From: The Team, Led by Mayor de Blasio To: New York City’s Bike Master Plan Open Forum Subject: Action Memorandum Regarding Impetus and Goals for New York’s Bike Master Plan Date: April 8, 2018 Recommended Action Our team recommends that New York City expand Bike Master Plan, which was launched to promote bike usage through increasing bike lanes and offering bike share systems. This plan revealed the city’s ambition in remarking streets and increasing bike ridership and was set to make the city's streets safer for the cycling community, pedestrians, and motorists. Now, it is the time to expand the sustainability agenda and discuss the progress to date and the next step to move forward. Issues As early as 2006, New York City Department of …show more content…
This plan was set to achieve multiple goals including increasing safety for the cycling community, fighting the obesity epidemic, promoting local business, and ultimately encouraging more residents to start riding their bicycles around the city. First of all, this plan emphasizes heavily on safety for the cycling community, pedestrians, and motorists. New bike lanes provide cycling community with safeguard and the lower speed of traffic also further increases street safety for pedestrians and motorists. Second, study shows that regular physical activity, such as biking, helps prevent heart disease and reduces the risk of depression, cancer, and diabetes. Third, with more and more people riding their bicycles around the city, local business can also be benefited from this initiative. For example, Ninth Avenue bike lane is correlated with an increase in retail sales in local businesses by 49%. Moreover, NYC was …show more content…
Sponsored by Citigroup and Mastercard, Bike share program demonstrated the most extensive outreach effort ever done for a transportation project.Citigroup committed $41 million over five years in return for Citi’s logo being displayed on the bikes and docking stations, and Mastercard agreed to contribute $6.5 million to have all of the docking stations installed with “PayPass Tap & Go” payment points. Bike share program initially targeted medium-and high-density areas of the city to maximize the success as these areas were expected to generate immediate results after the implementation. The program scored an initial victory with a total of 105,359 annual members, 955,032 trips of ridership, and 1,686,310 miles traveled by the public within one year of operation in 2014, the statistics fully demonstrated the public confidence in this bike sharing program. As Citi and Mastercard mostly shared the initial project cost and the program itself generates consistent revenue streams from membership fees, the city bears the minimum financial burden on the balance sheet. Besides, increased usage of biking facilities is directly linked to reduced greenhouse gas