Anyone who's ever traveled by bike in New York City has experienced the annoying, dangerous scourge of the obstructed bike lane. Police officers park in them with abandon, sometimes to ticket cyclists for not riding in the lanes. Pedestrians venture into the paths haphazardly. Drivers, somehow not satisfied by millions of free parking spaces allotted to them, treat the meager space set aside for cyclists like personal storage for their private vehicles.
A new study out of Hunter College takes a statistical approach to the vexing problem—confirming that, as you suspected, the city's bike lanes are chronically impeded.
As part of the first-of-its-kind study, researchers fanned out across 42 bike lanes, both protected and not, in every borough but Staten Island. They found an average of 7.5 obstructions per 10 city blocks—or 11.5 obstructions per mile.
The survey determined that pedestrians and motorists are the two most frequent bike lane blockers, with roughly three of each category of obstruction per 10-block range. The third most common cause of blocked bike lanes is construction.
While Manhattan led the way with the highest frequency of blocked lanes, the problem was not confined to any one borough or route.
"The number of obstructions was fairly widespread across the area we studied," Professor Peter Tuckel, who led the survey, told Gothamist. "There are certain avenues or streets where it's more pronounced, but there were generalized obstructions across the board."
The study also found that protected bike lanes are more popular than conventional bike lanes by a margin of 4.5 to 1—regardless of location or time of day that they were observed. Interestingly, the researchers found a higher incidence of total obstructions in protected lanes than unprotected ones (8.5 vs 5.8 per 10-block area).
"There are a lot of benefits attached to having protected bike lanes, but clearly city authorities need to do a better job of making sure these passageways are unimpeded," said Tuckel.
This past summer, in response to an uptick in cyclist deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he'd directed the NYPD to clear out the city's bike lanes with increased enforcement.
Despite the stated crackdown, data from earlier this year shows police were on track to ticket fewer vehicles for bike lane obstruction than they did the previous year.
We've asked the NYPD for the most recent figures, and we'll update if we hear back. Inquiries to the Mayor's Office were not returned.
