A fast riverside ride, a Central Park tragedy - and the need to ride ethically

­“Hey, that was a good run!” the person who’d been riding behind me down the Hudson River Greenway on Friday evening shouted to me. He’d cycled on my tail from 34^th St, as I returned from giving a television interview about Scotland’s independence referendum, down as far as Warren St. Every time he’d come close to my rear wheel, I’d sped up a little and we’d done a steady 18mph – 19mph for three miles.

 

The Hudson River Greenway: easy to ride fast, harder
to ride ethically

“Safe ride home!” my travelling companion yelled as I turned off the path towards the Brooklyn Bridge and he continued on south.

Yet, on Friday, instead of feeling pleasure at the excitement of an enjoyable, fast-ish ride by the river, I felt a sharp stab of guilt. What if I’d been irresponsible? What if I’d been riding so fast that I’d have hit a pedestrian stepping onto the path? Did I risk running into one of the many stray runners on the cycleway?

I felt the guilt in the aftermath of a crash in Central Park on Thursday afternoon in which Jason Marshall, a cyclist on a fast training run round the park, hit Jill Tarlov, a 59-year-old woman from Connecticut who was crossing the road in front of him. Although she was on life support on Friday, she has since, very sadly, died.

News of the crash had left me with an acute sense of my responsibility towards other road users. I also anticipated – correctly – new calls for a crackdown on the menace of “killer cyclists”. As I was speeding down the Hudson River Greenway, I was feeling a strange mixture of unjustly put-upon and guilty over my complacency about the risks cyclists pose to others. Did I need to change the way I rode to ensure I kept other road users safer? Would everyone now assume I posed a deadly risk to them, just because one other cyclist had been involved in a high-speed crash?

Central Park: spectacular setting for an appalling tragedy

The big challenge in understanding events like Thursday’s crash is precisely that they’re extremely rare, whether in New York, London or anywhere else. Thursday’s crash is the second fatal pedestrian-cyclist collision in New York in recent months – a crash with a 17-year-old cyclist, also in Central Park, killed Irvin Schachter, 75, in August. But the last fatal bike-pedestrian crash before that was in 2009. There have consequently been three pedestrian fatalities in bike crashes over a six year period when crashes involving motor vehicles have killed more than 1,500 people.

A competing challenge is that people get away so often with risky behaviour that nearly everyone is confused about which behaviour actually poses a risk. Motorists who drive down urban streets at 50mph or more seldom encounter a pedestrian unexpectedly stepping out from a kerb or a motorist unexpectedly in an intersection. They can consequently lapse into thinking that 50mph is a safe speed on an urban street. The speed’s effect on their stopping speed and the vehicle’s higher momentum nevertheless make it profoundly unsafe and deadly when something unexpected does occur.

Cyclists racing round Central Park – or Prospect Park, near my apartment – grow so used to dodging successfully round pedestrians that many must assume there’s little risk in doing so at the 25mph and higher speeds that I see many going. Many leave far too little margin for error.

To confuse matters still further, cyclist and motorist behaviour seems to feel different to pedestrians. Given that motor vehicles killed 168 pedestrians in New York last year, pedestrians are in some senses constantly at risk from negligent motorist behaviour. Yet the ubiquity of motor vehicles and the difficulty distinguishing the seriously risky behaviour from the less dangerous seem to stop many people from understanding the risk’s scale.

Fast-moving, quiet cyclists often take people by surprise, however, even when they’re behaving safely. This seems to lead many to perceive wrongly that the danger from bicyclists – who were involved in no fatal crashes with pedestrians between 2010 and last year – is on a comparable level to that from motorists.

 

This car crashed at 100mph on the West Side Highway,
near where I worried my 18mph to 19mph speed was excessive.

However loud the understandable outcry, the Central Park crash hasn’t undermined the strong moral case for using a bicycle to get about, rather than a car. Cyclists are generally moving more slowly if they collide with people than motorists are. The lower weight of a bicycle and rider compared with a car and driver also reduces the energy released in a collision. I posed less risk to a pedestrian stepping out onto the Hudson Greenway than the scores of cars driving at 50mph, 60mph or more on the neighbouring, speeding-plagued West Side Highway.

