­­1. Chair Remarks

• The year is winding down, but our energy is building up. Keep bringing in the new members, new projects, and new ideas!

• Welcome to the students from Transit Tech Career & Technical Education High School in East New York.. They had to attend a political meeting in the community, for a school project. We hope they will let us know how their project turned out & we hope they will be inspired to work for livable streets in their neighborhoods­

  2. Project Updates
  

• Fix City bulk orders of bike racks: Over a year ago, Dan Latorre chose to head up this goal for the Brooklyn Committee. As a result, there is now a beta website, Fix City, where you can suggest bike rack locations for Williamsburg & Greenpoint. The site has been up for a few months; so far 150 locations have been collected. The goal is 300. The larger goal is to make good software that can be used in other locations. Read more about the project on LSN.
• The Park Slope Civic Council previously helped their Community Board set up a bulk order of bike racks. This way, the DOT doesn’t have to guess where to put the racks, but rather the  community can request where they need them. It helps to have a partner organization such as a BID (Business Improvement District), a school, a block association. Fix City hopes to create a feature that allows you to create a working group, a coalition, to make a bulk bike rack order possible in your neighborhood.
• Manhattan Bridge Pedestrian Plaza: On the south side of the Bridge, near City Tech, where you come up the steps off Sand Street, there is a plaza which was rehabbed a year ago, but no one uses it! Access to the plaza was not included in the original rehab plan, hence the plaza is not very accessible, there’s really anyone there. Someone said, You have to hop the fence & dodge traffic to get up there & walk over to Chinatown. CB 2 wants to hear our ideas before they ask for changes to make this plaza useable.
• Email Paco at subtle116(at)gmail.com if you want to help with this presentation. Would be great to have a 2010 Manhattan Bridge work group monitoring the situation all year (as the north side bike lane is going to be renovated; in the meantime, peds & bikes will have to share the south lane. It’s always hard to get answers about bridges – workers on the construction site often cite “Homeland Security” & won’t give out info. A DOT bridge person could give us a presentation about it & help us understand what’s going on. This way we, as users of the bridge, can make recommendations before it’s too late. 

 3. Presentations

 a) Nominations

• TA Brooklyn Committee Executive Board nominations are OPEN!

• The positions are: Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, & Treasurer.

• The current Exec Board described their roles; Elena will send out short descriptions of each role, written by the current Exec Board.

• During the meeting, Mike Lydon was nominated for Treasurer; Larry Gast was nominated for Vice Chair; Paco was nominated for another stint as Chair.

• Please email Elena at volunteer(at)transalt.org or Paco at subtle116(at)transalt.org to nominate someone…or yourself!

• Voting happens at our next meeting, Thursday, December 17^th.

 b) Analysis of 2009 Goals

• Our 2009 goals were: Bike Brooklyn (June 2009); Fix City bulk order of bike racks; Bulb-outs & Parking spot swaps; Bike valet at Celebrate Brooklyn & other events; Biking Rules! campaign; Car-free Prospect Park; Kent Avenue; New bike lanes & livable streets in South Brooklyn; Community Boards; Street Studies (such as “From Chaos to Compliance”); the Pulaski Bridge.

• A new tool developed by TA’s Traffic Researcher Jessie Singer: Neighborhood Traffic Monitoring Kit: this will help people track traffic violations in their neighborhood so they can bring stats to their Community Board. Better enforcement for traffic is a major TA goal for 2010. Email Jessie at Jessie(at)transalt.org to learn more.

• Check out TA’s website for original research, including “From Chaos to Compliance,” for which TA Brooklyn Committee members conducted street studies in spring 2009!

• Feedback from the Committee:

• Sholom said: Go to your Community Board! It’s crucial.

• Marin said: Prepare for events earlier in order to get more volunteers in your pool, esp. for taxing long-term efforts like Celebrate Brooklyn Bike Valet (which lasted all summer).

• Inbar said: Grow the bike valet in a sustainable way.

• Mark said: It was really rewarding to see people’s satisfaction at Bike Valet,

• Sholom said: We need more discussion with the Prospect Park Alliance. This year Paco did a presentation at the Alliance’s Community Committee, & Andrew McConnell from the Committee sometimes comes to our  meetings, but we need more collaboration.

• Elena said: We need leadership from the Brooklyn Committee to head up the Carfree Prospect Park efforts.

• Kasia said: Develop partnerships with groups & businesses in Brooklyn.

 c) Brainstorm: Ideas for 2010 Goals

• Try to keep your goals focused on things you will actually have time to help out with - we can have the greatest ideas in the world, but without spirited volunteers to help carry out the effort, they are obsolete.
• We will be finalizing our 2010 Committee goals at our December 17th meeting
• Please read over the goals & add any new ones here. The ideas generated at the November 30^th meeting are listed together at the end.
  
