Vote on Vine Street. Then Own the Vote.

Next Wednesday, September 16, the council’s transportation committee will do something it has avoided since spring. It will vote on the Vine Street bike lanes — up or down, on the record, with names attached — instead of voting to study them, hold them, or ask for them in a different font.

This newspaper has said since July that the study was a stall. It was. The “additional analysis” the department produced in August turned out to be its 2023 parking count with a week of new sampling on top, and Councilmember Alicia Rendón was right to say so on the record. But the stall is over, by the committee’s own unanimous motion, and the neighborhood should spend the next seven days on the question rather than the delay.

On the question, we come down for the lanes. Here is why, briefly, because the arguments have been made at length by better witnesses than us.

Tobias Ferrand’s volunteers mapped thirty-four injury collisions on this stretch of Vine since 2015 and filed the map into the committee’s record. That is not an estimate. It is a list. Every one of those numbers was a person on a bicycle, and the street as it is drawn today did not protect any of them.

The lanes cost roughly $400,000 less if they go in with the fall resurfacing than if they go in afterward, and the resurfacing window closes the first week of October. A no vote next week is not a neutral vote. It is a vote to either abandon the lanes or pay nearly half a million dollars to do the same work later. The committee should say which.

Nadia Constantino’s merchants have made the best case against, and it deserves better than it has gotten from the department. Their sign-in sheets and hand-counted curb-turnover logs are real data collected by people with real money at stake, and the city’s answer — an old count in a new binder — was an insult to the work. If the lanes go in, the committee should order a genuine twelve-month count of parking turnover on the affected blocks, published quarterly, and commit now to what it will do if the merchants turn out to be right. Own the vote, and own what comes after it.

And the committee should not repeat the trick of August. The Walk of Fame accounting motion — the simple question of whether the repaving contract contains a liquidated-damages clause anyone can find — has now been continued twice for lack of afternoon. It shares the room next Wednesday. Dora Feldman has attended every hearing of the repaving era. She should not have to attend another one to hear that the item ran out of time.

We have watched this committee find reasons not to decide things since March. We have also watched it, on one crowded afternoon in August, pay for a bus bench, patch a vending gap and set this vote — three decisions in three hours, when it finally decided to decide. It can do the job. Next Wednesday, it should do the job, and then it should stand behind the result.

Yes or no. Then own it.