Concerns about vehicle parking on Buffalo bike lanes

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A 2 On Your Side viewer has raised concerns about vehicle parking on the city’s bike lanes.

“Recently the city installed several new bike lanes, some of which eliminated parking. Naturally, many drivers decided to ignore the new paint. Parking on bike lanes is an epidemic in the city and the city refuses to do anything about it.”

In 2022, the Buffalo Common Council passed a resolution banning parking on a bike path. Mayor Byron Brown ultimately signed the resolution.

Since the law was signed, Councilman David Rivera says his office hasn’t received complaints about it like before.

“I haven’t seen these complaints,” Rivera said. “I frequent the street every day and I’m constantly monitoring to make sure no one is parked in the bike lanes, not only here, but throughout the city of Buffalo.”

Although it is illegal to park in a bike lane, there is no quantifiable data to determine whether the problem is widespread.

This is because the citation given for parking in a bike lane doesn’t actually specify what they did.

A city spokesperson told 2 On Your Side that “the City of Buffalo Parking Department enforced bike lanes for ‘no parking and no parking’ violations, which includes bike lanes designated areas of our city.”

When you search for bike lane parking violation data on the city’s open data site, you don’t find any useful data.

Rivera says the city needs to specifically track these violations.

“There should be a category so we can track it,” Rivera said.

Kevin Heffernan, director of communications at GObike Buffalo, as the problem of vehicle parking on bike lanes persists after the law was passed.

“A lot of people consider this to be auxiliary parking, which it absolutely is not,” Heffernan said. “We want to remind people that if a cyclist has to avoid your illegally parked vehicle and it is hit, you are just as guilty, legally, as the car that hit them.”

Like Rivera, Heffernan says the city needs to track the number of citations issued by those who violate the bike lane law.

“We hope this will be an easy solution,” Heffernan said. “We hope that in a few months we will come back to the open data and see that these tickets have been distributed.”