There might not even, it seems to me as a layman, be a solid case for charging Jason Marshall with a serious criminal offence under New York's shockingly lax road safety laws. Newspaper reports gave lurid accounts of how Marshall “ploughed” into Ms Tarlov. But Marshall seems to have hit her after swerving to avoid other pedestrians and yelling out a warning that she seems not to have heard. He might – might – have been going below Central Park’s 25mph speed limit and doing his best to avoid people crossing the road against the pedestrian traffic signal. New York motorists would generally have to behave with far more obvious recklessness to face serious criminal sanctions. When I rode in Central Park one time recently at a time cars were allowed to use part of the park, few seemed to adhere to the 25mph speed limit.

Yet all of these caveats only go to underline the most critical lesson that anyone who ever uses a street for any purpose should take away from Thursday’s tragedy. It’s that everyone’s primary focus should be, as far as possible, to avoid unnecessarily harming others. However solitary one might feel riding a bicycle or driving a car, one’s involved in an intense and complex series of social interactions. The scope for misunderstanding is so vast that it is always imperative to act cautiously.

 

Taxis - and other users - face a barrage of rules
in Central Park. But the imperative to behave
ethically should be even stronger

Anyone who’s ridden a bicycle in Central Park, Prospect Park or some other big urban park - like London’s Hyde Park or Regent’s Park - knows that the park’s users are apt to behave far more unpredictably and casually than they would around a normal road. Many are oblivious to the presence of even large numbers of cyclists. On the rare occasions when I go to a park to ride in circles, I try to ensure I pick up speed only when I can be certain the road is clear of obstructions for a suitable distance ahead.

Under those circumstances, there can be no moral excuse, it seems to me, for riding round a park so set on achieving a set speed that one is reluctant to reduce speed or make space when passing other park users. To judge by accounts of Jason Marshall’s keen pursuit of records on Strava, the online bike-racing app, his overall, incautious determination to maintain his speed may have been far more culpable than anything specific about his reaction on encountering people crossing the road.

It is, of course, apt to sound like a counsel of despair to enjoin road users to behave more ethically towards each other. Many road users struggle to understand rules about yielding when turning and other straightforward road rules. Others display such failures of compassion towards other road users that it’s hard to imagine their taking a truly moral stance.

It doesn’t help that the traffic rules in most places fail to push people towards moral behaviour. Police enforcement in many places seems almost designed to reinforce the worst kinds of attitudes. The cry for road-users to act morally can easily sound like the helpless cry of Rodney King, victim of a police beating, as Los Angeles erupted in flames amid protests over the policemen’s acquittal: “Can’t we all just get along?”

The 1st Avenue Bike Lane: easy to feel frustrated,
vital to behave ethically

But any of us who thinks seriously about how we use the roads can set an example. I can avoid recklessly swerving into the oncoming lane to overtake slow cyclists in front on the blind bends on the Manhattan Bridge bike path. You can overtake carefully and with plenty of space even the infuriating runners who run down the Hudson Greenway’s bike lanes. I can slow even for pedestrians with the maddening habit of waiting to cross 1^st avenue while standing in the busy, hard-to-negotiate segregated bike lane. You can wait until it's safe to pass that pedestrian who's insisting on walking down the narrow, constricted Allen St bike lanes.

Even on Friday evening, despite my guilt pangs, I had, looking back, kept looking carefully for pedestrians and runners and sought to take evasive action in good time when I saw one. I stopped for one crosswalk by the Chelsea Piers and so surprised one waiting pedestrian she took a moment actually to cross. I tried, albeit probably imperfectly, to live up to my moral principles.

It is, after all, the central tragedy of traffic in New York City and many other big cities that so many people walking and cycling – using the least harmful transport modes – end up in cold mortuaries and warm intensive care units. It’s a horror that’s no less intense for being widely taken for granted. I will do everything I reasonably can to ensure I’m not responsible for putting anybody else in those places.

