As the summer was coming to a close, Alexander Toulouse and his father, Christopher were out a bike ride, one of the 8-year-old’s favorite pastimes. His father sped up to lead his son Alexander as they made the turn onto Boerum Place from Livingston Street in downtown Brooklyn.

Moments later, the boy was dead. Hit by a postal truck whose driver didn’t even see him.

Police didn’t charge the truck driver. Accidents between motorists and pedestrians, like the one that killed Alexander, are common at this Brooklyn intersection—one of the city’s worst. It’s a five-way whirlwind of cars, busses, and suddenly-stopping delivery trucks where two people have died in the past year and where 11 serious accidents occurred between 1995 and 2005.

Despite the dangers, New Yorkers are increasingly turning to their bikes as a cheaper, greener source of transportation. In fact, biking is up 35 percent this year, according to the Department of Transportation. At the same time, 23 cyclists died last yea the highest number in eight years. In New York State, about 25 percent of non-motorists who died in fatal highway accidents were cyclists—nearly double the national average, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Bike advocacy groups estimate that there are thousands of collisions resulting in injuries between cyclists and motorists in the state every year. Collisions are harder to track than fatal accidents, however, since many incidents go unreported.

Paint Me A Lane

To try to make the city’s streets safer for cyclists, the Department of Transportation has blanketed streets in bike lanes in recent years—so far 90 miles of bike lanes have been created, and an additional 110 miles are planned by the summer of 2009. Nonethless, “deadly intersections” such as Boerum Place and Livingston Street account for thousands of the city’s bike accidents every year, the result of a combination of poor planning and dangerous drivers.

“There aren’t too many people in my family that I would want to put on a bike on Houston Street or Delancey,” said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, a bike advocacy group. “The dominant factors are speeding and reckless driving. When two wide streets meet one another, it’s a problematic intersection.”

The area of downtown Brooklyn where Toulouse was hit got extensive bike lanes in May. But it’s still a tricky place to navigate—several wide avenues meet in the area, and it’s also where vehicles get on and off the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges Boerum Place leads directly to the Brooklyn Bridge itself. Worse still, the area is encircled by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The result is a traffic-laden array of avenues where cars often move at speeds not often seen in most New York streets. The bike paths have done little to help cyclists, according to one local expert.

“Bike paths are only good if cyclists follow it and all the rules are enforced. But they’re not,” said Tony Scarselli, the manager of the Brooklyn Heights Bike Shoppe, which is in the area. “You see cars and taxis double-parked in bike lanes, and people don’t care.”
Cars and trucks blocking bike lanes is such a problem that there’s now a popular website, mybikelane.com, where people in New York and around the world can post pictures such illegally parking. Each vehicle’s license plate is recorded; there are many repeat offenders.
Even some cyclists ignore bike lanes. Outside of Scarselli’s shop, William Ortega was biking on the sidewalk, up Smith Street, even though it has a bike lane.

“It’s too crazy here,” said Ortega, who commutes to his job at a downtown Brooklyn bank using his bike, unless there’s snow on the ground. “Drivers don’t care about bike lanes. Cops don’t either. People are always double-parked in them and they never get a ticket.”

The New York Police Department would not respond to inquiries about enforcing bike lanes, but Ortega has a point. It almost seems like double-parking in a bike lane isn’t against the law. Biking around the area’s lanes, it is rare to find a moment when they’re completely unimpeded. This is particularly true in the dense, downtown core of Brooklyn, where delivery trucks and buses stop at offices every few feet.
“When there’s a UPS truck in the middle of a bike train, it forces you to go into traffic,” said Jennifer Clunie, who works at the New York Bicycling Coaltion, a cyclist advocacy and education group. “Motorists see cyclists as stationary objects, so they aren’t on the lookout for someone coming out of a bike lane. At the same time, a lot of cyclists don’t know how to properly avoid cars in that situation.”

Scott Gastel, from the Department of Transportation, defended the DOT’s bike lanes by arguing that some roads simply wouldn’t work with lanes because they are too small or too congested, and so his department tries to build lanes onto alternate routes.

“What’s important isn’t where we’re putting the lanes, where we’re not putting the lanes,” he said. “Look at Queens Boulevard, we put a lane in the area, but not on Queens Boulevard because it’s safer.”

Despite such reassurances, cyclist Ortega says he’s staying on the sidewalk, especially since he often sees drivers swerving in and out of bike lanes.

“Drivers just don’t care,” he said. “They hate you, and they’d hit you in a second.”

Where the Wild Things Are

According to New York Vehicle and Traffic Law, bikes are considered traffic, and have the same right to be on the road that a car, truck, or bus does. To see if that’s true, I decided to bike across Manhattan and into Brooklyn two weeks ago.

Some say that New York City is a jungle, and if that’s the case, being a cyclist on a busy street makes you feel like a gnat surrounded by panthers and elephants. Biking east on Houston Street, there’s no bike lane. Cars whizzed by, often cutting me off and coming within inches of hitting me.. Drivers shouted at me and others for taking up “their” road, yelling at us to get on the sidewalk.

It’s not surprising—two of the top ten most dangerous intersections in the city for cyclists are on Houston. The intersection of Bowery and West Houston Streets is the deadliest one in the city, according to the group Transportation Alternatives. There were 29 serious collisions between cyclists and motorists there between 1995 and 2005, one of which killed a cyclist.

As I approached Bowery Street, I tried to keep an eye out for any erratic cars. Just after passing through the intersection, a massive, white delivery truck covered in Asian characters swerved in front of me and slammed to a stop. I could either veer into the parked cars to the right or the rushing traffic to my left. I chose the latter, and was nearly hit by a woman in a blue sedan.

