a livery cab (photo by Kate Hinds)

(Ailsa Chang — New York, WNYC) The city has settled a federal lawsuit charging that the New York City police department has been unlawfully detaining, questioning and searching passengers for weapons in livery cabs as part of a city livery cab inspection program.

The two passengers who filed the lawsuit last May, Terrence Battle and Munir Pujara, are both men of color. They alleged they were pulled out of their cabs and searched for weapons even though the officers did not suspect either them of criminal activity.

Neither of them was charged with any offense after their encounters.

As part of the settlement, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has committed to retraining officers and instructing them that passengers riding in livery cars participating in the Taxi/Livery Robbery Inspection Program, or TRIP, can only be removed on certain conditions: if the officer fears for his safety, or if he suspects the passenger is armed or has committed a violent crime.

Kelly issued a new operations order commanding all officers to follow these rules. Although the department issued a similar operations order detailing this policy about a decade ago, criminal justice advocates said too few officers heeded the rules.

“The problem was no one knew about that operations order and there had never been any training on it, so police officers around the city mistakenly believed that they could frisk and search passengers without suspicion,” said Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented both plaintiffs.

Dunn said they interviewed more than a dozen livery car drivers who claimed they were getting stopped routinely and their passengers were getting pulled out without any reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

TRIP is meant to protect livery drivers from crimes perpetrated by passengers, especially robberies. Drivers who voluntarily participate in the program consent to being pulled over by a police officer at any point to check on their safety. Participants display a decal in their windows stating, “This vehicle may be stopped and visually inspected by the police at any time to ensure driver’s safety.”

The plaintiffs didn’t challenge the actual vehicle stops in their lawsuit — only the manner in which they were treated after the officers pulled the livery cabs over.

In addition to promising the retraining of officers, the city paid Battle and Pujara $10,000 each.

City lawyers called the TRIP program “entirely constitutional” and noted that the program itself was not challenged in the lawsuit.

“The police department remains committed to ensuring that the program is run correctly and to ensure the continued safety of livery cab drivers and their passengers,” said Mark Zuckerman of the city’s Law Department.

Dunn said, as with the the stopping and frisking of pedestrians, TRIP resulted in unwarranted frisks and searches that disproportionate impacted minorities.

“Yellow cabs just aren’t available in the outer boroughs, the communities where blacks and Latinos primarily live,” said Dunn. “Really the targets — and the victims — of this practice wer blacks and Latinos.”

A Chevy Volt marked NYPD patrol car (Photo: NYC Dept. of Citywide Administrative Services)

Forty percent of New York City government vehicles are hybrids or run on alternative fuels. The New York Police Department is exempt from the aggressive environmental vehicle procurement requirements of other city agencies and yet, they have at least one marked patrol car labeled for traffic enforcement.

As a commenter notes, this will be for meter maids and intersection control, not armed police officers.

A "bike lift" in silence during a memorial ride for killed cylists, March 2012 (Photo by Alex Goldmark)

Last year, 21 cyclists died in vehicle crashes in New York City.  But only two drivers were arrested and local district attorneys are hard pressed to cite convictions for cyclist deaths.  Instead, they say, cyclists and their advocates don’t understand how tough it is to call a traffic crash a crime.

As far as intersections go, Bowery and Delancey is a pretty big one, eight lanes cross six. It’s never really empty, not even at 1:30 in the morning. It was that time of night about four years ago when Rasha Shamoon was fatally struck there by a Range Rover while riding her bike home.

As is standard procedure in traffic deaths in New York City, the police arrived and treated the intersection as a crime scene. They interviewed the three people in the car, but no other witnesses were mentioned in the police report — several people had called 911 from the scene, but we’ll never know if they saw the crash or not. Police determined Rasha Shamoon caused the crash and let the driver go.

Rasha’s mother didn’t buy the story. Samira Shamoon would later tell a New York city council hearing: “The first police report to the newspaper claimed that Rasha was at fault because she had  run the red light and she was not wearing a helmet.” No helmet was found at the scene, but Rasha was known as obsessive on safety issues.

