Bikes – Bike Snob NYC
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When I started this blog back in 2007, change as afoot–or awheel–here in New York City. Our mayor was this guy Michael Bloomberg:
And he’d just appointed someone named Janette Sadik-Khan as commissioner of the Department of Transportation:
Who immediately set apart doing weird Euro stuff like carving out little plazas and building bicycle lanes, including the city’s first “protected” one:
We’d had a weird blip back in like 1980 when then-mayor Ed Koch installed a bike lane on 6th Avenue for five minutes:
And we’d also had a weird bicycle-riding mayor before that:
And we’ve always had lots of bike paths thanks to–wait for it–that Robert Moses guy:
But this was really the first time in the city’s history it had made a sustained attempt to incorporate bicycles into the street grid. The bike paths of the Moses era were to serve those who “derive pleasure from this form of exercise” in light of the fact that “use of City streets and boulevards for bicycling is dangerous to the bicyclist.” While Bloomberg’s bike-centric planning was also in the interest of public health (this was the guy who tried to ban large sodas), it ultimately endeavored to transform those streets and boulevards so that they were no longer “dangerous to the bicyclist,” and to undermine the primacy of the automobile. This also marked the point at which the bicycle advocates and the Department of Transportation began to openly cooperate:
Together they harnessed the power of the cultural elite:
Truly we were witnessing some sort of a Golden Age of Smugness, and some say 2007’s “David Byrne Presents: How New Yorkers Ride Bikes” was its Woodstock.
Even Lance Armstrong got into the act:
These were heady days indeed–especially if you were a semi-professional bike blogger:
And between all the celebrities, and the media coverage, and the bold public policy, and the excesses of hipsterism and gentrification as embodied by all those utterly ridiculous fixies, it seemed like the good times would never end:
But end they did. Lance Armstrong confessed to doping and became a podcaster. David Byrne got tired of getting made fun of and moved on to other things. Blogs became increasingly irrelevant as they were supplanted by Twitter, and Instagram, and TikTok. Any urban hipster fixie riders who didn’t quit bikes altogether moved to the desert, bought vintage Tacomas, and reinvented themselves as gravelistas. And while the city kept installing bike lanes, they eventually became bike lanes in name only, and are now mostly just full of fast-moving vehicles with motors (both gasoline-powered and electric) that have little in common except for the fact that they’re not cars:
And it’s not just happening in New York. Even when I visited Amsterdam in 2011, people were already grumbling about the increasing presence of motor scooters in the bike paths. Now, according to David Hembrow’s blog (and thanks to the commenter who linked to this in the comments recently) bicycle sales are in decline as e-bikes take over:
Moreover, they’re becoming a “menace” (though, to be fair, this is the Guardian, so it’s probably more like an irritation):
And there’s a call to lower e-bike speeds to 12 American Freedom Miles Per Hour:
I mean who thought you’d ever read a headline like this?
If you’re even passingly familiar with urbanism and transportation infrastructure and all that other dorky stuff you’ve heard of the concept of “induced demand.” I guess it comes from economics, but in urbanist speak it means that, practically speaking, when you widen a highway to reduce traffic you just get more assholes in cars, and therefore more traffic:
Whenever anyone wants to widen a road, advocates wield the “induced demand” argument like a Zefal frame pump. However, now New York City is widening the bike lanes to make more room for faster-moving e-vehicles. Advocates are all in favor of this, and while I agree it’s almost certainly both necessary and inevitable, nobody wants to consider that induced demand might just mean more and faster vehicles making the “bike” lanes less and less hospitable to the users for whom they were ostensibly build:
Is a bike lane full of “Citi e-bikers, deliveristas and scooters” really a bike lane at all?
And no matter who’s using them, should increasing speed really be the goal?
As I’ve mentioned before, it really doesn’t matter how an old curmudgeon like me thinks people should get around, and if people prefer easier and faster vehicles then that’s the way it’s gonna be no matter how I feel about it–and in no point in human history have the majority of people opted for the slower and more difficult mode of transportation once technology presented them with a faster alternative that required less effort. It’s sad that the bicycle mania that characterized the Roaring Aughts is over, but in retrospect it was inevitable, because ultimately what’s going to sustain the old-fashioned bike (especially as e-bikes continue to take over) isn’t bike lanes or policy decisions or celebrity endorsements or anything else. No, the only thing that’s going to sustain them is people who love bikes.
We had our brief flirtation with the mainstream, but we’ll always be weirdos, and in the end we’re on our own.
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