Back in March 2011, John Cassidy of The New Yorker wrote a much-discussed and highly instructive blog post in which he made a case against bike lanes in New York — much-discussed in that many people disagreed with him (including me) and instructive insofar as it conveniently collected nearly all the tropes of the burgeoning anti-bike genre.
(Some examples: The pre-emptive self-exoneration: "I don't have anything against bikes"; the invocation of meddling government apparatchiks: "A classic case of regulatory capture by a small faddish minority"; and the fond nostalgia for pre-lane New York City cycling perils, coupled with implied dismissal of today's namby-pamby cyclists: "In those days … part of the thrill was avoiding cabs and other vehicles. … When I got back to my apartment on East 12th Street, I was sometimes shaking.")
There have been many such pieces written since, most of which follow more or less the same formula and rely on more or less the same arguments.
But a new entry by Steve Cuozzo at The New York Post, headlined "The Bike Lane Cancer," and written in response to a city proposal to expand the Columbus Avenue bike lane from 59th street to 110th (it currently runs from 77th to 96th), is notable for introducing several exciting innovations to the genre.
Here, we catalog these additions to the growing lexicon that's available to anyone looking to write an anti-bike-lane screed:
The aesthetic tragedy of double-parked cars: The new bike lane, he argues, "will subject another mile and a half of the avenue to the collateral damage wrought by the existing lane: fewer lanes for cars and trucks, vehicles unattractively parked in the middle of the street. . . ." Really, is there anything in New York more unattractive than double-parked cars? (I'm assuming Cuozzo here means double-parked cars and not cars literally abandoned in the middle of the street, as in a Godzilla movie.) Longtime New Yorkers will of course recall that double-parked cars where never seen in the city prior to the advent of bike lanes, back when parking was ample, traffic was light, nary a car horn was ever honked in anger, and there was a waiting spot on every block for every Jaguar.
The existential tragedy of the eternally circling car-passenger: Further, the new lane will bring "damage to stores and restaurants caused by the impossibility of dropping off passengers." I, for one, have NEVER seen a car pulled over in a bike lane; it's true that the city's drivers treat these lanes as inviolable, and would rather trawl indefinitely for a spot than so much as break the plane of the sanctified bike lane.
As a result, I've also seen Town Cars on the Upper West Side circling blocks for days, the passengers growing irate, then despondent; the drivers searching vainly for a safe patch of asphalt on which to pull over and let their human cargo disembark. Usually, these cars end up running out of gas, at which point they're abandoned and unattractively parked in the middle of the street.
The city has become an overwhelming nightmare of disorienting traffic signals: "Those are on top of the pavement jungle of planters, bizarre turning lanes and giant painted arrows, which are equally baffling to drivers, pedestrians and bikers." Pavement jungle! Bizarre turning lanes! Giant painted arrows! Also: Traffic lights! Lane markers! Stop signs! RAZE IT ALL, I TELL YOU. RAZE IT ALL TO THE GROUND.
Expose the wizards behind the curtain: "All are victims of two streetscape-tinkerers wholly out of touch with the way most of us move about in the city" (Hell, yeah!) "Mayor Bloomberg, who travels by limo and helicopter" — limousine liberal! helicopter . . . humanitarian! — "and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who bikes everywhere" (Exactly! So what does she even know about — oh, wait.)
Intoxicate the reader with a potent cocktail of hyperbole and anecdotal evidence: "The city's claim that New Yorkers in the zillions have taken to cycling is baloney: Again, stand on any corner and count." Actually, don't stand on the corner and count; it will take years to count into the zillions (well, 31,000 years to count to a trillion) and you would die long before you were finished. Instead, trust Steve Cuozzo: The city claims that commuter cycling has nearly quadrupled in the last decade, which more or less rounds up to zillions, and that is obviously baloney. There aren't even zillions of people on the whole earth. Nice try, streetscape-tinkerers.
On second thought, forget the numbers. Believe your eyes. Or, rather, my eyes: Since 1980, the city's Department of Transportation has conducted an annual Bicycle Screenline Count, which tracks the number of bicycles on various avenues, intersecting with 50th Street. The counts are done over 12 hours (7 a.m. to 7 p.m.) on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, three times year (May, August and November), then these numbers are combined into an annual average.
In 2011, cycling traffic at 9th Avenue and 50th street (i.e., Columbus and 50th) was tallied at a 12-hour average of 1,480 cyclists, or nearly
125 cyclists on average per hour.
OR WAS IT?
Here's Cuozzo: "[T]he Columbus bike lane is usually empty. I've watched it repeatedly, at all hours and in all weathers, on weekdays and weekends. I've clocked as few as a half-dozen cyclists in 20 minutes — nearly all of them delivering food. Many ride the wrong way, endangering any pedestrian naïve enough to expect them to obey the law: Yesterday, it took me all of one minute observing the corner of West 85th Street to catch a deliveryman illegally speeding north."
Cuozzo has seen our streets with his own eyes, and the picture is not pretty: it's a bleak landscape of barren, barely used bike lanes that are also somehow teeming with wrong-way-speeding, pedestrian-endangering, food-delivering cyclists. The bad news: there's only a half-dozen or so cyclists every 20 minutes. The other bad and logically contradictory news: It may take "all of one minute" for one of them to appear out of nowhere and run you down.
These homicidal delivery people, of course, are conjured out of thin air as a consequence of dedicated bike lanes — lanes that can't in any way be expected to ameliorate the riding habits of these nonexistent, nearly lethal ghost riders that continue to haunt/not haunt our streets.
A pitch for moon-based velodromes: "Growing up on Long Island, I lived on a bike. I rarely use one on city streets for the obvious reason: It's dangerous and impractical on the streets, with or without bike lanes." So, no bikes on city streets. Got it. "It's intimidating even on off-street thoroughfares where bike riding seems to make sense." No bikes on off-street thoroughfares where it seems to make sense. Check. "Central Park's inner loop road is closed to vehicular traffic on weekends, but it's increasingly inhospitable to a cyclist who doesn't pedal at 40 m.p.h. — which is why I haven't ridden on it in years." So no bikes in public parks on designated bike lanes that aren't accessible to cars.
It's unclear where, if anywhere, bikes would be considered practical, if not on city streets, off-street thoroughfares or in public parks on designated bike lanes during hours closed to vehicular traffic. Perhaps we should confine bikes only to the suburban cul-de-sacs of Steve Cuozzo's remembered youth? Or to vacant galleria parking lots during nonshopping hours? Or to as yet-unconstructed lunar velodromes?
Wait — here's a radical idea. I just read about it in The New York Post.
Apparently, the city is crisscrossed with entirely empty designated bike lanes — and they keep building more of them.
Why not put the bikes there?
Thanks, Steve Cuozzo. Problem solved.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 14, 2012
An earlier version of this post misstated the average number of cyclists at Ninth Avenue and 50th Street in 2011. The 12-hour average was
1,480, not 1,250.
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The 6th Floor Blog: "I Was A Teenage Cyclist, Part 2: The Scourge of the Lethal Ghost Riders"
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The 6th Floor Blog: "I Was A Teenage Cyclist, Part 2: The Scourge of the Lethal Ghost Riders"
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