Results tagged “thedot”

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).

• 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 civilians dropped 1% last year.
• The lawyer defending the man on trial for killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter has been receiving phoned-in death threats. The defense attorney says that he doesn't bother reporting the threats anymore because cops don't seem very interested in investigating them, but is determined to defend his client to the best of his ability.

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.

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 and legs crossed for this special day." And so it goes.

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.

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 a helmet, but I will.”

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 racks.

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.

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).

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!

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.

Continue reading "145th Street Bridge Gets Ready For "New Bridge""

allowed there. David Bourgeois told the Daily News he paid $205 to get his Mini Cooper out of the pound and was issued a $60 parking ticket: "It's just outrageous. I'm definitely going to fight this." The DOT says they would help with getting the ticket dismissed, and the NYPD said they were "looking into waiving" the tow fee.

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 slideshow of peeling paint close-ups on rusted beams - it's gross and we hope little kids aren't eating those paint chips.

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 up to $13 million in revenue from fines. Gothamist, more a pedestrian than a driver, loves the Red Light Camera program, but we do acknowledge that lots of pedestrian cross against the light, even though cars have right of way. Not that we want things to be Giuliani-style with $2 jaywalking tickets again, but traffic problems do begin when some party is not following the light.

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 actually use the toilets. In fact, the NY Times had a quote from the American Institute of Architect's NYC executive director Frederic Bell, who thought it "elegant and functional":

"I saw it and I really wanted to use it. Whether you're sitting on a toilet or buying a newspaper, design matters."

And design matters when you're reading a newspaper on the toilet! The head of Cemusa Toulla Constantinou said, "Cemusa is committed to bringing New Yorkers the world-class street furniture they deserve." Um, street furniture that'll survive various forms of defacement and debasement? The DoT's press release, though, said that Grimshaw Architects's "distinctive design will enhance and enliven the streetscape while standing up to the rigors of sidewalk life in New York City," so we can only imagine the kind of focus groups and user testing they conducted. Overall, these toilets look beautiful, but we are skeptical how nice they'll look after one week. And we bet there will be lines outside of them.

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 "Truck, Trucks, Everywhere: Does the City Make Any Effort to Manage Truck Traffic?" and transportation chair, John Liu (big news day for him), says, "For too long, it has been generating into a truck free-for-all through our residential neighborhoods." Other interesting fact: The last time the truck routes were mapped was 1982 - there's 24 years of gentrification that's unaccounted for! And trucks do cause traffic issues, with the double parking...

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 the Gun Hill Road Bridge over Metro-North Railroad") and some interesting diagrams and renderings. The Willis Avenue Bridge, aka the Third Avenue Bridge, project has taken a couple years and over $100 million, and as the New Yorker article stated, the new replacement bridge will be put beside it and the dismantling of the old, 105 year old bridge will occur in 2007. Photobloggers, pencil that into your calendars.

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 railing around subway entrances. The DoT says they will install another 40 racks by the end of the year, while the NYPD says the bikes are tagged for owners to retrieve them. But the NYPD's actions seem to fly in the face of what they are supposed to do: According to Transportation Alternatives, the police are supposed to give bike owners notice first before removing the bikes. Contact Transportation Alternatives if you bike has been taken.

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 bike? Plus, these bumps might violate laws for the disabled as well. The DoT is bringing in a consultant to do another study, but City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez laughed and told the Daily News, "To me, a study doesn't cut it. This is going to be studied? They are going to study something that never should have been approved in the first place? I'm sick and tired of all the studies."

Then one such driver asked the Jewish borough president how he would feel if there were a sign reading, "Leaving Brooklyn: Oy Vey!"

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.