MYD Transportation Chair Josef Szende trying out Melbourne's bike sharing system earlier this year; the same system will be coming to New York in the summer of 2012.

New York is on the cusp of a new form of transportation called “bike share.” This has the potential to redefine the typical way of moving around the city from the crowded underground subway to the care-free bike on the street.

MYD went to Manhattan Community Board 8 last Wednesday to hear about the new system from Jon Orcutt, the Policy Director for the City’s Department of Transportation. We expected to have to defend the system but Mr. Orcutt did such a good job of selling it that the bike-hostile Upper East Side community board actually responded to the plan warmly.

The system will have 10,000 bikes at 600 kiosks around the city from 79^th Street in Manhattan all the way to the Battery and in Brooklyn from Greenpoint to Prospect Park.

New Yorkers can buy a membership for less than $100 and will be able to use any bike for a period of 30 minutes or less as many times as they want during a year. Members can take longer trips but will be charged more and more for taking the bikes out for long rides (this encourages people to return bikes and keep them in the system). People will only have to bring their own helmet and can ride free of the hassle of locking, storing, and maintaining a bike.

Visitors will be able to buy daily memberships that will let them take out bikes for 30 minute periods as many times as they want within 24 hours.

The City has given Alta Bicycle Share the right to install and operate the system and in exchange they will keep a portion of the profits from system use and advertising. Alta already operates the systems in use in Washington DC, Boston, and Melbourne (Australia); they will bring their tried and true system to the city using the same model of bicycle and the same charging system.

The timeline from now until the planned launch next summer is: to continue to meet with Community Boards this fall, design the system over the winter, test it in the spring with a few mini-pilots, and launch the full program next summer.

You can help by getting involved with your Community Board’s transportation committee to help choose where to locate bike sharing stations. Find your Community Board here and find out more about getting involved through the Community Board Join-up Jamboree or through your Borough President. You can also suggest bike sharing station locations here.

Any way you choose to get involved, you’ll be part of a great new asset for New York. Bike share is going to make the City more accessible and more fun than ever before!

Dr. Linda Prine and 139 other doctors recently wrote a letter to Mayor Bloomberg on Sept. 22, 2011, explaining “pedestrian plazas, car-free spaces, neighborhood bike networks and world-class bicycle lanes… are vital to the public health of our city.” Dr. Prine would know as the President of the New York County chapter of the Academy of Family Physicians. She also advises that commuting to work by bicycle or increasing the distance of daily walks has been shown to promote weight loss better than any exercise program or medication physicians could prescribe.

So this is a readily available policy solution to prescribe better health for 8 million New Yorkers – how could anyone stand in the way?

We’re part of the solution – MYD is taking a stand for biking and you can, too:

1)   Write to local newspapers –Times, Daily News, Post, Wall Street Journal, El Diario – and compliment them when they promote biking and good public health (and let them know when they are not being helpful). You never know when you may get published! Check out my published letter in the New York Daily News from this week: http://nydn.us/rot7Lp.

2)   Support biking at public hearings in person and online. Community boards often have hearings about bike lanes and supporters need to come out to defend our right to safe streets. A recent community forum was held to solicit public opinion about an East River Greenway. This will be a transformational project for biking, walking and running on the East Side of Manhattan. You can still submit comments here: http://bit.ly/qUKFjT.

3)   Get out there and bike yourself! The best way to support the biking community is to join it.

Dear Friends,

I have been asked by the Mayor’s office to seek volunteers who might be able to assist 311 operations during the weekend.

The city needs volunteers (preferably in four hour shifts) starting at 8:00 am tomorrow morning through Monday.

They would be especially grateful to those willing to volunteer for the Sunday shifts.

The 311 facility is located on Maiden Lane and Williams Street in Lower Manhattan and the 311 staff will provide training.

If you can volunteer, please email Christie Huus at chuus@cityhall.nyc.gov.

Best,

Julie Menin
Chairperson
Community Board 1

The union boss agreed to suspend study sabbaticals for a year to save his members’ jobs.

The deal also allows the city to use teachers who lack a permanent job as day-to-day substitutes. Those teachers, whom the city is required to keep on the payroll, would be forced to take all daily assignments in their local districts, saving the city tens of millions of dollars in substitute teacher expenses.

But it’s not all good news:

Teachers will not entirely be spared the knife of one of the most painful city budgets in recent years.

City schools are expected to lose 2,600 teaching jobs through attrition, driving up class sizes in many of the city’s 1,700 schools.

That’s a higher estimate than Bloomberg’s original budget, which projected the loss of just 2,000.

The City Council is expected to vote on the budget this Tuesday.  Want to learn more about the City budget and how it affects all New Yorkers?  Join the MYD Econ committee – email Zac for more info: econ@gomyd.com

“It raises all kinds of red flags,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York.

“It just smacks of an old-boys club, where large amounts of public money are spent based not on ‘is this the best product?’ but ‘I know this guy and I like him and I want to be sure he makes a lot of money.’”

State officials defend the move: “In a request to the state controller’s office to sign off on a no-bid process, officials cited the tight timeline for beginning the Race to the Top project and the company’s record at producing results.”

Of course beyond the appearance of favoritism, one has to question the logic of spending $27 million on a system to track test scores, while laying off thousand of teachers.  But I suppose that’s a topic for another blog post.

First there’s Jack Davis, the former Democrat who is now running on the Tea Party line.  Polls show Davis has actually been quite effective at bleeding support from the establishment GOP nominee, Assemblywoman Jane Corwin.

On Wednesday Davis was approached by a man with a camera and this happened:

Which on its face is not particularly noteworthy, except it turns out that the guy who was holding the camera actually works for Assemblywoman Corwin! Daily Kos has the full story.

The good news is that while Davis and Corwin battle it out, Democrat Kathy Hochul has managed to stay above the fray.  Who knew a special election in Upstate New York would be so interesting!

UPDATE: You can phone bank for Kathy Hochul on Saturday! Info HERE.

Last night I popped into my local Community Board meeting (the Transportation Committee of Community Board 8 to be exact).  I did not have high expectations.  I suppose I expected it to be something like those insanely boring City Commission meetings I had to cover for my college radio station; hours upon hours of prattling with nothing much accomplished.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised.  In just over an hour the committee addressed issues ranging from adequate parking to safer crosswalks to noise complaints.  Not life or death issues for the most part, just average citizens trying to improve their quality of life.

There was an 87 year old woman who is awakened at 5am every morning by an idling delivery truck.  A local senior center whose residents are too scared to cross 96th St. because of the lack of an adequate crosswalk.  These are real people with real problems, and the Community Board is there to help.

Community Boards are not government entities.  They cannot enact or enforce laws.  The make recommendations to city agencies and those recommendations are given a lot of weight.

When a group of local residents complained about a company’s delivery trucks idling on the their street, making noise and blocking traffic, the Board resolved to invite company representatives to their next meeting, along with folks from the local police precinct, the DOT and the DEP.  The hope is that they will find a solution that will satisfy everyone involved.

This is what a civilized society looks like.  This is Democracy.  I walked into that meeting last night with low expectations.  I walked out just a little bit prouder to be a New Yorker, and an American.

To find your local Community Board, click HERE.