The Wild Bunch [NYT]
By ROBERT SULLIVAN
Comments at: community.nytimes.com
SOMETIMES, when I am biking, I remember the ’80s, and I shudder. I remember, in other words, when biking was an extreme sport, when, if you were a biker, you had a lot of locks and a lot more nerve.
Just the other day, when I was enjoying the bike lane down Clinton Street in my neighborhood, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, I stopped at a red light. And after the crossing guard smiled and chatted with me, after the cars pulled up alongside me and did not honk, I experienced a flashback from 1987: my regular trip from West 113th Street to Central Park, navigating honks and taunts, the mayhem that was then on Cathedral Parkway.
In those days, when I got into the park, I thought I had really achieved something, in terms not of stamina or increased heart rate, but of survival. Riding a bike in New York was like spelunking or white-water rafting, and in those days, bikers traveled best at night, when traffic was light. In the absence of bike lanes, we looked for parks to move through; we stayed on the side streets, and most New Yorkers then did not believe bikers should be anywhere in the city, much less on the streets. This was what I was remembering the other day when, as the light changed, I began to pedal and a biker went racing by and nearly killed me.
Well, not literally. Literally, he only scared the bejesus out of me and brushed my arm, no big deal. The crossing guard shook her head. “Jerk,” she said.
When I got to Atlantic Avenue, a street I would be nervous about crossing if I were in an armored vehicle, I stopped to wait for the light as a helmetless man, riding with his child on a seat, weaved wobbly between me, the taxi and the pedestrians trying to cross, uttering not even an “on your right.” He pulled silently out into traffic, stopping halfway across the intersection to let a tractor-trailer wail by before he finished crossing against the light, the toddler in back thinking heaven knows what.
Meanwhile, another biker was about to pass him, and pedestrians in the intersection now scattered like deer. And I was thinking, “No wonder they hate us.”
Because they do hate us, they being nonbikers and us being bikers.
Stimulus bills with federal money for transportation come and go, but we bikers appear to be staying. For once in our biking lives, New York is really listening to us, helping our numbers grow, with new bike racks, bike shelters, biking incentives (a proposal for an indoor parking requirement for new buildings, for instance) and, of course, bike lanes.
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To be clear, cars are more likely to kill nonbikers; we still live in a world ruled by the ruthless car. But as someone who has been knocked off his bike by an S.U.V. making an illegal right on red (pretty hard, but I just got bruises and a busted front wheel), who has been hit by a cab veering into a bike lane (not that hard) and who has been knocked down as a pedestrian in a crosswalk by a Ford Econovan (really hard, as in broken knee, lots of stitches in the head and weeks of crutches and physical therapy), I admit that my knees feel wobbly when I see a guy ride against the light in a busy intersection with a child in the seat behind him.
As someone who has been honked and screamed at by drivers when I am proceeding carefully along a wide, bike-friendly street, I acknowledge that my blood boils, just from a public relations standpoint, when I see a guy do that. Because again, they hate us.
The nature of the hate has changed. Once, they hated us because we were a rarity, like a rat in the kitchen, a pest. Now, they hate us because we are ubiquitous.
In a 12-hour survey one day last summer, the city counted 12,583 bikers on the Staten Island Ferry, the East River bridges and the Hudson River bike path — up 35 percent from the year before in what Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, called an “unprecedented increase.” Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, estimates that 131,000 bikers in the city commute to work daily.
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There was a time when bikers couldn’t imagine the city giving to us, even when it tried. In a previous earth-friendly period, Mayor John Lindsay chickened out on bike lanes after Fifth Avenue businesses complained. In 1980, before “sustainable” was everybody’s middle name, Mayor Ed Koch put in bike lanes separated by concrete and asphalt barriers on Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, and then ripped them out after not seeing any bikers in them.
Today, the Transportation Department has gotten serious about biking, and in just three years, the agency has painted bike lanes (good), constructed bike lanes separated by parked cars (great) and bike lanes separated by medians or barriers (the best) and installed bike signals, bike signs and many bike symbols painted on the street. Some of these symbols are clear, although I’m not sure I understand others. What do the biker and double arrows mean when painted on a busy street without a bike lane? Good luck?
Though bikers are hated, pedestrian deaths and injuries on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea immediately declined in the area of the physically separated bike lane, as reported on streetsblog.org, news blog of the Livable Streets Initiative, which advocates creating sustainable cities. In December, Community Board 4 voted in favor of creating a bike lane on Eighth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets.
There are still detractors; Fox News aired a report a few months ago blaming the new bike lane on Grand Street for not only clogging up car traffic in Lower Manhattan but — potentially! — putting pedestrians’ lives in danger. Less reported was the story of the biker who was — actually! — killed by a truck driver in a hit-and-run in October. But despite such criticism, people are gradually losing the car-centric view of Manhattan and are sensing that the streets are for more than automobiles.
We bikers, in other words, have been on the receiving end. Now, as much as we would perhaps prefer not to, we must stop to look at ourselves and realize that we have a little giving to do. I am talking about perceptions, about the things we should do outside the letter of the law, like the way we try not to kill the person in front of us in the revolving doors.
