Bike Revolution: More of New York on Two Wheels

By Julia Zaychenko

Bicycling in the city has moved from a fringe activity for the moderately insane to a part of many New Yorkers’ everyday lives.

An estimated 150,000 people in New York City commute to work on their bikes every day, according to Transportation Alternatives (TA), a bicycle advocacy group. Thousands more ride their bicycles to get around, exercise or just have a good time.

This change is a result of the work of organizations and institutions created around bicycling and bicycle advocacy within the last 25 years. Those groups, such as TA, environmental action group Times-Up! and the organization Recycle-A-Bike, have also been instrumental in the growth of a distinct bicycle culture in the city, or rather a set of varied subcultures situated around biking.

Now with the cost of gas always precarious and that of public transportation on the rise coupled with growing environmental awareness in New York City, the bike is the new car.

“[My bike] was one of the first things I bought when I moved here, because this city is the perfect place to bike,” said cyclist Philip Newhardt.

Ask anyone but the least faint of heart, in the 1970s and 80s bicycling in New York was one of the most dangerous things you could do, and was mostly reserved for messengers and anyone else crazy enough to brave the streets.

There were no bike lanes, and aggressive New York drivers had little to no awareness or consideration for anything that wasn’t a car. Transportation Alternatives was founded in 1973 by people who were concerned about high rates of accidents and injuries to pedestrians and cyclists.

The group raised voices in support of non-polluting transportation, biking included, and began to advocate for the rights and safety of bikers in the city.

In 1987, a man named Bill dePaola felt that New York could really use more bikes and less cars. He founded the environmental action group Times-Up! and sought to make biking cool and social, organizing rides and getting the activity in the public eye.

PODCAST: Bikers on biking Julia Podcast

Now what is referred to as bike culture has grown on a practical as well as a social level in New York, which joins cities like San Francisco and Seattle in terms of the amount of people who choose to take to two wheels. A lot of it thanks to the work of the two advocacy groups, one working with the city to lobby for bike lanes and car-free parks, and the other working on the street to make biking fun and cool.

The infrastructure of New York City makes it difficult to effectively incorporate bicycle traffic. In a city somewhat known to run on cars and trucks, where even pedestrians are regarded as walking roadblocks, making room for another type of vehicle on the road is a continuing challenge for the city administration.

Especially early on when officials started out being forced to acknowledge the needs of bicyclists, at a time when biking was not a common or profitable activity.

“It always felt like bicycles were really an afterthought for New York City streets,” said Wiley Norvell, communications director for Transportation Alternatives. “The streets were laid out for cars, the serious transportation, and then you would just kind of fit in on the edges, wherever you could find room for yourself.”

Through the lobbying work of Transportation Alternatives, bike lanes started appearing on New York streets, in theory ensuring a portion of the road to cyclists. With more bike lanes came more riders, coming along as at first high gas prices and then increasing environmental and health awareness pushed more people to get on their bikes.

After years of hard lobbying and bicycling being pushed to the side for more pressing issues, the city is finally starting to get intelligent and creative about how to organize shared streets, putting well designed bike lanes in places where bikers will use them. “It’s not like they’re putting bike lanes everywhere but they’re putting bike lanes on streets that cyclists do use. It feels a lot more intuitive, and like there was a lot more though put into it,” said Norvell.

On the social side there is no doubt that biking has become a cool thing to do, from the weekend warriors who get spiffed up in racing gear to zoom through the city’s major parks to the hipsters one can see casually lounging against their fixed-gears outside trendy Williamsburg cafes.

According to dePaola, a part of this formation of a culture of cool around the bike is due to a ride his group started promoting in 1992 called Critical Mass. This ride got started in San Francisco in the same year as part of an effort to promote non-polluting transportation and agitate directly on the streets for more safety and inclusion for bikers in the city.

Pseudo-anarchistic in nature, the once-a-month ride in its original form consisted of a group of riders, the bigger the better, simply taking up the streets, riding through the city with no planned route and literally stopping car traffic as they went. The ethos of the ride was taking street space away from motorized vehicles, which were seen as the controlling element, and giving it to a larger, more environmentally friendly public.

