No more $1000 bike tickets

Well, maybe that's not a guarantee.  But we do know you aren't required to register your bike anymore so there's some positive news.

For private citizens, bike registration is now voluntary, though the cash fee to do so will jump from $3 to $5 on Jan. 1, 2019.

“Bicycle registration was initially put in place to ensure the safe return of citizen’s property, and we hope people will continue to utilize the program,” said Councilwoman Kristen Gisleson Palmer, who authored the ordinance, in a statement.

The ordinance also moves bike registration management from the purview of the New Orleans Police Department to the Department of Safety and Permits. Under the NOPD, registration has been a cumbersome process for those without proof of purchase for their bikes.

Someone will still have to explain to me how registering your bike helps you with "the safe return of your property."  At least please show me someone who got their bike back because of that.

Just get a bike

You don't need anything super fancy just to get around town. Usually you can get something perfectly serviceable for $80-$100.  I realize that isn't nothing. But if you're going to be using it a lot then that one time price is certainly a better deal than this is.

New Orleans’ bike-sharing program is permanently dropping its prices, in the hopes of attracting new riders as city temperatures cool off this fall.

The program, called Blue Bikes, also wants to turn people who rode for free under one of its recent promotions into longterm customers.

Riders will pay 10 cents a minute or $6 an hour starting in October, down from the original roughly 13 cents a minute or $8 an hour. New riders will also pay a one-time $5 registration fee.

The prices of monthly and annual plans will stay the same. Those are $10 a month for college students, $20 a year for low-income riders and $15 a month for other riders.

It's nice to see the city invest in better bicycling awareness and infrastructure.  But  it seems sometimes like nothing is allowed to happen unless some private company is making a profit. So efforts that should go toward promoting better facilities in general get channeled into ensuring that the contractor can operate.  For example, we could just make sure it was safe for people to ride where they needed to go and park when they got there regardless of whether they paid $6 an hour to ride that day. But instead we're doing subtle things to make it more difficult to bring your own bike.  Why is that?

Bullshit ticket is bullshit

While police don't hesitate to write thousand dollar tickets to people with "unregistered" bicycles, it turns out that nobody actually wants to register your bike.

Protections and responsiblilites

I don't see anything in here that offers any "new protections" to bicyclists or motorists.

Bicyclists in New Orleans will get new protections — and some additional responsibilities — under a package of ordinances passed unanimously Thursday by the City Council.

The new rules, recommended by the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee, explicitly prohibit motorists from driving in designated bike lanes or harassing cyclists, clarify that pedestrians have the right of way in crosswalks and require that bikes must be equipped with lights or reflectors plus bells or other devices that can provide an audible signal to those nearby in emergency situations

In effect, all this really does is provide a new pretext for police to randomly stop people just for being outside. It's stop and frisk on wheels. So, you know, stay in your lane because they are serious about that stuff these days.

Another problem with bicycle policymaking in general is that it always combines the worst possible panders to the motorists who hate bicyclists with the worst possible panders to the bicyclists who love bicycling a little too much. Bikes and cars are different in the same way that cars and pedestrians are different. Cars are big and dangerous and the rules and infrastructure should protect everyone else from them. This is different from simply demanding that all vehicles on the road should have to follow exactly the same traffic laws.  That doesn't make any sense no matter how cranky and loud drivers tend to be about it.

Meanwhile here's every cycling activist asking to be saddled with "additional responsibilities."

Stop doing that. Nobody cares. There are many great and good reasons to get around the city by bicycle when you can. But these are the top two.

1) It is convenient to be able to tie up anywhere instead of worrying about where and how expensive the parking might be.  But a look around town will show you the universe of arbitrary rules is offering less and less protection there.











2) It is the best way to avoid getting snagged in one of these.

NEW ORLEANS -- Police will be looking for drivers under the influence Thursday night.

The New Orleans Police Department is conducting a sobriety checkpoint at an undisclosed location from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

(FYI: The "undisclosed location" was Louisiana and Tchoup last night, if the reports are to be believed.) Now that police have got a reason to watch for non-compliant bicycles just like they go after expired brake tags, I guess this advantage is going away too.  Maybe the best answer is just for everyone to never leave the house. 


Also, what kind of protection does a "bell or other device" offer that just saying "excuse me" with one's own voice can't?  Let's leave the horns on the trains where they belong. 

Streetscapin'

Oretha Castle Haley Blvd August 2008

Here comes the beautification crew.  

The city began construction Wednesday on a $1.8 million project designed to make it easier and more inviting for people to walk and bike on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City.

The project, funded by federal grants, is the latest in a series of "streetscape" beautification projects officials have unveiled since Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010.

The work will stretch along O.C. Haley from Calliope Street to St. Andrew Street.

Crews will remove the neutral ground from Felicity Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, repair damaged sidewalks and install handicapped curb ramps at intersections. They also will add a bike lane and new crosswalks, plant new landscaping and repave the asphalt roadway, among other improvements, officials said.

That last paragraph offers more detail than did the mayor's press release yesterday. The only specific it offered was the bike lane.  I started to ask for more information but the mayor's office just tweeted the same press release back at me.

tfw they answer your question about a press release by tweeting the same press release back at you.

A photo posted by @skookses on Aug 24, 2016 at 11:48am PDT

Oh well.  Anyway, one reason I wanted to ask about the bike lane is, although the city is quick to advertise the progress it has made in installing painted lanes in recent years, the so-called best practices have already moved beyond this style.

BOSTON (AP) — Bike lanes are evolving. Cities are increasingly changing them to make them safer in light of fatal crashes involving cyclists and cars.

From Boston to San Francisco and New York to Tokyo, traditional bike lanes running alongside vehicle traffic are being replaced in favor of “protected” lanes or “cycletracks,” where physical barriers like concrete curbs, planters or fences separate cyclists from vehicle traffic.

