The city is ramping up its war on cars, lowering speed limits, narrowing streets, and, last week, staging a sting operation on drivers turning into crosswalks, but some activists say scofflaw cyclists need policing, too.
Bike-riders regularly pedal in the wrong direction on one-way streets and blaze through red lights in Park Slope and throughout the borough, and the same undercover Slope cops who pounced on drivers for failing to yield to pedestrians should target two-wheelers, according to Linda Cohen, who wound up in a coma after a racing cyclist mowed her down in Prospect Park in 2011.
“It needs to be an equal playing field where the riders and the cars and the pedestrians all have respect for one another,” said Cohen, a Ditmas Park resident who is still suffering from a brain injury caused by the crash. “People are going too fast.”
The 78th District cop shop’s crosswalk crackdown that netted 16 tickets in two days was just one of a slew of measures taken by the city to slow drivers in January. The transportation department lowered the speed limit Prospect Park West abruptly on Jan. 17 and plans are in the works to squeeze auto traffic on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg and throughout Clinton Hill.
But some say all the emphasis on calming cars overlooks the danger posed by reckless cyclists.
“Bikers have to learn some safe and polite rules of the road,” said Windsor Terrace resident Florence Weintraub. “As of now, that is not happening.”
Bike advocates counter that cars are unstoppable death machines that have an astronomically higher chance of killing or maiming pedestrians and should for that reason be the focus of traffic policing.
“It’s no secret that there are some cyclists who don’t always follow the letter of the law, just as there are many, many drivers who don’t,” said Park Slope Street Safety Partnership chairman Eric McClure. “But the fact is that drivers pose a far greater threat to life and limb.”
Others argued that more bike lanes would make cyclists more comfortable on roads — and less likely to hit people.
“I am not going to say it is all sunshine and roses out there,” said Doug Gordon, a Sloper and the author of the bike activist blog Brooklyn Spoke. “It is a big city, and there are always going to be people who are not considerate.”
Gordon was slapped with a ticket on Friday for running a red light on Fifth Avenue, according a post on his Twitter account.
Cohen and other Prospect Park regulars are also spearheading a petition calling for more bike enforcement in the park, which lacks signs that explain traffic laws to cyclists and is a desert for police oversight, they say.
“The result is frequent near misses, several near-fatal accidents, and a culture of incivility in which physically fit, spandex-clad, male cyclists dominate the park and intimidate everyone else who uses it,” the appeal reads.
The petitioners are not the first to fear the buzz of the lean, mean, racing machines that loop the park day after day, or to bash back at the city and cyclists after a crash.
Actress Dana Jacks sued the city for $3 million after she was nearly killed by a cyclist on West Lake Drive in 2011 and a pedal-pusher struck a 62-year-old man and broke his hand on Prospect Park West the following year.
Despite the outrage, crashes involving a bike and no cars account for only a tiny fraction of the carnage on Brooklyn streets. In 2012, 17,428 people were injured and 78 killed in motor vehicle crashes, while only 146 people were injured, and one killed, in bike collisions, according to transportation department data.
A police officer from the Brooklyn South Task Force said he is not aware of a “rogue cycling” problem in Prospect Park.
