nws bike lane

Clearly marked bicycle lanes are blocked on a daily basis by illegally parked vehicles.

(Third-Party-Submitted)

Question: When is a bike lane not a bike lane?

Answer: When there are cars and trucks parked in it.

Sure, there may be signs and markings on the pavement to indicate it's a designated lane for bicyclists, but if said bicyclists can't ride in them, what good are they?

That's pretty much the situation along Richmond Terrace in St. George, where the clearly marked bicycle lanes are blocked on a daily basis by illegally parked vehicles. And the situation has gotten even worse because of the construction of the Empire Outlets,

As with a lot of the chronic illegal parking that happens in St. George, it has been going on for some time, but no one has ever done anything about it. For whatever reasons, there seems to be an unwritten protocol in St. George to let the blatant violators slide. (Witness the widespread abuse of parking placards in that community that suggest that hundreds of illegal parkers are on "official business.")

Government offices

Perhaps because many of those illegal parkers either work or have business in the nearby government offices and ancillary private businesses.

To complicate matters, a strip of sidewalk on the north side of Richmond Terrace that borders the Empire Outlets construction site has been fenced off with temporary barriers placed in the bike lane on the roadway to provide protection for pedestrians.

The situation has gotten so bad it prompted an exasperated Rob Foran of Tompkinsville, a member of the Staten Island Transportation Alternatives and one of the foremost advocates for cyclists in the city, to go to the trouble of registering several official complaints with the city.

Of particular concern to him was the stretch of the Richmond Terrace bike lane between Schuyler and Wall streets that is regularly blocked by cars and trucks whose owners break the parking regulations with apparent impunity. That has led some motorists to park in the bicycle lane.

Three complaints

"I called up [311] to let [the city] know the cars were completely blocking bike riders from traveling safely," he told the Advance.

But when he checked online at the nyc.gov website to see the status of his complaint, he saw that it had been filed under "police action was not necessary."

His second call to 311 found a would-be helpful person who advised him to file the complaint under "blocked sidewalk," as opposed to "blocked bike lane" in order to get a more energetic response.

But that complaint too was processed by the bureaucracy as "no action necessary."

His third complaint went directly to the city Department of Transportation, the city government's lead agency on bicycle lanes.

The official response: "The Police Department responded to the complaint and a report was prepared. Due to construction on north side of street, temp barriers have been erected that push the legal parking into the bike lane. At the present moment, there are no signs to denote that parking along this temp barrier is unauthorized."

No signs, no violation?

In other words, because there are no "No Parking" signs posted, parking there is not illegal.

Mr. Foran said, with good reason, "I didn't understand how that was possible.How are you allowed to park in a bike lane?"

Of course, you're not. It's illegal for vehicles to stop, park, stand or obstruct a bike lane, according to the DOT's own rules. Even when there's no "No Parking" sign to be seen, it's still illegal. After all, the bike lanes are clearly marked as such.

"The bike lane is supposed to be a safety measure," Mr. Foran said. "When the city goes through the trouble to create a bike lane, and people circumvent that for convenience, it puts people in danger."

He's right. We've often criticized the city's obsession with building bike lanes everywhere someone might want to ride a bicycle on a city street.

It has often been done without regard to prevailing traffic flow, parking or other considerations and poorly planned bike lanes can themselves be dangerous.

Mr. Foran has often objected to our less-than-supportive position on the city's relentless bike-lane crusade. But in this case, he's right.

That part of Richmond Terrace is well-suited for bicycle lanes and everyone, motorists and city agencies alike, should obey the restrictions.

The city's failure to police the lanes and allow habitual scofflaws to use them as their own personal parking spots makes a mockery (again) of the whole "Vision Zero" initiative.

Perhaps because so many city and other government employees work in St. George, however, there always seems to be a different set of rules in force there.

In this case, the city's failure to enforce the law on the books only deepens the public's cynicism about the competence and fairness of the agencies that are supposed to do so.