Ben Fried

So yesterday the Daily News published an opinion piece on bike-share that framed it not as a new option for New Yorkers to get around, but as another tense, dangerous showdown in the eternal confrontation between bikes and cars. Yawn.

It looks like demand for bike-share in New York is going to be intense. In the first 24 hours of membership sales, more than 4,000 people signed up for annual Citi Bike subscriptions, according to NYC DOT.

A big announcement is coming later this morning, but the news is all over Twitter: You can now buy a Citi Bike annual membership.

The Post revealed earlier this week that NYPD trains only one officer per precinct to use a radar gun, which partially explains why speeding enforcement is close to non-existent in most neighborhoods. But while NYPD thinly spreads local precincts' speeding enforcement resources over thousands of miles of surface streets where pedestrians and cyclists are at risk of getting struck by drivers, the department does have a number of officers trained to apprehend speeders. The problem is that they're positioned on the city's limited access highways.

So John Liu has managed to take an excellent idea -- tolling the East River bridges -- and turn it into a policy disaster.

After the first Citi Bike stations were installed in Bed Stuy and Clinton Hill over the weekend, NYC DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Transportation Nation that bike-share implementation will "be moving through the Brooklyn area and then into Manhattan over the next few weeks." And it looks like stations have now been installed at least as far west as Adelphi Street and as far north as Flushing Avenue.

With Citi Bike set to launch later this spring, the long wait for bike-share in New York City is almost over. But I couldn't bring myself to wait an instant longer, so recently I headed over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to try out some Citi Bikes.

After blocking the authorization of NYC's first speed enforcement cameras, State Senator Marty Golden (R - Bay Ridge) has introduced a bill that he says will lead to safer streets while placating the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police union that opposes speed cams.

Usually when we hear news from a Streetsblog Network member about the Missouri Department of Transportation, it's because the agency is blocking ideas like a complete streets bill or a highway-to-boulevard conversion in downtown St. Louis. The advocates at BikeWalkKC report that now the agency is feeling some grassroots resistance to its cars-first approach:

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill