The city Department of Transportation is lying through its teeth about an alleged biker boom.
Last week, an NYU Furman Center study based on US Census data revealed that far fewer New Yorkers bicycle to work than the city’s DOT claims. A flack for the agency “answered” by sneering at the survey’s methodology: “We count cyclists, not questionnaires.”
Sorry: The Post has been counting cyclists too — and they’re far fewer on the ground than DOT pretends.
We counted the number who bike to and from their jobs in Manhattan office buildings, the prime movers of the city’s economy. And the total is well below even the paltry numbers cited by NYU.
The truth about how many people cycle to their jobs matters because Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan are using a supposed increase to justify their crazed campaign to install new bike lanes all over town — at drivers’ and pedestrians’ expense.
If bike-ridership to work is negligible, what possible rationale can exist for wasting precious city funds to reduce the number of vehicular lanes? And, in the process, hurting stores and restaurants that depend on curbside dropoffs? (And let’s not even touch Sadik-Khan’s bizarre initiative to stick parking places in the middle of streets.)
No excuse can be made that cyclists keep their wheels home because there’s no safe place to park them. Since the end of 2009, the city has required office-building landlords to install secure bike racks whenever a tenant requests them — or to permit employees to carry the bikes to their offices if there’s not enough room for racks. Certain new buildings even provide free, indoor bike racks.
But how much use do they get?
We asked the Real Estate Board of New York, the landlords’ group that represents owners of most of Manhattan’s 400 million-odd square feet of office space. Last Thursday — a bright, sunny day offering optimal cycling conditions — REBNY collected responses from owners and managers of 77 million square feet in Midtown and Downtown.
They reported a total of just 278 bicycles either in the racks or carried up to offices that day.
Using a standard space-use formula that allocates 250 square feet to each employee, those 42 million square feet hold about 308,000 workers. Thus, a mere .09 percent of employees in those buildings went to work by bike.
That’s fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 workers biking to the office — far fewer than even the paltry 0.6 percent the NYU study found citywide in 2009.
After seeing the REBNY numbers, fearing they might be skewed, we asked employees at certain specific office buildings to count bikes immediately.
* At 1 Bryant Park — the new Bank of America tower at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, where 8,000 people work daily — a mere 11 of 30 bike slots were taken in a secure, indoor room. That sunny day, about one out of 727 percent of employees at 1 Bryant Park went by bike.
* At Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle — which wasn’t included in the REBNY poll — a 25-cycle rack in the building’s garage is similarly free to anyone who works there, whether in an office, store, restaurant or hotel. On that same bright day, our source in the building counted exactly one bicycle.
You don’t need a degree in statistics to grasp what’s obvious to any New Yorker out for a stroll: The DOT’s bike lanes are usually devoid of bikes except for food-delivery personnel. The lanes are the superhighway for General Tso’s chicken, but lonesome highways for everyone else.
The truth has begun to emerge. In Brooklyn’s Park Slope, fed-up residents backed by former city Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall and former Sanitation Commissioner Norman Steisel are suing the DOT over a detested bike lane along once-majestic Prospect Park West. They say the DOT has wildly overstated the lane’s popularity and falsely claimed it’s reduced accidents when considerable evidence suggests just the opposite.
Yet the DOT can count on the support of highly organized cycling-advocate groups such as Transportation Alternatives and their stooges, who claim that New Yorkers are forsaking cars and even mass transit for bikes. (One clever ideologue even snatched the domain name stevecuozzo.com to link to Transportation Alternatives’ home page.)
Fun’s fun — but to recognize the lie of a bicycle “boom,” check out Broadway between 47th and 59th Streets, where a virtually unused bike lane and pedestrian mall shrank four auto lanes to two. You’ve only to be stuck in traffic there — or on Allen Street downtown heading north, where a similar lane was installed — to appreciate the DOT’s stupidity.
Or ask a friend who bikes to work at an office building how hard is it to find a parking space.scuozzo@nypost.com