August 3, 2015- New York, NY
Cars parked in the bike lane on Saturday on the route to Summer Streets included about 30 police cars. Does the city really care about cyclists?
That obnoxious driver is parked in the bike lane, causing you to swerve out into traffic? Well now you can report them.
The department responsible for transportation in New York City has told CI that they have an app for reporting illegal parking in bike lanes.
Their Twitter handle @DOT_NYC responded to a tweet from @JenGoodSword‘s tweet and photo that drivers do not respect bike lanes in New York City.
Especially when events like Summer Streets are underway as it was last Saturday, August 1, it just doesn’t make public safety sense, and is counter productive to attracting cyclists to the event not to enforce bike lane law.
“Report illegal parking in progress to: @NYC311 http://on.nyc.gov/1heZLqI or with App: http://on.nyc.gov/GL73rg ,” tweeted the NYC Department of Transportation.
Even though that transfers the responsibility for reporting scofflaws to the shoulders of cyclists, it’s a good start.
This was just one of the many private citizens parked in the bike lanes from 168th street to Central Park. No one was ticketed.
Last Saturday our progress down to Summer Streets was impeded by no less than 50 cars parked in the bike lanes from 168th Street down to the northern entrance of Central Park a distance of approximately 58 blocks or a little less than 3 miles. Many of those illegally parked were marked and private NY Police Department vehicles outside the 28th Precinct on 123rd Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard.
A police vehicle was also parked in the bike lane on 145th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue, along with 8 other private vehicles, none of whom received a ticket for their offense.
Outside the 28t Precinct on 123rd Street both official and private police vehicles are routinely parked in the bike lane. This cyclists rides in traffic to get around them.
We also found moving vans, private vehicles with people waiting, limousine service cars, and unmanned private vehicles among those parked in the bike lanes. Gosh, we even found a -gasp- federal U.S. Postal truck parked in the bike lane! On the other hand, the ONLY vehicles that were correctly parked belonged to delivery trucks.
As many cyclists are familiar, this has been an ongoing problem for years and was reported repeatedly by CI and Benepe’s Bike Blog in 2009, six years ago.
“It’s been that way for a long, long time,” said Wendy Frank who lives and bikes in Harlem and is the outreach coordinator for the Five Borough Bicycle Club, one of the largest recreational cycling clubs in New York City.
It’s not clear if reporting illegal parking on the 311 app will actually cause the driver to get a ticket, since it’s not stated how quickly the app works to engage 311 operators to call police officers–especially when the officers themselves are the offenders.