MTA's bike-ban excuses, all in one place
You can't ride your bike there, for a different reason every time you ask.
Hey! I’m Brian, and this is the first edition of Sharrow Minded, a newsletter for a better biking city and region around New York. If this was forwarded to you, or if you’re reading this on the web, you can subscribe by clicking here!
MTA Bridges & Tunnels has a monopoly over bridges between outer boroughs, and it uses its power against people on bikes.
That simple fact makes the highway department of the otherwise transit-focused authority a key obstacle in the ultimate viability of a true five-borough bike network.
Unfortunately, that monopoly is one of the legacies of 20th Century New York’s antagonist-in-chief, Robert Moses, and MTA B&T retains his hatred of all things not motorized. Of its six bridges connecting outer boroughs to each other, three of them ban bike riding over their pedestrian walkways, and the other three ban bikes and pedestrians outright. (None of these have bus lanes, either. Moses hated people who rode on the bus.)
And while bike-hostility was once the norm across highway departments, the MTA now stands alone. When the New York Thruway Authority opened the bike & pedestrian path on the Mario Cuomo/Tappan Zee Bridge this past June, it meant that the MTA was the last bridge operator in the region that still bans bikes.
The MTA is still occasionally forced to defend its hostility towards pedestrians and people on bikes.
As it did last week when the Brooklyn Paper’s Kevin Duggan covered the Verrazzano bike path petition kicked off by my friend and fellow Bike South Brooklyn co-founder Anna Lise Jensen. The petition parallels her Jane Jacobs-centered art project currently installed at Brooklyn’s Old Stone House, as well as a proposal from our group to convert one of the existing 13 lanes on the bridge for bike and pedestrian use.
On one hand, the excuses offered by the MTA are nothing spectacular. They’re easily refutable, typically lack logical consistency when compared with one another, and are meant to divert attention from the truth of the agency simply not wanting to change decades of car-centric planning. But on the flip side, as much as they may try, event-driven reporting pieces have a structure and narrative flow that’s ill-suited to calling malarkey on a well-resourced and disingenuous communications team.
As long as the MTA gets the last word in — and uses a slightly different excuse than the one they offered the last time — they can keep deflecting criticism as it comes along in a series of flanking maneuvers, a textbook wartime tactic that favors the side with the most public relations reps at its disposal.
So I thought it would be useful to put all of the MTA’s excuses in one place.
“Our pedestrian walkways are too narrow to allow bike riding!”
Narrow spaces that combine pedestrian and bike traffic are trash, and we all know it. Each of these bridges should have dedicated bike space on the road deck. But prohibition until that day comes isn’t the answer, either. The NYC DOT manages to allow biking in sub-optimal spots like the Queensboro Bridge (which should definitely have more room!) and it’s many fake bike-lanes-on-sidewalks (which should definitely be dedicated space on the roadway!).
The pedestrian walkway on the MTA’s Marine Parkway Bridge, where biking is technically banned but also common, is five feet wide. Riding past pedestrians and other people on bikes can be tricky. The status quo isn’t great! Collisions can and do happen, and it’s bad when they do.
Importantly, collisions also happen on roadways between cars and pedestrians, bikes, and other cars — including on the Marine Parkway Bridge. It’s usually much worse when that happens, and no one has banned the driving of cars yet.
I liken it a bit to the NHL of the 1980s and 1990s, when teams like the Boston Bruins and Buffalo Sabres played in arenas that were too small for regulation-sized ice rinks. The NHL didn’t give up on playing hockey in those cities, they just played on smaller rinks until larger arenas could be built, which they eventually did.
TL;DR: Allow biking on the walkways in the short-term, and create dedicated space on the roadway in the oh-so-slightly-less-than-short-term.
“It’s gonna cost, like, half a trillion dollars to build a bike and pedestrian path on the Verrazzano!”