“What the hell are you doing?” one woman shouted at me after skidding to a stop. “You’re not in fucking Europe.”

Keith Goldstein, a 51-year-old photographer who has been biking around the city for 20 years, wasn’t surprised at the way drivers treated me.
In September, a friend of Goldstein’s, Jonathan Millstein, was struck by a school bus and killed while biking near Prospect Park, not far from where Toulouse was killed. After both deaths, the public cried out for more protections for cyclers.

“They think of us as being a nuisance,” he said. “If we’re impeding their progress by a millisecond, that’s too much for them. People tend to look at bicycles as toys instead of legitimate modes of transportation.”

Keith knows this attitude well. He’s been hit by motorists six times. After the last time, three years ago, he needed knee surgery and still feels “niggly little pains” in his leg.

Help!

The city isn’t unaware of the animosity between cyclists and drivers. In 2006 the city joined forces with bicycle advocacy groups to start the LOOK campaign, a series of posters and public service messages aimed at teaching both cyclists and driver safer road-sharing strategies in order to stop collisions. But advocacy groups have also been pushing for a greater integration of bike safety issues into driver training courses.

Rich Conroy runs Bike New York’s education programs, and runs a workshop that teaches driver’s ed instructors how to include in their lesson plans techniques that help drivers share the roads with cyclists. But, he said, few instructors in New York State’s decentralized and privatized driver’s ed programs want to learn teach what the state doesn’t tell them to.

“Because they already have a set curriculum packed into a certain number of hours, they aren’t going to put [bike education] in unless the state mandates it,” he said. “We tried to reach out to a local college that trains them. They didn’t return our calls, and when they finally did, they don’t think it’s important.”

Jennifer Clunie, of the New York Bicycling Coalition, a statewide non-profit advocacy group, has had better luck, and her organization has formed a partnership with the American Automobile Association, training their instructors. Currently, one of the most important things both she and Conroy want drivers to know is know is that they should keep a three foot minimum distance from cyclists at all time, especially while passing. The state’s driver education manual suggests a five food distance, but that’s not enforced.

“Stretch out your arm from your shoulder to your fingertip. That’s three feet,” said Clunie. “It’s not much, but I can testify from personal experience how dangerous and precarious a situation being so close puts a cyclist in on the road.”

Clunie’s organization has been trying to convince state legislators to make the three-foot minimum a law for three years, but hasn’t had any luck yet.

Drivers aren’t entirely to blame for the upswing in cycling collisisons. Many cyclers around the city bike erratically, running red lights, foregoing helmets and lights, and swerving in and out of traffic lanes.

“The cycling community automatically assumes that if there’s a crash, and a cyclist is killed, the motorist is automatically guilty of something,” said Bike New York’s Conroy. “Is that really the case, if the cyclist runs a red light?”

Scarselli, the bike shop manager in Brooklyn Heights, thinks that a lot of the problem has to do with this sort of bad attitude cyclists have towards drivers.

“When drivers hit, cyclists hit back,” he said. “We’re always pissed off at motorists and pedestrians, but a lot of cyclists ignore the rules of the road. It’s an endless circle.”

Divided We Bike

If drivers and cyclers can’t play nice together, then perhaps there’s another solution: split them up. Though the city has tried to give more visibility to lanes by painting them green, the common consensus among cycling advocates and the DOT is that physically separated bike lanes seem to be the best way to make biking on city streets safe.

“We need more physically protected bike lanes across the city, that’s what it’s going to take to get the average New Yorker biking,” Norvell admitted, referring to a number of projects where there is a large barrier between drivers and cyclists. “It still remains something for the intrepid.”

This year, the city tried building such a lane on Ninth Avenue between West 23rd and West 16th Streets. By essentially switching the bike lane with the parking lane, and placing small pylons between parked cars and the bike lane, the parked cars essentially act as a barrier between bikes and motor traffic. Since the lanes installation, bike accidents are down 39 percent, according to the Department of Transportation.

“You can just see the safety enhancements,” said Gastel, of the Department of Transportation, He’s enthusiastic about these separated bike lanes, and says that the department is working on more on Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Some streets are just to narrow to handle such lanes, he said.

But even physically separated bike paths can be dangerous. This is particularly at intersections, where the paths can’t help but mingle with motorists.

In 2006, Dr. Carl Nacht was biking on the West Side Bike Path, a part of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, which is a 32-mile-long walking and cycle path that encircles the island of Manhattan, and is mostly separated from traffic. Even though there are signs telling drivers to yield to cyclists, he was crossing 38th Street when an NYPD tow truck driver struck him and he died in hospital.

The next morning, Paul Barenholz, a 55-year-old who lives in Tribeca, was also riding on the path. At the same spot, a car—which Barenholz believes was being driven by a tow truck driver on his way to the NYPD tow yard nearby—suddenly turned into the path, and into him.

“I skidded a few feet, hit the ground, and got a huge scrape,” he said. “Turns out, I had some nerve damage. It all happens quicker than you think.”

The driver didn’t acknowledge that anything happened, and he kept on driving into the lot. To this day, Barenholz has a weakness in his left arm, and a recurring weakness and pain in his left shoulder. He’s grateful it wasn’t worse. Luckily, Barenholz was wearing a helmet.

Back in Brooklyn Heights, Scarselli says that his shop has sold a lot more helmets than usual—likely because of increased concerns about bike safety because of the accidents in the area.

He sighed after he was reminded of the death of Alexander Toulouse.

“I don’t think an 8-year-old belongs in traffic. He belongs in the park,” Scarselli said. “But at least there are lessons to be learned. We’ve all got be safer.”