Board lists 27 spots for bike racks

By N. Clark Judd

Community Board 8 members have come up with 27 locations in the Riverdale-Kingsbridge area where the city can plant a bike rack.

The city is planning to install some 5,000 bicycle racks across the five boroughs by 2011. Several months ago, the Bronx Borough President’s Office released a study, showing there wasn’t a single bike rack in all of Riverdale and only 18 in Kingsbridge and Kingsbridge Heights.

Hoping to see some racks come to Riverdale, several board members conducted their own study of viable locations.

Led by Thomas Durham, Board 8’s housing committee chairman, who knows a lot of bicycle enthusiasts in the Riverdale-Kingsbridge area, a subcommittee of the board determined that the city Department of Transportation should install racks at park entrances, playgrounds, libraries, shopping areas, subway stops and in major parking lots.

The subcommittee proposed locations including the Skyview shopping center; the No. 1 subway stops at Broadway and West 231st and West 238th streets; high-traffic street corners such as the intersection of Kingsbridge and Jerome avenues, along the Johnson Avenue and Riverdale Avenue commercial corridors, and the River Plaza Mall in Marble Hill; and locations around Van Cortlandt Park, the Jerome Park Reservoir and Ewen Park.

The board as a whole will consider the list at its next meeting in February.

This is part of the January 29, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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