“Even the statement they got from the driver and his friends were not accurate and complete,” Samira Shamoon lamented. To get more information, she took the driver to civil court.

“We didn’t have any eye witnesses that said he was speeding,” says Shamoon’s lawyer, Adam White.  “We didn’t have an accident re-constructionist, nothing in the police report that indicated rate of speed.” White used circumstantial evidence: Rasha’s whole bike was covered in reflective tape, the passengers gave partially-conflicting accounts, and the 21 year-old driver had at least six previous moving violations.

“Ultimately the jury found that the driver was 95 percent at fault and it put 5 percent of fault on Rasha,” White said of the verdict handed down in February. The Shamoons were awarded $200,000.

The year Rasha Shamoon was hit, 2008, was the worst since 2000 for cyclist deaths: 26 people died. Last year, it was 21. But there were 27 times when a cyclist died, or was thought likely to die in NYC—that’s how police categorize cases for record keeping. The NYPD tells WNYC of those 27 cases, two drivers were arrested. Looking at all cases where a driver kills someone — pedestrian, cyclist, other motorists, themselves — forty percent of the time, there’s not even a traffic ticket. Explaining why not, gets complicated.

Cyclist deaths in 2011 — locations and dates from NYC DOT.

Bike advocates like Caroline Samponaro of Transportation Alternatives want the police to get tougher. If drivers cause crashes that kill, she told me, they should face serious consequences. “Even if you can’t prevent that crash, you can follow up and make sure that another crash like it doesn’t ever happen.”

As cycling has taken hold in New York, and cases like Rasha Shamoon’s make their rounds on the bike blogs, something of a furor has risen up in the cycling community. Samponaro’s group organized protests outside police headquarters in November after another killed cyclist’s family started criticizing the NYPD investigation.

Artist Mathieu Lefevre was hit by a truck in October in Williamsburg. The driver told police he did not know he hit anyone, so continued driving a few blocks before parking. No charges were filed because police determined both parties were at fault.

Erika Lefevre, Mathieu’s mother, pressed for more investigation, and publicly complained the police withheld information from her, eventually filing a freedom of information request to see what the investigation report had found.

There were no photos from the scene because the police camera broke, according to the police report. And the only surveillance video from the scene doesn’t show the crash.

I called the truck driver several times. When he didn’t return my calls, I went to his house to try to get his side of the story, but all he said was “no comment.”

As for the police, they say they’re just following the law.

Sparked largely by the Lefevre case, the City Council held a four-hour hearing on traffic safety in February. “We realize that these are not just numbers on a piece of paper,” NYPD Deputy Chief John Cassidy told angry council members and victims’ family members. “And in my opening statement when I said one fatality is one too many, I seriously believe that,” he added.

The morning turned into a lesson in organizational charts, patrol guides and traffic law. The NYPD’s most involved traffic investigations are handled by the Accident Investigation Squad. In 2000, there were 24 detectives. Now, because of budget cuts, there are 19. They handle the whole city.

So those detectives can only show up when someone dies or is declared likely to die by a medical professional. Asking them to handle more cases, or adding more detectives would be a policy choice, Cassidy said. “It would take resources away from other enforcement initiatives. One person can’t do two separate jobs at the same time.”

Those other initiatives include speed traps and DUI checkpoints. And, as Cassidy pointed out, traffic deaths are at an all time low. “So the accidents that you speak of,” he told the council, “are not in fact occurring. So it’s not that we’re not doing anything out there. I think it’s quite the contrary — we’re doing a lot with [a] lot less.”

I asked the police to explain how they determine when to make arrests, when to issue a ticket, and when to just let the driver go in a fatal crash with a cyclist. In an email, they said a motorist needs to break two traffic laws to rise to the level of criminal.

“Speeding alone will not produce criminality” the statement reads. “Passing a stop sign only will not provide for criminal charges. They will result in a speeding summons and a stop sign summons only, but together we have established a criminal charge of Criminally Negligent Homicide or higher.”

You’d need both to slap cuffs on a driver. And the police would need to witness speeding to prove it in most cases, they point out.

