of those involved here. That's what I read. It renders the comment useless and lacking critique and makes it useless.

Thanks to those who made the site

I came across this site from a link on The Cleanest Line:
http://www.cleanestline.com/2008/03/amen-to-physica.html

They've got a great video that speaks to the challenges of whether a site like this can "make a difference".

I tend to agree with colleagues that say things like, "I would need to leave an hour earlier to get to work on time if I documented every bike lane violation on my way." That's not good. I'm not sure exactly how this site can help, but I like the idea and intend to support it. Have any conversations been had with law enforcement about transitioning the information captured here to action?

It seems to me that, if the violations recur, if there are repeat violators, and if there are hotspots, where violations occur with greater frequency, all of which seem to be the case, that the site could be used to help individuals reach a tipping point with local law enforcement, enabling any one of these tax-paying citizens to point to a series of documented violations and at least justify a patrol car writing some easy tickets from a revenue perspective alone.
I think bike safety is a much broader issue, well addressed by the video at the link above, but this is an important point and a good idea for a tool which I will continue to advocate.

I think it might be interesting to write a grant for bike cops to get lipstick cameras for their helmets, making it easy for them to catalog such violations... Or for cyclists in general. Has anyone formalized a relationship with CBF?
Cheers,
Justin

interesting video you shared. i see that new york is totally different to austria. well, but in vienna most people actually don't like the separated bike lanes cause we are much slower on them, there are a lot of dangerous intersects where cars block the crossing and don't watch out for bikers (cause they think they're gone). and there are still a lot of problems with cars and trucks parking on even separated bike lanes. and on top of that, most pedestrians don't care where they walk and simply use the bike lane as if is was sidewalk..
i would prefer to have more bike lanes in the traffic than separated ones. at least in vienna. although blocked bike lanes will become an even bigger issue than (why do motorists have to be so ignorant?). i see that in nyc that doesn't work cause everybody ignores the bike lanes and no one is fined for that.

LaLune:
That's interesting. I have since been talking this idea up with fellow cyclists. One thing I find is concern about passenger doors opening into the bike lane, which I find a bit 'funny' since this happens with the current setup, though is statistically much more likely, especially in a country where we love our independence (or just love to waste) so much that we often drive alone, leaving no passenger to open the door on that side...
Beyond this, I feel the bigger issue is moving traffic; it's not the fall I'm worried about -- it's the truck following behind me that might not see me or react quickly enough to avoid me when I do wipe out. The fall is manageable; getting rolled over by traffic? not so much... :-(
I agree though - pedestrians could pose a challenge -- perhaps signage encouraging pedestrians to use the sidewalk and leave the bike lane mostly for cyclists?