Judging by all the hysteria from motorists who are mad as hell and not going to take anymore encroachment on their turf, you'd think the DOT's Janette "Sadist"-Khan had gone and transformed every vital thoroughfare into grassy promenade for cyclists, pedestrians, and opium cultivation. As one Brooklyn Community Board member put it when the bike lane war first exploded back in 2008, "You can’t accommodate every single street with a bike lane." Well the DOT showed him, because look at the city now: bike lanes EVERYWHERE! Or are they...
As you can see from this pie chart that Streetsblog put together, the ubiquity of bike lanes has been a tad exaggerated. After a careful analysis—and generously estimating up when considering the bike lanes' footprint—Streetsblog figures that "less than one half of one percent of NYC’s street space has changed in the past three and a half years." And in their analysis, "both the bus and bike estimates probably overstate the amount of street space taken away from cars. They include, for example, all the space in line with a bus or bike lane that spans an intersection — space which is shared with crossing motor vehicles."
Well, you just can't argue with a good pie chart! This is surely going to come as a shock to the editorial board of the NY Post, which has been under the impression that Sadik-Khan has been leading a bloodthirsty army of cyclists across the defenseless steppes of Brooklyn and Manhattan, where drivers once grazed freely in idyllic peace, free from traffic jams and predatory pedestrians. And so we look forward to reading the Post's humbled retraction in tomorrow's edition, and the dawn of a harmonious new era of cooperation and street sharing. THE WAR IS OVER!
