The League of American Bicyclists has awarded New York City a bronze medal for bicycle friendliness. League representatives met with Mayor Bloomberg and DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who sometimes cycles to work, at City Hall yesterday to present the award. Though bronze is the lowest rung on the friendliness ladder, New York City is the only community in the region to be designated a Bike Friendly Community (BFC). While the total number of cycling fatalities......

Photo of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King reflected in a Fort Greene storefront window, by Paul Fugelsang Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Stuyvesant Ave. and Hart St. in Brooklyn, a multiple stabbing on West 49th St. and Broadway in Manhattan, and a car in the water on Beach St. and Rockaway Pt. Blvd. in Queens. After a 14% surge between 2005 and 2006, complaints about the NYPD from......

After talk of flight caps to help ease airport congestion that leave many travelers very irritable, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced another policy to help ease airport woes. The DOT will let airports charge airlines based on the time of day and volume of traffic their planes are landing in. Previously, aircraft was only charged based on plane weight. The hope, per the USDOT, is that "airports would be able to spread traffic more......

For just 25 cents, you finally can experience the steel-and-glass splendor of the city's first new public toilet. City officials gathered in Madison Square Park for the ceremonial first flush of the Automatic Public Toilet (APT). Almost a year after the location was announced and almost 2 years after the toilets were first previewed, Department of Transportation Commissioner Jeannette Sadik-Khan said she was "flushed with excitement in this new era...New Yorkers had their fingers......

As the ones who first reported on the mysterious tall bench on the median of East Houston Street, we feel some responsibility in bringing closure to the story. (fYI amNY: Link.) Contrary to some of the comments in our original post claiming that the bench was just an amateurish photoshop gag, it turns out the surreal furniture was real, quite real. And now it is quite gone. We spoke to Ted Timbers at the DOT......

Yesterday a new bike safety law went into effect. The law requires all commercial delivery workers, which include delivery workers and bike messengers, to wear helmets on the job as well as have a horn and headlight on their bikes. And apparently the bike messengers are in an uproar about it. One tells NY Metro that wearing a helmet is "something that’s not cool. You look kind of dumb. I really don’t want to wear......

Yesterday saw two important moment in the Department of Transportation's handling of bicylist quality of life issues. One was the installation of bike racks on North 7th at Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, which the DOT said was "the first time car parking spaces have been removed to accommodate bicycle parking in New York City." Previously, cops have sawed through locks chained to the subway entrance and impounded bikes, leading to community demand for bike......

Yesterday, a suicidal man on he George Washington Bridge caused traffic delays up to two hours. Newsday reported that the man was "armed with a box-cutter razor climbed a bridge cable, slashed his arms and wrists repeatedly and threatened to jump," but police officers were able to talk him down. We wrote about New York bridge jumpers last month. Interesting, Newsday was also the one to tell the NY State Department of Transportation about the......

Tonight is the big meeting where the Department of Transportation will present its plan to turn Sixth and Seventh Avenues one-way. The DOT thinks that one-way-ing the big streets will improve safety with less cars making sharper turns and cars traveling the speed limit (how, we don't know). Some residents believe the DOT is actually easing the way for more Atlantic Yards -related traffic. Streetsblog checked out the traffic on one-way Eighth Avenue, and......

A totally crazy story from the Daily News about how one city employee moonlighted. A pothole repairman for the Department of Transportation smuggled heroin for a Colombian drug ring. Ricardo Calderon actually worked deals while working on street potholes - now we know why it takes so long to get those things filled! Heroin would come to the Bronx via cruise ships, hidden in suitcases or "inside small packets sewn into running shorts." Then Calderon......

For the next four months, the 145th Street Bridge will be closed to traffic and pedestrians as the Department of Transportation reconstructs the bridge. And it is a total reconstruction - new bridge arrived on barge and is parked nearby. From the NY Sun:Once the old bridge is disassembled and disposed of by the contractor, Kiewit/Pully, the new trusses will be floated in at high tide. Over the next four months, deconstruction will occur in......