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The Brooklyn Bridge is an important front in the bike publicity war; it is a place where bikes are losing. The essential conflict can be grossly caricatured like this: Guys dressed as if they are in the Pyrenees stage of the Tour de France try to set speed records as Italian tourists linger in the middle of the bridge to get a photo of their cousin, Paolo, backed by the Empire State Building.
Bikers won’t stop, fearing they will lose a few tenths of a second off their times; and tourists from former Soviet republics confuse the phrase “Get out of the bike lane, you jerk” with “Enjoy your stay.”
Confusion ensues, slowing down the furious bikers and dragging into the mix City Hall-area office workers who are just trying to get in a little lunch break walk-a-cise but are now risking loss of limb.
Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe.
Now, as the Tour de France vs. the tourist melee is exploding, the Really Cool Bikers attempt to skirt the scrum of tourists, using the moment of chaos as an obstacle course, causing tourists to break like pheasants after a bad shot. The Really Cool Bikers speed silently around terrified bystanders, leaving a trail of bike-induced horror. Even bike commuters complain about bikers on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Once, cars were the natural enemy of bikers, and vice versa. But as the Brooklyn Bridge biking shows, now that the city has made some progress in holding back the cars, bikers have begun to treat people the same way the cars they used to battle do — in other words, like the enemy.
Likewise, for pedestrians seeking to complain, bikes are easier to attack than cars, a fact that plays on the strength of the bike. It is driven by a human being you can see and communi- cate with more readily than you can with a guy in a car whose windows are shut and whose stereo is blasting.
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Despite the presence of bike lanes, we see many bikes on the sidewalk, and the bikers riding the wrong way down streets, alarming cabdrivers at the light. For biking to make it to the next level, for bikes to be completely accepted as the viable form of city transportation that they are, bikers must switch sides. They must act like people and stop acting like cars.
This means doing things that we, the bikers of New York, would have laughed at just a few years ago. It means getting a little personal, though not that personal. Acting like people means that we have to do things that we frankly don’t want to do and things that we want cars to do, like slow down.
As far as bikers go, I’ve become a kind of laughingstock because I wait at traffic lights. Recently, as I waited in a bike lane at Atlantic Avenue for a light to change, a woman in her 70s, walking hunched with a cane, approached the crosswalk smiling — until she spotted me. Then she began shouting as I waited behind the crosswalk, “Well, are you going to stop?” I assured her I was waiting. She grimaced. “How do I know you’re not going to go?” she asked.
A good point. But I stood my ground, smiled and tried to win the point by not doing anything. Just as she finished crossing, two Lance Armstrong types whipped through the crosswalk and pulled past the red light, waiting to slip through the crossing traffic. The woman who had crossed looked back at me and started shouting again. “See?” she said, proclaiming herself the winner. “You’re going to run me over!”
Which brings me to four sure-to-be-scoffed-at suggestions for better bike P.R.:
NO. 1: How about we stop at major intersections? Especially where there are school crossing guards, or disabled people crossing, or a lot of people during the morning or evening rush. (I have the law with me on this one.) At minor intersections, on far-from-traffic intersections, let’s at least stop and go.
NO. 2: How about we ride with traffic as opposed to the wrong way on a one-way street? I know the idea of being told which way to go drives many bikers bonkers. That stuff is for cars, they say. I consider one-way streets anathema — they make for faster car traffic and more difficult crossings. But whenever I see something bad happen to a biker, it’s when the biker is riding the wrong way on a one-way street.
There will be caveats. Perhaps your wife is about to go into labor and you take her to the hospital on your bike; then, yes, sure, go the wrong way in the one-way bike lane. We can handle caveats. We are bikers.
NO. 3: How about we stay off the sidewalks? Why are bikers so incensed when the police hand out tickets for this? I’m only guessing, but each sidewalk biker must believe that he or she, out of all New York bikers, is the exception, the one careful biker, which is a very car way of thinking.
NO. 4: How about we signal? Again, I hear the laughter, but the bike gods gave us hands to ring bells and to signal turns. Think of the possible complications: Many of the bikers behind you are wearing headphones, and the family in the minivan has a Disney DVD playing so loudly that it’s rattling your 30-pound Kryptonite chain. Let them know what you are thinking so that you can go on breathing as well as thinking.
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Maybe I have been hit too hard by cars while biking, but I foresee a time when my street will be filled with bicycles, when streets will have car lanes and when bike lanes will be transformed into bike-only streets, which is essentially the same as a physically separated bike lane like the one on Ninth Avenue. This bike-centered city life even happened over the summer, when cars were kept off Broadway between the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park and the city did not shut down, nor did bikers kill people.
Bikes don’t kill people; cars kill people. I know this, I feel this (big scar on head), and when I think of my bike heroes and bike role models, when I imagine the tone of the new bike culture, I think of civility. I think of Murray Kempton, the great baroque sentence maker who wrote for The New York Post and The New York Review of Books and biked on what I remember as a three-speed, pedaling to his word processor, wearing an early Walkman.
I think of Alayne Patrick, the owner of the Brooklyn boutique Layla, cruising through Cobble Hill wearing something Indian that was made even more fashionable by the fact that she is on an extremely cool Scandinavian bike. I think of my father, Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised and biking up on a beaten-up 10-speed when we were kids to tell us to head home. “Why drive?” he used to say. “It costs money, and a bike’s more fun.”
Robert Sullivan is the author of “The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant,” to be published this month. |