Video: Ride With Critical Mass

DePaola saw that in San Francisco the Critical Mass ride was drawing vast numbers of cyclists together, and viewed the ride as a way of getting the same effect in New York.

“Biking at the time was still viewed as a dangerous activity, but Critical Mass made it cool and acceptable to bike, and created a space for a community to develop around biking,” said dePaola. “There were other rides but they were much less inclusive, catering to a specific type of biker. On a Critical Mass ride I would see all types of people, yuppies, punks, messengers, kids, all getting together to ride.”

For Times-Up! establishing a more bike-friendly environment in New York was about getting more bikers on the streets, a matter of supply and demand. The more people on bikes, the more the city would be forced to acknowledge biking as a legitimate form of transportation and to legislate measures that would increase the safety of biking.

It’s an ongoing process which has only recently begun to speed up from a snail’s pace, complicated by the pervasive culture of the automobile which Americans are known for and which is still deeply embedded in the minds of many New Yorkers, as well as the complex and often conflicting relationship between bikers and pedestrians.

“Neighborhood opposition to bike lanes is this sort of knee-jerk response, people saying, ‘Why is there a bike lane on this street, we don’t see any bikers, this is our neighborhood, we drive, bike lanes don’t belong here,’ not acknowledging our streets as public spaces or as part of a broader network,” said Norvell. “With that, when it comes to a referendum of bicycling on principle, we don’t have much tolerance for that, and we’ll roll against it every time.”

Pun intended. In any case, especially in these times where money is tight and there is an increasing concern for the environment and air quality in the city, there is a consensus that reaches as far as City Hall that promoting biking as a valid form of transportation and making it safe for people to bike is good and necessary.

Whereas problems between bikers and motorists can be improved with legislation resulting from legitimization of the bicycle’s place on city streets, the issue of bicyclists and pedestrians is more complicated.

The war between the two groups is as well known as that between bikers and cars, and unlike the first battle there is no consensus, but rather opinion varies on a large scale. In March an article appeared in the New York Times by Robert Sullivan, in which he urged bikers to be more courteous and careful and to abide by the laws that apply to them as moving vehicles, especially with regard to their behavior towards pedestrians.

Many bicyclists see the point he is making and agree to some extent, but can’t absolve pedestrians entirely from their own responsibilities to follow rules and look when crossing the street.

“Pedestrians should know better. If people aren’t going to look [when crossing the street against a light], I hate to say it, it sounds cruel, but they kind of deserve what they get. It seems a little harsh, but you have to take responsibility for your own actions,” said Eric Berkau, a bicycle commuter.

Many bikers find it difficult to stand being relegated to the end of the line on both sides, by cars and pedestrians.

Susan Lindell, a bike mechanic and cyclist, has had more than one run-in with a pedestrian who wasn’t looking out for her to be biking in the street. “It’s just about common sense, people should be more aware of where they’re going and the fact that bikers are out there,” said Lindell.

On the other hand, TA has come up with a system that they claim makes the most sense and provides a rubric for road relations. TA ranks modes of transportation in order based on factors such as how much space they take up, how polluting they are and how much they are involved in the function of the city.

In their book, pedestrians rank the highest, followed by bikes and other types of non-motorized transportation, with cars and other motorized vehicles at the bottom. Bikes must always yield to pedestrians; cars must always yield to bikes and pedestrians.

“Pedestrians are at the top of the food chain. They take up the least amount of space, it’s non-polluting, and pedestrian traffic is a big part of the city’s economy, as shopping and tourism are pedestrian based,” Norvell said.

TA actually does most of its advocacy work for pedestrians, and argues for the ranking system on the basis that in the end it’s good for bicyclists because it promotes a positive attitude towards biking on the part of pedestrians. Essentially, if people aren’t afraid of bikers they will be more likely to support biking in their neighborhoods.

One thing that can’t be denied is that biking is now an integral part of city life, even as perspectives on it as such remain varied. “We’re engaged in ways of coming up with solutions that work,” said Norvell.

“Fortunately we’re at a time in the city where New York’s innovating, they’re troubleshooting problems that nobody’s had to deal with before, to come up with a more elegant blend of all the different uses that are put on our streets. No other city in the world has streets like New York.”