They’re not going to let it ride.
The city’s bike-share program is about to start, but some New Yorkers are still trying to put the brakes on cycle stations planned for their blocks.
SoHo neighbors put the kibosh on a 43-bike rack in tiny memorial park Petrosino Square because it took up too much space — only to have the city Department of Transportation replant it in front of an advocate’s home.
Now they’re fighting the rack’s new spot in a no-parking area of the street on Cleveland Place near Kenmare Street, saying the busy intersection is too dangerous for a rental kiosk.
“It’s as though DOT is on lockdown,” said Georgette Fleischer, founder of Friends of Petrosino Square, who will soon get the cycle rack in front of her tenement. “They’re not responding to us.”
“The very agency you’d think would be most concerned about public safety on our streets seems to be absolutely unmoved,” she added.
Firefighters at nearby Ladder 20 and Engine 55 say they’re also trying to persuade officials to move the bikes for safety reasons, but to no avail. Fire trucks often take a sharp right onto Cleveland Place from Kenmare Street.
The long-awaited bike-share network will include at least 5,000 two-wheelers across 293 stations when it launches in May. Citibank, the program’s sponsor, plans to eventually provide 10,000 bikes.
As part of the self-service system, commuters can get a bike, ride it and return it to any docking location as long as they have a subscription — $95 annually, or $9.95 a day.
The network will first spin into Brooklyn and Manhattan south of 59th Street before reaching North Brooklyn and Queens by the end of the year.
But not everyone is pumped up. Brooklyn Heights residents are bracing for 39 docks on Montague Street, in the street’s parking lane, and 23 bikes on the promenade, where riding bicycles is currently illegal.
In TriBeCa, a 25-bike kiosk was moved from Duane Park to the northeast corner of Duane and Greenwich streets after residents said it was a blight on the park. Now it’s drawing the ire of residents of Independence Plaza, who say Duane Street is too narrow for a hulking station.
“This area has a lot of congestion,” said Adam Malitz, a community-board member and plaza resident. “It’s not a good corner to put a lot of bikes.
“But [the city] has made all the decisions at this point and is saying, ‘We’ll look at it in the future if there are problems.’ I just hope someone doesn’t get hit by a car.”
Last summer, the Battery Park City Authority asked the city to reconsider a station at the center of West Thames Street near South End Avenue. It still got the green light after the DOT explained that the island of bikes would be a traffic-calming measure for the wide street, a BPC spokesman said.
Some communities have been luckier than others.
The DOT listened when a SoHo priest railed against a bike station in Father Fagan Square. He claimed it would “cheapen” the memorial park near Sixth Avenue and Prince Street.
A kiosk on Sutton Place was nixed after the community board protested that it was in front of the UN secretary-general’s residence.
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wrote a letter last summer asking the DOT to remove one of two bike-share kiosks from Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. There’s now only one station slated for the area.
A DOT spokesman defended the bike-share locations as the result of thousands of public suggestions taken across 400 meetings citywide.
“The locations are the result of this very public process, the most extensive of any transportation project in city history,” said Seth Solomonow.