It's one thing to park on no-parking street and get your car towed. It's another thing to park in on a parking-allowed street and get your car towed because someone put up a "No Parking" sign that suddenly got NYPD traffic officers' and towers' attention. Car owners - and parkers - on a stretch of Front Street between Washington and Main Streets in Brooklyn were treated to an unhappy surprise when a mysterious new "No......

The NY Sun calls attention to a problem in the midst: The Booklyn Bridge hasn't been painted in fifteen years. Even the Department of Transportation rated the bridge as experiencing "serious detioration"! Meanwhile, the Golden Gate Bridge is "painted constantly." Sure, the Golden Gate Bridge is pretty much all paint and the Brooklyn Bridge's most notable features are the limestone and granite towers, but painting the structure wouldn't hurt. The Sun has an extensive......

Ooh - the State Assembly has passed a bill doublnig the number of red-light cameras in the city. Red light cameras record who has been running red lights, and Assembly Ivan Lafayette of Queens explains, "As soon as you put a red-light camera in at an intersection, the number of collisions there will drop by 70% in a matter of months. The bill will double the current number of cameras to 100 and could generate......

The Department of Tranportation revealed prototypes of the public toilets that are part of the $1 billion street furniture deal the city struck with outdoor company Cemusa last fall. While the papers are detailing the minutiae of doing your business in a this toilet (pay 25 cents for 15 minutes in the stainless steel and frosted glass water closet; door will open after 15 minutes), Gothamist wondered how this preview worked if you couldn't......

The Department of Transportation will be questioned at City Hall today over the city's plans for truck routes. The DoT recently completed a two-year study about changing truck routes - a couple years after it was requested - and according to the Post article, truck traffic will go up by 50% in the next fifteen years. So, teleporters won't be invented by then, huh? What's funny is that the City Council's meeting name is......

Gothamist decided to do a little bridge information digging after reading the New Yorker's Talk of the Town piece about how the Willis Avenue Bridge would be dismantled and is essentially for sale (but it's getting replaced - don't worry) and we came across this cool Department of Transportation Bridge Reconstruction Projects website. There are a bunch of projects on the list ("Rehabilitation of the 17th Avenue Bridge, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn," "Grand Concourse Reconstruction," "Rehabilitation of......

After various reports of people's bikes being hauled off by the police in Brooklyn, the NY Times gets more answers with its press creds than the actual bikers. It seems that the police at the 94th Precinct started to forcibly remove locked-up bikes because people had complained the bikes were obstructing sidewalks and endangering pedestrians. And while the Department of Transportation installed more 53 bike racks, the new racks are less convenient, then, say, using......

The metal bike bumps on the pedestrian/bike path on the Williamsburg Bridge will be re-examined by the Department of Transportation, after repeated complaints and crashes. In fact, a study showed that the 2-inch bumps, which are plates covering expansion joints of the bridge, cause one in four bikers to crash; there are $10 million in lawsuits against the city from injured bikers. Two inches for a bump? That's good for a car, but a......

You just can't knock Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz down. In a story about the Department of Transportation nixing Markowitz's idea for a sign "Leaving Brooklyn: Oy Vey!", the Post includes on origin story stemming from the "Leaving Brooklyn...Fugheddaboutit" sign: The "Fuhgeddaboudit" sign angered some motorists, who saw it as an anti-Italian stereotype. Then one such driver asked the Jewish borough president how he would feel if there were a sign reading, "Leaving Brooklyn: Oy......

The Department of Transportation reports that bike ridership over the East River is at the highest level in the 23 years of keeping bike ridership numbers. The DOT points to the renovated bike paths in Williamsburg and on the Manhattan Bridge; the Queensboro Bridge's biking popularity more than doubled year-to-year. The DOT tells Newsday these figures are a reflection of people willing to try the city's different paths and Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick says, "These......