“We as a society have chosen to drive these  big cars,” said Joe McCormack, Assistant District Attorney for the Bronx. It’s his job to prosecute traffic crimes. “And we also as a society have chosen not to criminalize every single small mistake that just has a dramatic consequence because you’re driving a car,” he said.

I asked all five district attorneys for an accounting of how many times someone who killed a cyclist was convicted of a crime. They all said they don’t track cases that way. But after much prodding for examples of what types of cases lead to jail time, the Queens DA cited two cases. In a 2009 case, a driver who had just sold heroin to an undercover officer was fleeing the scene when he struck and killed a cyclist. He was sentenced to seven-and-a-half to 15 years. In a 2006 drunk driving case, the motorist was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years.

The Manhattan D.A. pointed to the case of Marilyn Dershowitz, sister-in-law of prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The driver has been indicted. The case is pending.

The Brooklyn D.A. has brought three cases where bicyclists died in the past two years. All got convictions. Two were prosecuted as aggravated unlicensed driving charges. The third death case was tried as a manslaughter but ended with a jury trial conviction of driving with a suspended license.

Only one cyclist died in the Bronx last year. It was a hit and run. The driver was never found.

“There are times where the factual situation that is presented to us doesn’t rise to a crime,” McCormack said. “And it’s important to realize that the reason it doesn’t rise to a crime is that society has made that decision that it doesn’t want it to be a crime.”

Some in society do.

When the weather warmed last month, a couple hundred cyclists held a memorial ride to honor the 21 bike riders who were killed on city streets last year. They placed white painted ghost bikes at the site of each crash. Read a statement in front of the 90th Precinct where four cyclists were killed last year, including Lefevre. And rang their bike bells the the backdrop of a bagpipe.

Those 21 deaths, they say, are 21 too many.  On that, the police agree.

Audio of protest used with permission from Streetfilms. In addition to our map above, cyclist deaths from other years are tracked and mapped at Ghostbikes.org

About 250,000 people ride a bike each day in New York city, and  about 500,000 ride at least several times a month, according to the New York City Department of Transportation.

At the start of last year the New York Police Department cracked down on cyclists breaking traffic laws. Bike community protests erupted, compromise was gingerly reached, and outrage faded. The pace of ticketing, however, did not abate.

By the end of 2011, police handed cyclists 13,743 moving violations — those are for less serious infractions like riding on pedestrian-only paths in parks, or riding on a sidewalk. Most of the summonses last year — about 35,000 — were the more serious criminal court summonses for infractions like running red lights.

By comparison, Cassidy said the NYPD’s specialized truck enforcement units issued about 25,000 tickets to truck drivers.

Overall, police issued more than 1 million traffic tickets.  Cassidy did not specify an exact number.  More than half the tickets he said were for four categories of infraction: using cell phones while driving, not wearing a seat belt, speeding, and disobeying signs.

After an extensive crowdsouring project to map the scale and scope of the bike crackdown by Transportation Nation, NYPD leaked to the New York Post that they issued 14,000 tickets to cyclists who broke the law between January 1 and May 26, 2011. The Post reported that was more than a 50 percent jump over previous years.

In New York City, bikes count as vehicles and must obey all traffic laws unless posted signs or signals say otherwise.

NYPD officials at a City Council oversight hearing (photo by Kate Hinds)

In two and a half hours of sometimes heated testimony, NYPD brass defended the department’s record investigating bike and pedestrian deaths before the New York City Council.

“We have utilized the resources at our disposal…to drive accidents down in the city,” said John Cassidy, chief of the NYPD’s transportation department.

“There doesn’t seem to be any discussion of that at the Council hearing at all,” he said. “It seems the fact that accidents are down, injury accidents are down, injuries are down — those are done by utilizing the patrol force that we have. So it’s not that we are not doing anything out there — I think it’s quite the contrary. We are doing a lot with a lot less.”

A number of recent deaths — like Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu LeFevre, who was hit by a truck last October in Brooklyn, and 12-year old Dashane Santana, who was struck by a minivan on the Lower East Side in January — have caused the council to question how vigorously the NYPD enforces laws in these kinds of cases.

