Tonight: Weigh in on Bike-Share Stations for Downtown Brooklyn

There’s an important meeting of the Brooklyn Community Board 2 transportation committee coming up tonight, where the DOT bike-share team will present proposed locations for Citi Bike stations.

The bike-share siting process has been praised by several community boards, and like all the other CBs within the bike-share service area, Brooklyn CB 2 hosted a public workshop where participants expressed their preferences for station locations. But the Brooklyn Daily Eagle makes it seem as if the entire program was sprung on the unwitting district overnight. Under the headline “Heights battles bike stations,” the paper quotes Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, who complains that bike-share will take up street space better suited for parking cars.

Of course, the fact is bike-share will increase options for getting to and from Brooklyn Heights and other neighborhoods, not limit them. For every parking space that’s no longer available for cars, the neighborhood will gain many more public bicycle docks. Siting the stations in the street will preserve a much more important commodity than car storage: the neighborhood’s scarce sidewalk space.

To help ensure that rationality prevails, head to tonight’s meeting, to be held at 6 p.m. in the Founders Hall Auditorium at St. Francis College, 180 Remsen St.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Citi Bike Releases Map of Williamsburg and Greenpoint Expansion

|
Here’s some eye candy for the weekend — a map of Citi Bike’s expansion into northern Brooklyn. This map was submitted to Community Board 1 and obtained by the Brooklyn Paper. There are 53 stations planned for Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Unlike the Citi Bike phase two expansion areas in Manhattan and Queens, which are starting […]

Citi Bike Map Now Shows Over 100 New Stations Coming Soon

|
New York City’s bike-share expansion is almost here. Citi Bike has added more than 100 new stations to its system map in Brooklyn, Long Island City, and between 59th Street and 86th Street in Manhattan. While it’s difficult to assess station density with much detail from eyeballing the map, you can see that parts of the Upper West Side, […]

Bike-Share Already Getting More Use Than Park Slope’s Free Parking Spots

|
The new bike-share stations in Brooklyn south of Atlantic Avenue are getting a lot more use than your average free on-street parking space, according to recent Citi Bike data compiled by Carroll Gardens resident Viktor Geller [PDF]. Geller addressed the report to Brooklyn Community Board 6, which is holding a hearing on Thursday in response to complaints about bike-share stations […]

The Next Brooklyn Bike-Share Expansion Will Be the Thinnest Part of Citi Bike

|
DOT unveiled its latest Citi Bike expansion map last week, and the stations look significantly more spread out than stations in the rest of the system. Spread-out stations are a problem for bike-share users because people have to walk farther to make trips, and that costs time. The National Association of City Transportation Officials recommends 28 stations per square mile — and […]