Manhattan is a very dangerous place to bicycle, straight up. But both of my major bike-related injuries occurred in Brooklyn, and though that’s probably because I live here, and so bike here more often, I don’t know that Brooklyn really gets its proper props as a very dangerous place to pedal. Probably the greatest threat comes from other people on the road, mainly in cars, but they often won’t stop to be photographed, or if they have stopped, are hard to really capture from a prone position, what with all those EMTs and ambulances in the way. Bad streets though can be just as insidious and just lie there while you click away. So I started carrying my camera on my bike to preserve a record of the offenses (click the images for nice, big versions; the street names link to google streetview images of the roads in question).
This baby brought me low as it rose up out of the dark beneath me while I was drafting a city bus. Unfortunately, though I didn’t know it at the time, I had broken a toe three days before and I fell on that foot, so this was an especially painful spill. I’m not quite sure how this road-formation came to exist, but my guess would be that the road was widened but the original curb was not fully removed. At least, that’s what it looks like. However it came to be, woe be to bicyclist rolling up to Lafayette on Fulton from the West because an invisible curb rises up in the middle of the lane.
So we have an intersection that’s had its blacktop patched so many times that driving over it can shake your fillings out. Yes, that describes about half of Brooklyn streets, but this one came up on a list or something. We need to do two things at the same time (what a happy coincidence!): 1) replace some utility pipes underneath said intersection and, 2) cover the entire intersection with fresh macadam. What would be the proper order in which to do these two jobs? In Brooklyn, we put down the new roadway, and then cut a trench in it to get access to the pipes (Navy and Flushing).
Let’s say there’s a school crossing zone. Let’s say it’s on DeKalb around Clinton. Let’s say you don’t want that zone to be a school crossing zone any more. But there are all those words painted on the street already! What to do? In Brooklyn, apparently, this is what you do: bring some heavy road machinery to the now ex-zone and just scrape the very pavement from beneath that paint. Sure, now the road is scarred by traffic-direction-oriented grooves almost fiendishly effective at catching bicycle tires, but at least it doesn’t say “SCHOOL X-ING” any more. Or at least not in the same color.
