"Recent studies have found that over a third of bicyclists run red lights, bike lines are blocked 60 percent of the time by cars, trucks, and taxis and that New York City is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States for bicyclists," his office said yesterday.

Transportation reform advocates shot back at Liu's statements: They said that he put the safety burden on cyclists by calling for mandatory helmets, as well as casting them in a negative light. They also claimed that he need to do more to address dangerous driving, as vehicular accidents are 356 times more likely to cause injury than bicycle-pedestrian crashes.

Now, the Department of Transportation has taken issue with Liu's charges, too.

At a press conference today, the mayoral hopeful presented the DOT with a list of safety recommendations -- such as making helmets mandatory -- to implement before the program's official July start.

But some transportation advocates have taken issue with Liu's statements. They claim that the comptroller -- who has supported the program but did not voice these concerns during its development -- is incorrectly shifting the safety burden to riders.

The court document sheds a little light on how this controversial policy gets put into practice, and suggests that cops themselves might not understand how it works.

The New York Police Department waited four days after Heyworth's death before investigating the accident. Her widower, Jacob Stevens, claims that NYPD investigators dragged their feet because she wasn't killed instantly. By the time they went to gather key evidence, he says, it had already been destroyed, meaning Webb got off the hook for Heyworth's death.
 
Stevens is filing a lawsuit against the NYPD today, alleging the department's policies prevented adequate investigation of this and similar cases.

Here's what's up: a reader was recently riding away from the Bedford Avenue L-station and saw a squad car and two officers stationed near North 12th Street, near the corner of McCarren park, where she encountered a bike checkpoint -- an encounter which prompted us to ask a few questions about the NYPD's efforts.

Sam Levin

New "Citi Bikes" unveiled at City Hall today.

"I will certainly pay and ride one," the mayor told reporters this morning, standing in front of the new bicycles. "Am I going to do it often? Probably not. But I will certainly do it right away...so that I can say I did it."

That way, the mayor said, if someone asks him what it's like, he can describe his experience. You hear that folks? He's just a regular guy like us.

When a reporter later suggested that maybe he wanted to give one a try right there and then, Bloomberg declined: "I gotta get myself a helmet first."

Mathieu Lefevre's family and the NYPD had their day in court yesterday.

Questioned by Supreme Court Judge Peter Moulton, the Lefevre family's lawyer, Steve Vaccaro, laid out the history of the case. For weeks after Lefevre's death, the NYPD refused to provide the family with any information about its investigation into Lefevre's death -- in fact, it was more communicative with the truck driver who killed Lefevre, and with the press, who were told by officers soon after the crash that there was no criminality in Lefevre's death.