Teresa Pedroza, Santana’s grandmother, said: “My granddaughter’s gone because it’s just that easy for dangerous drivers to end a life on our streets.”

Added Erika LeFevre, mother of Mathieu LeFevre: “The only person the NYPD showed courtesy, professionalism and respect towards was the driver who ran over my son,” she said, referencing the slogan painted on the side of patrol cars.

“What actually happens when a pedestrian is struck and killed by a car?” City Council member Jimmy Vacca — who chairs the transportation committee  — asked at the opening of the oversight hearing. “Anecdotal evidence suggests that unless the driver is drunk or distracted, in the overwhelming majority of cases involving fatalities or serious injury, there are no charges filed at all.”

Cassidy said in 2011, the NYPD issued over a million summonses to drivers for moving violations, as well as 10,415 criminal court summonses to truck operators. He added that last year the department issued 13,743 moving violations to bicyclists and 34,813 criminal court summonses to bicyclists.

But this didn’t satisfy the council members.  Council member Peter Vallone asked the police brass:  “Are any of you aware, personally, of any reckless endangerment charges brought as a result of one of these traffic injuries?”  After a pause, Cassidy responded: “No, sir.”

Recent legislation (known colloquially as Hayley and Diego’s Law) amended section 1146 of the New York State Vehicle and Traffic Law to establish careless driving as a more serious offense. But according to Susan Petito, an attorney for the NYPD, the only officers who write 1146 violations are members of the NYPD’s Accident Investigation Squad. The AIS is only called out to investigate if the victim is either dead or has suffered a life-threatening injury.

The AIS, which covers the entire city,  has 19 detectives, one lieutenant, and three sergeants.

“Even with those (1146) summonses that are written,” Petito said, “they are invariably dismissed by traffic court, because traffic court judges believe that it’s inadequate because it wasn’t personally observed.”

“It’s really unacceptable,” said Council Member Brad Lander, who wanted to know why more patrol officers couldn’t be authorized to write 1146 violations.

The council wasn’t the only frustrated party in the room. “You know, we’re well aware of the catastrophic nature of what we are discussing. We realize these are not just numbers on a piece of paper,” said Cassidy at one point.

Other city council members complained about what they perceived to be a the NYPD’s lack of transparency. At one point Vacca wanted to know how many drivers were charged for criminally bad driving. “Unfortunately, reckless endangerment is not segregated for record keeping purposes in our arrest database,” said Petito. “So we can’t give you a specific number of reckless endangerment charges connected with speeding … connected with a vehicle. Unfortunately that data’s not available.”

“Why is it so hard to get information from the police department?” asked council member Jessica Lappin, who has worked to try to get the NYPD to make more data available to the public. “Why did Mathieu LeFevre’s family have to file a FOIL request about their son’s death? That’s literally adding insult to injury.”

Lappin called the NYPD’s approach to releasing data “irritating” and “infuriating.” “While putting up a PDF may comply with the law, it doesn’t comply with our goal. It’s information we’re entitled to.”

After the hearing, Peter Vallone said the council is committed to giving the NYPD the tools they need to go after bad drivers. “They are not paying enough attention to reckless drivers, and I think that’s clear from the testimony of all the victims who were here today.”

Ghost bike along the Hudson River bike path (photo by Kate Hinds)

The City Council is holding a joint hearing Wednesday to determine if the NYPD is thoroughly investigating traffic crashes following a number of high profile cases involving cyclists being killed or injured by vehicles that did not result in criminal charges.

The most noteworthy case was the death of Mathieu Lefevre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last October. A truck making a right turn struck Lefevre then dragged him and his bike almost halfway down the block. From evidence released after Lefevre’s parents filed a Freedom Of Information request, it appears as though the truck hit Lefevre twice, kept driving and parked nearby. When identified later by police, the driver said he didn’t know he hit anyone. No charges were filed.