Weird, how the original designers of the bridge projected a much lower price tag that would still be under $100 million in 2020 dollars (adjusted for inflation). But putting an inflated price tag on a project is how an agency that doesn’t want to do a thing gets out of having to do the thing.
And you don’t need a brand new addition to the superstructure! You can put bike and pedestrian paths on the existing road deck.
“We need all these lanes for our paying customers, the cars!”
At least when responding to the Brooklyn Eagle’s Paul Stremple, the MTA was being honest about priortizing people with cars above anyone else that would want to travel between Staten Island to Brooklyn, or between Queens and The Bronx. Honest insight is a rare quality at the MTA these days, and should be acknowledged when present.
The more important point is that the MTA bridges are already overbuilt relative to the car traffic in their corridors.
The MTA has overbuilt bridge capacity like they’re building freeways for Los Angeles. Having 13 lanes on one stretch of any highway in New York City is madness. The six Staten Island-bound lanes of the Verrazzano Bridge are more than the five lanes of traffic that feed into it from the Brooklyn side. Space for bikes and pedestrians already exists — the MTA doesn’t need to build any more, just make better use of the space it already has.
“Separating bikes and pedestrians from highway-speed car-and-truck traffic with temporary barriers or plastic bollards wouldn’t be safe!”
Oops, this one is actually my bad. Bike South Brooklyn proposed the seasonal aspect of a bike path, as New York’s Summer Streets program was popular among people and also politicians that like things that are already popular.
The correct answer is, the protective barriers should be year-round and permanent. Ask CalDOT, they recently did this for the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Pro tip for politicians: it’s popular there, it’s popular on East and Harlem River bridges, it will be popular here. (📸 baytrail.org)
“We do have bike access on the Verrazzano and Whitestone — there are bike racks on the front of the buses!”
The bike-carrying capacity of the rack-equipped bridges is a pittance compared to actual bike ridership over other bridges. The average number of weekday trips on the Brooklyn Bridge — all the trips divided by all the weekdays and all the hours, even the cold and dark ones — was 66 bikes per hour in 2019. A peak day on the Brooklyn Bridge saw 166 bikes per hour (again, spread evenly across all hours of the day, even 3am), and that’s with three other East River Bridges absorbing trips.
On a Fourth Of July a couple of years ago, I collected 80 signatures from cyclists going over the Marine Parkway Bridge in a 90 minute span, and I definitely did not get every person on a bike to stop.
Even during peak times, the bike capacity of the S53, S93, and Q50 buses doesn’t come close to that.
Also: bike riders can be highly skeptical of bus-mounted racks! A commenter on the Hey Ridge Facebook page remarked, “I love my bicycle too much to stick it on the front of a bus.” A friend of mine acted on this sentiment — on a recent ride to Staten Island, I went the short way via the S53 bus, and he rode all the way up to Whitehall to catch the ferry. And there are three different models of racks on the S53/93 buses, some of which even cause bus operators themselves to question how securely a bike has been attached.
Knowing the capacity and security-of-property issues, it won’t surprise you to know that the racks aren’t used frequently. Highway planners are fond of saying that you don’t gauge car demand for a bridge by counting the number of people swimming across the river, but dang, they do have a hard time applying that same metaphor to The Bike Folk.
“We’re looking at options to expand bike access!”
Don’t tell us. Show us. As paltry as the two-by-two racks are, they’re the only expansion of bike access to these bridges in the entire history of the Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority.
“We can’t figure out how to do this, even though our peers like the city DOT, Port Authority, Thruway Authority, and others have done it, because ________ ???”
Actually, I haven’t seen them even attempt to provide an answer for this question. A professional communications staff knows “we don’t want to” is a bad interview answer.
Hey, thanks for reading this far! My grandiose objective is to bring some more light to major obstacles to a better biking city and region that fall just below the radar. So many things are awful all at once! And with the worst of the worst rightly drawing our focus, there are a lot of issues that deserve more attention than they get.
If you liked this, please spread the word!
-Brian