  
  
  

Traffic Calming/Public Space Reclamation

• Pedestrian Plazas
• Car-Free Prospect Park (second)
• Support traffic calming on major arterials like Flatbush, Atlantic and 4th Avenues
• Curb Extensions (They’ve been super successful on 4th Ave) or as a cheaper alternative remove one space from every block to daylight intersections
• Support for more pedestrian/bike-centric streetspace reclamations like Park Circle (candidates include Fulton Landing, Grand Army Plaza, Bedford/Manhattan/Nassau, Tillary/Adams, and similar big intersections)
• Safer pedestrian and bicyclist space on the Pulaski Bridge (second)
• Hazard ID - advocate for better street surface conditions (second)

Bike Infrastructure/Lanes

• Support better bike connections between Brooklyn and Queens, like a bike lane on 58th Street in Queens
• Campaign for a continuous bike lane along 5th ave, connecting Park Slope, Sunset Park, Fort Hamilton, to Verrazano
• Advocate for a bike lane network south of Prospect Park, including Victorian Flatbush
• Support for kent ave bike lanes (second)
• Continuation of support for Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway and more interim implementations
• Red Hook-Sunset Park Connection (second)
• Bicycle parking issues, racks, etc in general (Dan & Co. Fix City initiative as well as bulb-outs/bike swaps)
• Bicycle valet

Outreach/Education/Transportation Alternatives Membership

• Bike Brooklyn T.A. Bk CmT membership drive
• Biking Rules! outreach/education (second)
• Community Board attendance and involvement

Legislative/City Agency Issues

• Better/more enforcement of those traffic laws which would increase safety for all (speeding, running red lights, turning without signaling, texting while driving, using cell phone without hands-free device, etc.) (second) (third) (fourth)
• Cyclist’s/ Pedestrian’s Bill of Rights …. penalties for drivers who intentionally try to kill?

Mass Transit Issues

• Bus Rapid Transit Advocacy
• Advocate for better explanations of what is happening during weekend train service
• Bike Racks on Buses (second) (third)
• Bicycle Storage Facilities at Subway Stations
• Expanding subway lines and service to transit poor regions

 Other Goals

• Inbar: mass transit outreach, interboro BRT, partner with another group such as COMMUTE (part of Pratt Center for Transportation Equity).

• Sholom: Community Board attendance/involvement. We need someone to chase the info for each CB, to keep the group informed about that CB. Group rides to CB meetings or drinks after.

• Michael: Trying to engage CBs in semi-social ways because some communities don’t have a forum for these discussions. Don’t just sit through the meetings; engage the other people there.

• Bike racks on buses. Perhaps an inaugural one could be the bus over the Verrazano from Staten Island to Brooklyn. TA’s Staten Island Committee is working on it, maybe we could partner with them.

• MTA Service Changes/Promote Bikes: the MTA could hang posters to advertise an alternate bike route, side-by-side with the posters explaining the service changes. (One of the Transit Tech students suggested this – thanks!)

• Marin, Inbar: Bike-share.

• Marin, Kasia: Traffic Justice – through legislative efforts, enforcement, & traffic calming.

• In Oregon there is a business where, if you bike to work 200 days out of the year, you get a bike from your employer. We could talk to employers about how to incentivize riding & walking to work. Reach out to certain-size companies. Related to this: Biking Rules! will have a pledge for businesses to sign, to say that they support their employees riding with the law. A program for working cyclists such as delivery people & messengers.

• Define common terms such as BID (business improvement district), DOT (Dept. of Transportation), etc. for new members.

• A kids’ membership? A kids’ component/event?

• Sam: A cargo bike share operating out of bike shops.

• Expose underused bike lanes, reclaim abandoned infrastructure.

• Speak to businesses at the site of specific problems, such as the Marriott on the Adams St. lane; the livery cabs on Jay St.

• NYPD lack of enforcement issue: first get our bikes etched, do something constructive, open up a conversation. Cops would notice more if they rode bikes, maybe we can encourage the NYPD to adopt that mode of transport, esp. for things like traffic violations & quality of life issues.

• Parking Day – Block Parties – Summer Streets-type events

4. Announcements

• December 3^rd was the TA Holiday Party. Send photos if you took any!
• December monthly ride TBA

 5. Break Out Groups

• We didn’t get to write letters at the meeting but we encourage you to do so on your own! There’s a great stretch of Greenway linking Owl’s Head Park to Leif Ericson Park via 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge. However, the Greenway needs a clean up, & most importantly, it needs curb cut on 3rd between 65th & Wakeman for cyclists to have safe entry (http://bit.ly/7Yp2fX). Otherwise, the bike lane’s turn forces you to dismount in the middle of a busy 3rd Avenue corridor in Bay Ridge. Let’s write notes to the local elected and Community Board asking for an improvement.

6. Wrap Up

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• Next Meeting: Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 7 PM
• We will vote for the 2010 committee officers & 2010 committee goals!
• Please email Paco at subtle116(at)gmail.com, Elena at volunteer(at)transalt.org, or me at kasia.krolowa(at)gmail.com if you have any questions.