I am responding to the article about the battle over bicycle lanes in
Prospect Park. I am a longtime cyclist, and given that, one would
expect that I would be a strong advocate of these lanes. However I
recently was involved in a major cycling accident in New York City and
feel very much that with the great density of cyclists using some of
the lanes and the unruly way that they use them, bike lanes can be
quite dangerous. One has to keep in mind that in addition to building
bike lanes, one also needs to come up with a suitable system of rules
and a way of enforcing them. A cyclist going the wrong way on a lane
is quite a bit more dangerous than a slow-moving automobile going with
traffic and some way of preventing this type of behavior needs to be
devised -- before we build more incentives to bad behavior.
Unpublished letter in response to:
http://nymag.com/news/features/bike-wars-2011-3
Not Quite Copenhagen
Is New York too New York for bike lanes?
By Matthew Shaer, New York Magazine, Published Mar 20, 2011