“I would like to know police enforcement policies in terms of bike safety and truck enforcement,” Council public safety committee chair Peter Vallone told WNYC. Vallone said he gets consistent complaints from constituents about trucks breaking the laws without receiving tickets, and on lapse police follow up to traffic crashes.

Police did not respond to requests to clarify their policy on investigations. Sources said they were concerned police only investigate traffic crashes if there is a death or a police witness.

But based on a review of incomplete data available to transportation safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, the group’s general counsel and policy analyst Juan Martinez said, “if you don’t leave the scene and you’re not drunk, there’s almost no chance you’ll be charged.”

Martinez’s group advocated for Haley and Diego’s Law which was billed as a crackdown on careless drivers. The statute took effect in 2010 and could be used to bring charges in cases where no clear traffic law was violated, but the driver is at fault.

Steve Vaccaro is the Lefevre family’s lawyer. He says Haley’s law could allow for charging the truck driver. “Given the facts here, that the driver somehow managed to run over the cyclist with his front driver-side wheel, and drag the cyclist for 40 plus feet… and his bike,” he said, “we think it is unlikely that the driver didn’t notice.”

In 2009, a record low 258 people died.  The total for all of 2010 was 269.

But Noah Budnick of the group Transportation Alternatives says that number is still way to high, saying it exceeds the number killed by guns.

“Like the other crime and public safety issues that the NYPD solves, traffic deaths and injuries are preventable. New Yorkers deserve more leadership than Ray Kelly’s acceptance of the status quo,” Budnick said.

Transportation Alternatives held a protest Wednesday at NYC police headquarters.  The group has been particularly incensed by a recent incident in Williamsburg, where a driver left the scene after fatally colliding with Brooklyn resident Mathieu Lefevre.  Police did not bring charges, saying “that’s why they call it an accident.”  TA calls that “a cavalier attitude,” towards enforcing traffic laws.

Budnick noted  Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s private foundation has contributed some $125 million to reduce traffic deaths in third world countries.

But,NYPD spokesman Paul Browne says police have  issued 770,000 summons for moving violations this year, and that traffic accidents have declined by almost half over the last ten years in New York City.

In an email, Browne said:  “The  NYPD, which  has  3,700 uniformed and civilian personnel engaged in traffic safety and enforcement, more than any Police Department in the nation, has  issued over 770,000 summonses for  moving violations so far this year, and has made over 8,000 arrests for drunken driving. The department has seized 1,363 vehicles in connection with DWI and other offenses. Over 21,000 vehicles have been seized since the program began in  1999. We regularly stop and summons drivers  for unsafe, accident-related  practices such as use of a hand-held phones while driving.”

Browne has not yet responded to an email request for more details in its summons.  But as Transportation Nation’s Alex Goldmark has reported from an examination of earlier data released by the NYPD, this year the department issued more tickets for tinted windows than speeding.

Watch a video short about a desk toy who uses Google Street View to take a virtual road trip. (Link)

Houston’s red light camera squabble has yet to be resolved. (Link)

Drag racers and drug smugglers drive Houston’s car thefts. (Link)

Welding work on the 2nd Avenue Subway (photo by Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

Blasting on the Second Avenue Subway project was temporarily halted after complaints about smoke and dust from nearby residents. (New York Times, New York Daily News)

More on paying for the Tappan Zee Bridge project: Governor Cuomo is looking for alternative financing (Bloomberg) — but says talk of leveraging pension funds for infrastructure is “premature.” (Poughkeepsie Journal)

Two California representatives want federal help with a struggling airport. (Los Angeles Times)

NPR finishes up its series on fuel economy with a look at making gasoline-powered engines more efficient. (NPR)

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey received a negative credit rating outlook. (The Record)

Florida’s rejected high-speed rail funding is now California’s gain. (Politico)

Ford and GM have a bitter rivalry that sometimes devolves into name calling. (Wall Street Journal)

If you see a NYPD officer rappelling down the Roosevelt Island Tram, don’t be alarmed — it’s only an exercise. (NY1)

And: a map of every U.S. road accident victim between 2001 – 2009 (Guardian)

(Photo: (cc) Flickr user Global Jet)

[Updated with comments from NYPD]

(Alex Goldmark, Transportation Nation) The NYPD issued more tickets for tinted windows violations than speeding so far this year. That’s one little tidbit to come out of a new data dump that has road safety advocates excited. New York City traffic data is coming online, allowing anyone to evaluate which streets are the safest, and even which police precincts are the most active in traffic enforcement.

