City bike boss rips brass and pedals off - 11 July, 2006
The city’s bicycle boss quit in a huff last week – lashing out at Transportation Department brass for not making the streets safer for cyclists, the Daily News has learned. In an angry e-mail sent on his last day Friday, former Bicycle Program Director Andrew Vesselinovitch blamed the DOT for installing dangerous bumps on the Williamsburg Bridge bike path and for failing to build more bike lanes.

The bumps – actually 2-inch, raised expansion-joint covers – were removed in December 2005 after The News chronicled $10 million in lawsuits brought by severely injured cyclists. “We could have saved the city settlements for lawsuits [and residents injuries] resulting from the puzzling addition of unusually high expansion joint covers on the Williamsburg Bridge,” Vesselinovitch wrote in the e-mail, which was posted yesterday to StreetsBlog.com.

“I brought this to [the Division of] Bridges’ attention in 2003 and was told by [DOT Deputy Commissioner] Michael Primeggia [to] butt out,” he added in the hastily typed message sent to Manhattan Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione and other colleagues Attorney Adam White, who represents eight cyclists injured on the bumps, called the e-mail a “smoking gun.”

“It’s shocking evidence that within the department they knew these were inappropriate and extremely dangerous from the beginning and they did nothing about it for years.” Vesselinovitch also took aim at DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall. In the past two years, only 15 miles of bike lanes were added, he wrote, when the DOT “could have produced plans for 40-50 miles of workable bike lanes each year.

“I waited for a long time for the direction from the commissioner’s office to change, or for the commissioner to be changed,” wrote Vesselinovitch, who is leaving to study architecture. “I hope that you won’t have to wait much longer.” In June, three cyclists were killed in the city.

Last year, 24 died, making it one of the most deadly years for cyclists in the past 10 years, advocates charge. A DOT spokeswoman declined to comment on Vesselinovitch’s e-mail, but pointed to the new Eighth Ave. bike lane and other projects, and noted that bike fatalities are down 50% over the same period last year.