A loyalist village, a Scottish upbringing - and why I'm cycling with a schism in my soul

It was in July 24 years ago that, riding my bike near Airdrie, in Lanarkshire, I came across a scene that’s been in my mind a fair amount recently. Cycling from Glasgow, my home city, to Edinburgh, I passed through a village whose kerb stones were painted alternately red, white and blue. There was bunting strung between the buildings above, also in the colours of the union flag.

A cyclist in Cathcart, on Glasgow's south side,
an area with whose streets I was once intimately familiar

Anyone familiar with central Scotland will know what I’d come upon. The village was a stronghold of loyalism, the ideology that aligns low-church Protestantism with fanatical loyalty to the British state. The sentiment’s heartlands are Northern Ireland – which loyalists are determined not to let join the Irish Republic – and parts of the Scottish lowlands. July 12^th, 1990 was the 300^th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, a key historic event for loyalists, in which William of Orange, a Protestant, defeated James II, the UK’s last Roman Catholic king. James was driven into exile, from which he never returned.

That village has been in my mind because Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom, the state that formed me and that commands loyalists’ loyalty, is in question in a way I’d never have imagined in 1990. In a referendum on September 18, Scotland – the bit of the UK where I grew up, was educated, learned to ride a bike, got married and started work – could vote to separate from England, where my wife, one of our children and I were born. I’ve spent all of my adult life since 1997 in either England, Hungary or the United States. But my mother, sister, nephews and niece still live in Scotland.

My mind has drifted to the potential split again and again as I’ve been riding to and from work the last few weeks. Although I’m watching developments from 3,500 miles away, this isn’t to me an academic question of geopolitics. It’s about a widening schism in my soul.

It’s partly because of two summers - 1989 and 1990 - that the schism feels so painful.

 

St Columba's Church of Scotland in London:
I was baptised here as a child, in a building
that symbolises much about
Anglo-Scottish identity

Scotland and I had got off to a difficult start. Having been born in London to Scots parents, I arrived at a Glasgow primary school, aged four, with an English accent. “What’s your bloody English name?” one child would demand each playtime, grabbing my jacket and pushing me up against a wall. I used to yearn to go back to London.

I was nevertheless shaped by some distinctly Scottish institutions. Our community was a local parish of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. My education taught me thoroughness and a certain toughness of thinking. It reflected, I think, how Scotland’s intellectual climate is a little more dogmatic and a little less pragmatic than England’s. Our school debating club and Glaswegians’ fondness for the withering, harsh put down sharpened my sense of humour and gave it a hard edge.

But those two summers - between my second and third and third a fourth years at university - made me appreciate the country far more fully. My grandfather had to go into a nursing home in Edinburgh in summer 1989 - a process with which I helped him - and, by summer 1990, he had, sadly, died. On days when I wasn't needed to help with grandpa or his house, I could cycle north and soon find myself riding amid lush vegetation on the steep sides of a sea loch. I could ride south and cycle atop windswept moors. Ride east and I was speeding towards the gentle hills and old towns of Fife. Ride west and I could zig-zag down the coast of the Firth of Clyde. With all its flaws, the country – the miserable former mining villages and non-descript shopping arcades as well as the baronial castles, glittering sea lochs and twisting river valleys – felt like the landscape of home.

The Perthshire Countryside: the kinds of hills I grew to love
cycling among

I don’t feel that the I whom those experiences in Scotland shaped need be any less a Scot now that I start my daily bike rides in Brooklyn than when I started them on the south side of Glasgow.

But there are certainly senses in which I’ve grown more distant from my homeland. The yearning for the bustle of London, where I felt a substantially freer, drew me south in 1997. A still greater wanderlust sent us from there to Hungary for four-and-a-half years. After another nine years in London, we’ve been in New York for two.

A fishing boat on a Scottish sea loch: the kind of scene
I discovered was just a short-ish bike ride from home.

I’ve overcome the culture shock of working for a rather English employer. (“It’s not often we bring somebody down from Scotland,” a senior manager told me shortly after I arrived. “So we wouldn’t want you to mess up.”) I find my heart lifted now more by the 17^th century English of Anglican worship than the drier fare of Presbyterian devotions. I feel more in common with my English wife than with any Scottish person I’ve met. I love my children not a whit less for their having English accents than if they spoke, as I do, with the drawl of the West of Scotland’s professional classes. I love London – and the stirring feeling I had when I lived there of cycling through history – just as I love the excitement of cycling through a New York summer.