The NYPD has released some–but not all– of the data required under New York City’s Saving Lives Through Better Information Bill (human readable background here). You can now see how many tickets each police precinct has issued for 36 different categories of moving violations. The law requires the NYPD to have three kinds of data available online. Moving violations figures by category and precinct have been posted. Crashes by location and data on injuries and fatalities have yet to be released. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told Transportation Nation, “As soon as department computer personnel work out the technical requirements for accurately accumulating  motor vehicle accidents, the data will be posted.”

The NYPD has issued 530,826 moving violations in the first five months of 2011. According to a WNYC analysis of the first data released, not wearing a seat belt is the top offense (if you include not using a car seat for children), eeking out cell phone use, each with a bit over 81,000 tickets. Combined, those two offenses are about 30 percent of all summonses issued in the five boroughs in 2011. Browne says those violations top the list because they are easier to enforce. ”Seat belts and cell phone violations are commonly observed and they do not require special equipment like radar guns, to document or the specialized training that Highway Patrol has in stopping and often pursuing speeders.” He added. “Also, illegal  cell phone use, because of its link to accidents and fatalities,  has been the subject of special quarterly enforcement efforts which tend to boost the numbers significantly.”

Safer streets advocates like Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives is excited to see this law take effect. ”This will show where there are the most crashes and the most common factors that contribute to them. Then, that can be compared to summonsing data and help the NYPD target their limited resources on the most dangerous locations and behaviors.”

For example, Transportation Alternatives and the NYPD paired up on Wednesday to target a dangerous intersection in Williamsburg with an education campaign. Signs were made to remind cars they must yield to pedestrians and bikes, seen here. “We partnered with the local precinct to advance our shared goal of safety,” said Budnick. “Now that the Saving Lives through Better Information Act is in effect, this event a great template for anyone to work with their local precinct to reduce crashes.”

This kind of data has been closely guarded by the NYPD in the past. The department has turned over some similar data to Transportation Nation in the past, including bus lane enforcement, but have also frequently declined to provide data on other occasions, including bike ticketing.

Under the new law, the NYPD will issue a monthly report with this data. We’ll keep an eye on it, especially after the crash data is posted, and see what we can learn about street safety and moving violations. Stay tuned.

Mapping the Tickets
WNYC has requested data from the NYPD on the number and locations of cycle summonses several times, starting in March. With no response from NYPD, we asked our readers and listeners to help us map the scope of the crackdown, as laid out in the map above.

This week, the NY Post cited an unnamed police source saying there have been almost 14,000 tickets issued to city cyclists so far this year–a jump of almost 50 percent over the same period last year–and that the tickets are scattered widely around the city but with far fewer in Staten Island and the Bronx. Neither the NYPD nor the Bloomberg administration would confirm to WNYC that those numbers are accurate, but the figure seems probable given our past reporting and other efforts to quantify the crack down. The geography is also consistent with our crowdsourced findings.

Red light running was the most common offense, though riding on the sidewalk was close behind, especially in the outer boroughs, where cyclists cited poor road conditions or safety as an excuse for riding on the sidewalk. If you click through the pins on the map above to read the “stories” of the tickets, many describe the circumstances and conversations they had with police.

According to this sample, it is fairly common for ticketed cyclists to beat the ticket in court, though many did not win their cases.

Who Is Getting Tickets
Richard Vaudrey, an Australian student who was ticketed for riding on the sidewalk felt it was unfair because he was going “slower than a walking pace” and he says it wasn’t unsafe. He writes, “I used to be impressed that in NY there is a cop on every corner — now I have a different opinion!”