“For 50 years, we’ve just been putting down a stripe of white paint, and that was how you accommodated bikes on busy streets,” says Martha Roskowski, director of People for Bikes, a Boulder, Colorado-based advocacy group that’s calling for better designed bike lanes. “What we’ve learned is that simply doesn’t work for most.”

Basically, we've been doing it wrong and other cities are already finding ways to do it better. This OCH project might have been an opportunity for us to think about how to make a better bike lane. Instead we're just gonna keep congratulating ourselves. 

“Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard is one of our city’s great boulevards, with a rich and diverse history that is uniquely New Orleans,” Landrieu said. “Today, this corridor is seeing a resurgence, and our streetscape project will complement the major public and private investments that have already been made here and trigger even more development for Central City and beyond.”

Also, notice the way Mitch can't help talking about the "public-private" nature of the corridor's gentrification resurgence. It's nice of him to overlook the grifting but that's also a factor. In reality, the benefactor here is the federal government. 

Federal Disaster Community Development Block Grant money will pay for the project, which was designed by GEC.

This week marks ten years plus one since the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.  And we're still benefiting from the CDBG-DR investment delivered as a result. On Tuesday the Governor informed President Obama that his staff would be requesting CDBG funding to help South Louisiana recover from this year's devastating floods. The size of this request will be critical.  As long as we're running around making suppositions like this one by State Sen Francis Thompson, we might as well capitalize on them, right?

Sen. Thompson says he thinks that #laflood will end up being more expensive than Katrina or Rita. #lalege

— Elizabeth Crisp (@elizabethcrisp) August 25, 2016

The more money we pull down from Washington now, the more streets we can "beautify" ten years from now.  Who knows, by then, we might even know how to make a proper bike lane. 

All we do is win-win-win

They're saying the new plan is full of win. 

City officials released a compromise plan for Napoleon Avenue on Thursday that would maintain the size of the neutral ground and add a bike lane — without reducing the number of lanes dedicated to traffic or parking.

The idea is to reduce the width of both traffic and parking lanes by 2 feet each, rather than eliminating lanes altogether or reducing the size of the neutral ground.

The final configuration will be two 10-foot-wide vehicle travel lanes, one 5-foot-wide dedicated bicycle lane and one 7-foot-wide parking lane in each direction. The neutral ground will be restored to its original, pre-construction width of 47 feet

“This is a win-win-win for area neighborhoods, motorists and cyclists,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a news release. “By working together, we feel confident that this roadway configuration is a reasonable accommodation for all interests.”

Is that really a "win-win-win"? Sounds more like nobody got what they wanted. Unless you count the portion of the neighborhood that wanted to make sure they didn't shrink the neutral ground, I guess. Although that wasn't the neighbors' only complaint and I'm not even sure that was their first priority.

They were also worried about the bike lanes. Specifically they were worried that a bike lane on a street like Napoleon Avenue was bound to produce a safety hazard at major intersections as they have in other places around town.  Another issue with the proposed bike lane was its placement between a lane of traffic and the on street parking which is also something that happens all over town despite being a clear safety hazard. 

Both of these issues are also frequently raised by cycling advocates to little avail so it's hard to say that this is really a "win" for them either. All they're getting now is another unsafe bike lane jammed in next to two 10 ft wide lanes of traffic which, by the way, is also not quite in keeping with the "best practices" standard for a trucking and transit artery like Napoleon Avenue.

For multi-lane roadways where transit or freight vehicles are present and require a wider travel lane, the wider lane should be the outside lane (curbside or next to parking). Inside lanes should continue to be designed at the minimum possible width. Major truck or transit routes through urban areas may require the use of wider lane widths. 

Lane widths of 10 feet are appropriate in urban areas and have a positive impact on a street's safety without impacting traffic operations. For designated truck or transit routes, one travel lane of 11 feet may be used in each direction. In select cases, narrower travel lanes (9–9.5 feet) can be effective as through lanes in conjunction with a turn lane.

The only "win" here is a slight one for the city the next time it wants to write a report about the total mileage of bike lane they've installed over the course of Mitch Landrieu's term in office. It doesn't really matter whether the bike lanes in question are actually placed where they'll be used properly or even if they do anything to protect the safety of the cyclists who have to navigate them. All that matters is that the mayor's office can make "the data show" how progressive a city we've become under their watch.

As bicycle ridership increases, the City is committed to expanding our network of bikeways. According to the League of American Bicyclists, New Orleans currently ranks fifth in the nation amongst large cities in the percentage of residents who bike to work. With the completion of the Lafitte Greenway’s bicycle and pedestrian path, New Orleans will have more than 100 miles of bikeways.

So congratulations on your 100 miles, guys.  Hope no one gets doored into a bus for the sake of it.

Aside:  Because, like you probably do, I thought the artistic rendering of Napoleon Avenue lined with beach hotels from 1920s Atlantic City looked kind of weird, I found out that the image is generated by a generic design program called Streetmix.What's great about that is, if you don't like what the city has come up with, maybe you can play around with this app and make your own Napoleon Avenue. Sadly, I can't find the button that puts the crepe myrtles back.

Is The Greenway Open Yet Dot Com

The opening of the Lafitte Greenway, originally scheduled for this spring, and then pushed back to summer, and then again to late summer is pretty much done right now. Or at least that's how it appeared this weekend on a bike trip from the Quarter out to Bayou St. John.  Work crews were still finishing up some landscaping. And I don't know if all of the signage and lighting is quite ready. But the bike trail is ready and you can definitely go there and ride on it.  It's a convenient way to get between Mid City and downtown. Plus it just looks nice. Here's some pictures.