Noah Kazis

Pretty much anywhere you go within the bike-share service area, you'll be within a few blocks of a bike-share station. There's probably a station around the corner from your office. Odds are, it'll be a boon for any of those tricky diagonal trips that aren't well-served by the subway.

Webster Avenue could be the place where Select Bus Service reaches the next level. At a community meeting Wednesday evening, the Department of Transportation and the MTA presented three visions of improved bus service for the corridor [PDF]. Two of the templates can already be found on the streets of New York -- bus lanes running curbside and bus lanes offset from the curb by one lane -- and bus riders are seeing travel times improve 15 to 20 percent thanks to those improvements. But the potential for a real breakthrough lies in the third template -- buses running in the center lanes with elevated platforms -- which would be a major step toward true bus rapid transit.

The Department of Transportation unveiled a new design for one of Brooklyn's most important transit hubs at a community board meeting Monday evening. By turning a single block of Van Sinderen Avenue into a one-way street, DOT plans to improve bus service and build new pedestrian space at East New York's Broadway Junction, which serves five subway lines and five bus routes [PDF].

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

On her way into the office this morning, Streetsblog development manager Christa Orth spotted some fluorescent safety vests as she pedaled up Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue. A DOT crew was out in front of local coffee shop Gorilla Coffee, which had agreed to maintain a new bike corral in front of their store. One parking space is being replaced with room for about eight bikes -- or as Gorilla might call them, seven new customers.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation's commitment to replacing any parking spaces the agency builds on top of is a one-way ratchet toward ever-increasing amounts of automobile infrastructure. For projects at Flushing Commons and the Lower East Side's SPURA site, slated to be built over surface parking lots, EDC has pushed for the new developments to include hundreds of parking spaces in addition to replacing the old parking.

Bike-share, no doubt, is going to be a major addition to the streets of New York -- in terms of both impact and visibility. Within the service area, there's going to be a station every few blocks. And some of those stations are going to have a lot of bicycle docks: 59 in many locations, and a whopping 118 next to Grand Central. Thanks to the small footprint of bikes, however, overall this new form of transit will consume relatively little space while allowing people to make tens of thousands of trips per day.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, or SPURA, is the largest undeveloped, city-owned area south of 96th Street. Located along the south side of Delancey Street at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, SPURA currently consists of five empty lots, the leftovers of a 1967 slum clearance project. Though mid-century towers-in-a-park style housing was built elsewhere on the site, these lots have remained vacant since the tenements were torn down 45 years ago, displacing a population that was two-thirds black and Hispanic.

Hungry for more bike-share maps? Yeah, us too. Thanks to Steven Romalewski, the director of the CUNY Graduate Center's Mapping Service, we've got our fix.