Numerous cyclists admit they regularly run red lights, and several made the case it was a reasonable thing to do. Gal Potashnick was ticketed for running a red light on Bedford Ave in Brooklyn. Like several others, he thinks that’s OK sometimes. “In the case of red lights and stop signs, I feel that if the intersection is not full of foot traffic or heavy car traffic, and it’s not peak travel time, yielding should be OK. It doesn’t make sense to sit and wait at a light when there is no one else on the road, and stopping at every red light and stop sign is extremely inefficient.”

Some other cyclists also lobbied for what they call the Idaho Stop: treating red lights as a stop sign that you can go through if there are no pedestrian in the crosswalk.

That kind of reasoning about the letter of the law is exactly what drove pedestrians to write us to laud the NYPD for ticketing cyclists more this year. Stephen Loges was “mowed down” by a bike in Central Park and wants cyclists to behave better. He writes, “walk just a block or two down any street or avenue and you’ll see at least a half dozen violations by people on bikes: running red lights, riding the wrong way, riding on the sidewalk.”

By contrast, food deliverymen don’t seem to see a rise in ticketing. We spoke with several of them in some of the highest-ticketed areas. None had received a ticket while working, nor knew of any other delivery person who has been ticketed. Though several did say they are aware of the crackdown and now stop at lights when police are present.

A Quick History of the 2011 NYC Bike Ticketing Crackdown
Cycling has more than doubled in NYC since 2006. As more and more cyclists roll onto city streets–carrying with them the age old New York habit of running red lights and riding the wrong way down streets–complaints to city agencies jumped. Then, in mid-January, as we’ve been reporting, the NYPD initiated Operation Safe Cycle, a citywide step-up in enforcement of cyclists who violate the traffic law.

There have long been tensions between New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, which bubbled into the press during the snow storms, when Sadik-Khan seemed to blame Kelly publicly for the Bloomberg administration’s inept handling of snow removal during the blizzard of 2010.

Shortly after the city launched Operation Safe Cycle a memo on what and how to ticket cyclists was distributed within the NYPD. The initial mid-winter ticket blitz immediately attracted the ire of hard core cyclists who felt the brunt of it. Central and Prospect Parks became the flash points for the police policy after hundreds of tickets were given out to cyclists during car free hours when cyclists claim it is safe to ignore signals if no pedestrians are present. The memo also appeared to carry instructions that were contrary to the law, in some cases.

Over time, and after multiple meetings between NYPD, elected officials, cyclists, anti-bike lane advocates, and other community leaders, a consensus was reached that the best policy for ticketing cyclists in Central Park was to focus on safety for pedestrians, which means allowing red light running in some cases.

Ticketing remains widespread and common throughout the city.

The Law, and What’s Next
A bike counts as a vehicle in New York. As such, it must obey the Vehicle Traffic Law code. Fines for bike offenses are just like fines for driving offenses, they can vary depending on circumstance and level of infraction.

Building on the Central Park consensus to focus on dangerous cycling, there is talk of a general “truce” between cyclists and police. Paul Steely White, the head of Transportation Alternatives met with the NYPD Chief of the Transportation Bureau, James Tuller, earlier this month.

“We brought with us a number of recommendations,” Steely White told Transportation Nation. “Those included more police officers on bicycles,” which would send a law and order signal that cycling is a legitimate mode of transportation, and cyclists need to abide by the law. He also asked for enforcement guidelines that focus on the most dangerous infractions, such as riding against the flow of traffic, riding on the sidewalk, and for officers to exercise some discretion to target cases where there are pedestrians present and cyclists not yielding.

Steely White said he also asked for and “alternative sanction program,” like that of Portland, where police issue warnings, cyclists can go through a punitive class and pay a nominal fee for some infractions. “They seemed very open. We were taken aback at how open they were,” Steely White said. Since the meeting, Steely White says he’s heard fewer complaints from cyclists of tickets for non-dangerous behavior.

When asked to confirm that a citywide consensus might be in the works to change police ticketing policy, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, Paul Browne replied, “no.”

Ticketing is here to stay, just as bikes are. But what earns you a ticket, may be slowly evolving.

Follow Transportation Nation on Twitter.