Update below
Former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has largely stayed out of the spotlight since leaving office at the end of 2013. Not that he doesn't still crave it. On the stand in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Monday, prompted that he'd been in office a long time, the former state senator and the official face of Brooklyn for more than a decade said, "I wish I'd been there longer, but 35 years, yes."
The setting was a third day of hearings in the revived lawsuit seeking to rip out the two-way bike path along Prospect Park West.
[UPDATE] Judge Bert Bunyan ruled this afternoon that the lawsuit can proceed. Click here for the latest.
Controversy around the road's redesign flared up toward the end of Markowitz's tenure, and he embraced it with characteristic gusto. Discussing a heated winter 2010 City Council Transportation Committee hearing about bike lanes, lawyer for the city Karen Selvin asked Markowitz whether he had called the bike path along the edge of Prospect Park a "pilot" project during his testimony.
"No, if I remember correctly, I was singing from my Christmas card," Markowitz said.
Now, more than five years later, the zany figurehead has lost his bullhorn and is boosting the outer boroughs for NYC & Co. the city's marketing and tourism agency. The bike route facing 19 blocks of prime Park Slope real estate has likewise lost its ability to elicit protests, or pack the courtroom.
The lawsuit, brought by a group of well-to-do neighbors claiming the city acted arbitrarily and capriciously in installing the path after years of consulting the local community board, had lost its juice too, thrown out in 2011 by Judge Bert Bunyan, who said that the statute of limitations had run out before the activists filed.
Undeterred, the group calling itself Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and Seniors for Safety appealed. Represented pro bono by the white-shoe firm Gibson Dunn, the activists won, tossing the case back to Bunyan to hear evidence on whether the Department of Transportation portrayed the redesign as a trial project, which would push back the deadline for suing.
No evidence has come out showing that the agency did call it a pilot or trial, although Park Slope Councilman Brad Lander now acknowledges that his office misrepresented the lane as such for months before and after its summer 2010 construction. And then there's Markowitz, who says that former DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan expressly told him the lane was a trial in a meeting at Brooklyn Borough Hall.
"She said, 'Don't beat me over the head with this, don't go on the war path, don't make a big issue out of this," he recalled. "'The project is a pilot, and we're going to be monitoring its effect on traffic and safety, and if necessary, the department can change and modify its plans.'"
(Zoe Schlanger/Gothamist)
Sadik-Khan denies calling the project a pilot, and a follow-up memo from Markowitz's aide reflects only that she said the department would monitor traffic along the retooled thoroughfare, whereas a note from the same aide prepping Markowitz for the meeting says, "You should insist the lane be installed as a 'pilot' or 'trial' project." Markowitz explained from the stand that Sadik-Khan relayed the crucial information about the lane during a private moment after the meeting, thus no one else would have heard it.
As for his 2010 denouncement of the transportation boss as a "zealot" for ramping up bike-lane installation, he now thinks he "may have embellished" with the label, "but she's very strongly opinionated, and so am I."
"I opposed her as it relates to bike lanes," he explained. "I was opposed to her goal of creating New York City as a bike city, as opposed to a city that's fair and balanced between modes of transportation."
To be clear, Prospect Park West went from having three lanes of car traffic, two parking lanes, and two sidewalks, to having all of those things minus one lane of car traffic, plus a two-lane bike path.
"It was my job to do everything I could to stop that bicycle lane," Markowitz said.
Outside the courtroom, Markowitz told us that there's no inconsistency between the work his office does using bike infrastructure as a selling point for tourists and his opposition to an amenity his old neighborhood has largely embraced.
"I don't oppose all bike lanes, just this particular one," he explained, describing his position on the bike lanes on Kent Avenue and the West Side Highway: "Love love love it."
Still, he said, "New York City is not Amsterdam, it never will be Amsterdam, and that's all there is to it."
Also on hand to testify, and the only of the plaintiffs to appear in court so far, was Norman Steisel.
A neighbor of the bike path, Steisel recounted helping to mount a campaign against the lanes through a slew of meetings, flyers, and protests, and calls, emails, and letters to reporters and politicians. The tools were typical of neighborhood activism, but unlike the average activist, Steisel and his compatriots were used to being able to get veteran journalists and top government officials to pick up the phone. Steisel is now, of all things, a green-industry consultant, but he previously served as a budget, police, and fire administrator, and as sanitation commissioner and deputy mayor in mayoral administrations stretching from Lindsay to Dinkins.
Therefore it must have been frustrating indeed when, as he recounted, his former transportation adviser, Sadik-Khan, wouldn't return his calls.
Listing off problems that first piqued his interest when the lane went in, Steisel said the redesign "moved parked cars to basically in the middle of the road, narrowed the roadway, which had the potential to create traffic problems, and cause accidents," and that the orange cones that at first lined the project were "very unsightly," upsetting the "historic character" of what had traditionally been a "grand boulevard."
What followed in court was a by-now-familiar rehashing at what was said at community board meetings and in letters and emails, and how they led Steisel and company to believe that the bike lane was a trial. More interesting was when, after court adjourned for the day, I told Steisel I needed to take his photo even though he wasn't willing to pose.
"Then you'll suffer the consequences," he said.
When I retrieved my camera from the check room and caught up to Steisel out on the sidewalk, he first blocked my shot with his umbrella, then halfheartedly whacked at my camera with it, hitting my outstretched hand. When I objected to this, he said, "Sorry, I didn't see you there."
Good block! (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)
A few more moments and I'd gotten what I needed, or something close.
Norman Steisel usually looks more composed, from my limited experience. (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)
How to explain all this: the seniors rallying against measures that slow drivers; the $1,000/hour attorneys pitching in for free; the borough president and the coterie of longtime political heavyweights devoting years to advocacy against a strip of green paint and some pedestrian islands; the umbrella whack. Park Slope resident and road-safety advocate Eric McClure, who has dutifully attended and live-tweeted all the latest court dates, said that the divide was partially generational, given that the bike lane opponents at their most numerous were largely elderly, and had in many instances been in the neighborhood longer than age-diverse supporters. The continuing battle is also a sign of a political class that has lost its clout, he said.
"The whole fight was indicative of a power shift in New York City politics and society, for lack of a better phrase," he said. "This was kind of the old guard, 'We do our deals behind closed doors,' the old machine politics confronting the Bloomberg, MBA-run City Hall, and their data driven projects."
As for the bike path, it has succeeded by most available measures. McClure again:
The street is much calmer for traffic. The bike lane carries thousands of people every week, and they aren’t riding on the sidewalk, so pedestrians don’t have to contend with them. The project clearly has delivered on its promises, and it’s made Prospect Park West a better place to walk and ride and drive. I'm once again hoping that the plaintiffs will come to their senses and withdraw the lawsuit, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Update 3:50 p.m.:
Norman Steisel gave us a ring this afternoon after concluding his testimony. He said a mouthful.
On his attempt to dispatch this lone paparazzo:
I just thought [taking photos] was frankly not appropriate to the moment, but that’s okay, that’s your judgement...I didn’t want my picture taken, there’s no question about it. You were busting my chops and I was busting yours, that was what was going on from my perspective. But is that really news?
On court today:
[Former DOT policy director] Jon Orcutt was called to testify, and he essentially testified that in fact, even though they knew throughout, they’d decided internally it wasn’t a pilot, they didn’t feel they should really be correcting anybody. Which contributed of course to, as we’ve said, this ambiguity, which kind of led to this cat-and-mouse game, as opposed to them just saying it definitively so that everybody would have known what their options were, legally or politically. I think they just wanted to control the situation, so they intentionally misled people, unfortunately.
On the DOT's alleged trickery with the pilot label:
They’re not the holy little innocents. They want you to believe they’re these visionaries, they’re trying to change the world—they play pretty hardball tactics.
All those people [who testified], with the exception of Marty, were pretty ardent supporters of the lane. If you were an ardent supporter, why would you contribute to the notion that it was a pilot program?
On the media's depiction of his cause:
This at the time got characterized as a pro-bike versus an anti-bike struggle, and that’s just not true. Our whole take was, we thought there were at least two other alternatives that had actually been in the city’s plan from 1979 that made more sense [adding bike entrances to the park, or running a southbound bike lane along Prospect Park West and a parallel lane the other direction along Eighth Avenue] and that would have achieved the same objectives that they wanted without some of the problems we’ve had, which have been the congestion [this seems not to have happened], crashes.
As with lots of things in life, especially in a big, complicated city like New York, it was a little more involved, the way the thing played out. Of course you had two groups who were in opposition, who had very strong advocacy positions, who were trying to influence both public decision-makers in office as well as people in the media and the public at large, and that’s why it ultimately got characterized as this big war.
On the safety of Prospect Park West:
We submitted a lot of material and looked over, and continue to look at it over a long haul, and for quite a while, crashes actually increased. It was by modest amounts, 5, 10 percent, ultimately, and it was only really until [current DOT Commissioner] Polly Trottenberg came along and decided to drop the speed limit, which later got incorporated into the city’s larger Vision Zero initiative to lower the default speed limit, that accidents started coming down.
Note on this: Crashes did go up slightly in the two years following the path's installation, by 9 crashes, or 7.9 percent, compared to the two years prior. Sidewalk cycling and speeding were also drastically reduced, and the predicted increase in cyclist crashes did not materialize though the number of cyclists using the route multiplied. Steisel questions how that data was collected. As for
On what's at stake:
The city had an obligation to tell us, what was the deadline, was it permanent or wasn’t it. These laws have been designed to protect the public interest from the city making arbitrary decisions, and they chose to play this bait-and-switch game so they could do whatever they wanted. And that’s kind of underlying it, stuff that inside-baseball policy wonks think about, but it’s really important that these processes be respected.
Steisel notes that he oversaw Janette Sadik-Khan's preparation of a city bike lane plan in the early '90s to get the city qualified for federal transportation funds under Bill Clinton, and that he wrote an op-ed for the Daily News calling for a more complete bike network before the rollout of Citi Bike. He also claimed that his group continues to number in the "hundreds," "many of the members" being "young people who bike who had doubts" about the lane. He said that lane opponents stopped showing up to court "to avoid the spectacle."
Asked if he could put me in touch with some of these skeptical young cyclists, Steisel said he'd look into it, "but I don’t think that’s going to happen."
