Still No New Bike Racks at the Metro North Station

Folks are getting out of their cars and riding their bikes like never before - and the city is doing everything it can to stop it! With gasoline over $4 a gallon and the dreadful consequences of global warning begining to manifest, bicycling just makes sense. What does not make sense is the paltry accommodations to bicyclists evident around town.

Take bike racks. For over a year now, the city has been tagging the bicycles parked at the White Plains Metro North Station, warning bicyclists that city employees will remove and dispose of their bikes if they are left for 48 hours. It is clear to anyone that regularly uses the bike racks that abandoned bicycles are not the problem - the problem is the amount of bike rack space. Arriving in time for the morning express to Manhattan, the bike racks are already full.

The bike rack situation is even worse downtown around the malls and the shops on Mamaroneck Ave. Recently a rack was installed inside the new City Center Parking garage and another adjacent to the Mc Donald's restaurant in the Westchester Pavilion mall. The rack at the City Center garage quickly filled up, and a second rack was installed on the cheep - the second rack is almost useless for securing a bicycle. Whoever built it clearly doesn't use a bike. You're out of luck if you are looking for a convenient place to leave your bike while you shop at the Galleria, White Plains Mall or along Mamaroneck Avenue.

Venturing out on the roads in town, there are no bike lanes or accomodations made for bicyclists anywhere - it's like the city's traffic planners have simply chosen to ignore bicyclists in favor of cars and trucks. Best advice is to ride on the sidewalks and try to avoid pedestrians, which appears to be legal (the city police's occasional bicycle patrols do it).

Going out of town, there are a few roads that are posted as "Bike Routes," but this almost meaningless designation only indicates through routes where bikes are not specifically prohibited; it does not mean that any accommodations have been made in the design of the road or the programming of the stoplights. Indeed, you're best advised to ignore stoplights altogether; the majority of them are connected to sensors which only respond to cars and trucks, not bicyclists or pedestrians.

Oh, and those "press button to cross streets" buttons - a not so secret secret - they are largely non-functional. The majority of the intersections that have the buttons have the stoplights on a timer tied into a program that optimizes the stoplight for overall car and truck traffic flow. The buttons don't do anything - the signal will stay on timer regardless if the buttons are pressed or not. The purpose of the "signal control" buttons is psychological - they are there to discourage j-walkings (press this and wait) and give give pedestrians a sense of control - they don't actually affect the action of the signal.