SPRINGS, NY | Path Urged for David Disick (Updated)

Poster shown at the Farmers Market, Springs, East
Hampton, N.Y., today. There is a bike path up to
Barnes General Store, but then it ends.

August 15, 2015–David Disick was hit by a car on July 4 weekend. He was taken to hospital in "critical condition". 

A family obituary notice describes him as having died "in a bicycle accident" on July 8 at the age of 77:

Loving son of Sylvia. Dear partner of Marcia Tucker. Beloved father of Justine Leger (Phil) and Adam Disick. Brother of Shelley Mendell. Adoring grandfather of Emme. 

David will be remembered for his sense of adventure, passion for life and insatiable curiosity. The lives he touched were many, his kindness and charm will not be forgotten.

David Disick exhibited a photo at Ashawagh Hall within the last year.

The painting had been sold.

It was a photograph of what appears to be a painter's box of oil-paint tubes.

Photograph by David Disick at Ashawagh Hall.

While East Hampton Town thinks about a bicycle path, could they please look at the terrible corner in front of the Springs Library? 

It is dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists, especially at night. There is zero shoulder and on top of that there is a huge pothole at the corner.

Free Biking in Paris

Free Biking in Paris. May is Bike Month NYC, according to Transportation Alternatives, so it's a good time to report on a trip up and down the Seine with my wife Alice using the Velib' ("Velo-libre" or "free bike") system. This is the less-than-a-year-old brainchild of the socialist Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. Paris has more than 230 miles of well-marked cycling lanes and the Velib' has been a big success with more than 20 million trips as of this month, or 70,000 trips per day. At this pace, by the first anniversary on the day after Bastille Day, July 15, the Velib' will have attracted an amazing 25 million trips. To add our two more trips to the counter, we first buy a Velib' map, sold at any newsstand. The Google map of Paris has its green arrow pointed exactly to where we decide to join the Seine from the north. We decide to start with the bicycle route on the north (right) bank of the Seine headed east, ride this until the Seine-side bicycle path ends (it goes north), then cross over the Seine and take the bicycle path west on the south (left) bank to the Branly Museum. Our trip has some lessons for New York City and other cities! A friend of mine from Lyons says the free-bike movement started there but Amsterdam had the white bikes years ago and may have been first. The problem in Amsterdam is that the bikes got stolen and were just repainted. Harder to do with the easily identifiable Paris bikes, and anyway they get your credit card and the locks are pretty secure. Washington, DC is experimenting with a much smaller program than the one in Paris. To continue, click here (map and photos included).

Chelsea Intersection Made Safer

Problems are global, politics is local. Earlier this year in May, an elderly Penn South resident was killed by a truck as she was walking across Ninth Ave. at the south side of 23rd St. Since I overlook this corner and have witnessed the aftermath of several fatalities resulting from speeding downtown cars at this intersection, I described it as the neighborhood’s “dead man’s curve” in an article in Chelsea Now by Al Amateau.

Something has now been done about it. Kernan Huttick and the Penn South residents' council lobbied three people: Traffic Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan at NYC DOT, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (who lives in London Terrace on the NW corner of the intersection), and State Sen. Tom Duane (a resident of Penn South, which starts at the NE corner).

Commisioner Sadik-Khan, who came from an engineering firm and has an explicit “green it up” agenda, devised an interesting solution that is a twofer. It puts an island in the middle of Ninth Avenue so that elderly people can make the trip across Ninth Avenue in two stages if necessary. At the same time it creates a bicycle lane, courtesy of DOT's Bicycle Projects Group, described as “awesome” by Amy Pfeiffer of Transportation Alternatives. Here's a DOT slide show on the twofer innovation - creating a bicycle lane and an island for Chelsea's senior citizens.

DOT gets great credit for taking an edgy action to deal with a real and persistent problem. The improvement will certainly make it safer to cross and the bicycle lane is in use. Now we watch to see how it works in practice.