 

New York City: I don't only belong amid lochs and rolling hills

I feel, in short, a bit Scottish, a bit British – even a bit of a New Yorker. Looking back in my father’s family, I see generations who must have felt the same. An eccentric great-great uncle of mine designed the road on which I rode through Lanarkshire in 1990. I discovered among some family papers that another forebear – a proud Scot – once ran a doctor’s surgery round the corner from where we lived in south London.

My heart used to swell with pride when I worked in central Edinburgh, cycled home up the Royal Mile and pondered how David Hume, Adam Smith and other giants of the Scottish Enlightenment had worked in the same area. I also felt proud, however, when I parked my bike daily in London by the site where Shakespeare produced the first performances of many of his plays. The enlightenment thinkers, Shakespeare and geniuses from different parts of the UK have constructed an unusually rich, diverse culture that the UK's constituents share. I believe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The millions of personal ties across the UK's internal frontiers, that cultural heritage and some shared British characteristics - a distrust of high-flown rhetoric, reserve with others and reluctance to make a fuss - seem to me more significant than the points that divide the peoples.

I recognise that to independence supporters these points will seem nebulous – even perhaps a betrayal of this blog’s avowed distaste for policy-making by reference to the gut rather than the cerebral cortex. I do in fact have considerable policy concerns about the prospects for an independent Scotland. I’ve covered the affairs of many small, open economies and think the risks facing a country dependent on oil and financial services with messy fiscal and currency affairs are substantial. It’s long been clear to me – although Scottish nationalists have somehow persuaded people that this isn’t the case – that Scotland’s public spending is buttressed by considerable transfers from the wider UK. The end of those would cause considerable pain to ordinary Scots, especially those dependent on state benefits or working for the public sector.

 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House in Helensburgh,
through which I cycled on a particularly memorable ride
in 1990: a blend of Scottish tradition and openness to the
latest worldwide trends I profoundly admire

I’m also sceptical that Scotland is somehow more virtuous or nurtures better political instincts than the wider UK. The scene I encountered in Lanarkshire is a reminder, for example, that Scotland has clung far longer than most of England or Wales to sectarianism between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Nor is it clear to me that a free-standing Scotland is fated to be better run than the UK. In the policy areas closest to my heart, the devolved Scottish government has built a destructive motorway across the south of Glasgow and undertaken the mind-bogglingly inane Niceway Code “share the road”campaign. The vigorous contest of ideas that comes from belonging to a larger state can be beneficial in making public policy operate better.

But, to me, living and cycling daily in New York City and without a vote on September 18, the biggest issues are emotional. The different bits of my background don’t feel to me like they should be on different sides of the bitter, angry debate that the independence referendum has stirred up. I don’t share the loyalists’ belligerent idea of British identity but love how the UK has balanced over the years different legal, historical, linguistic and religious traditions to make what seems to me a better whole.

If I wake on the morning of September 19^th to find my fellow Scots have voted to leave that enterprise, I’ll still get on my bike, ride to work and get on with business. If I get into a dispute with a driver or chat to a fellow cyclist, I’ll still be just some big British person with an especially hard-to-understand accent. Inside me, however, part of my identity will feel torn and there’ll be a deep sorrow. I’m hoping, despite the current trend in the opinion polls, that I don’t have to feel it.

A street drug arrest, a crackdown on cyclists - and why Broken Windows is a bust

It was as I walked down San Francisco’s Market St with my family on August 10 that I spotted a scene I’d previously witnessed only in TV shows such as The Wire. Two policemen were running towards us, guns drawn. As I started shepherding the family out of the potential line of fire, I spotted the reason for the fracas. A young-ish black man was sprinting towards us. He threw a large, plastic wrapped parcel over a wooden hoarding then, having ditched the evidence, surrendered himself. We continued our stroll as he knelt on the sidewalk, face towards a building, with the police officers handcuffing his hands behind his back.

 

San Francisco's Painted Ladies: the epitome of Victorian
respectability - and only a short walk from where our family
encountered a street drugs bust.

I didn’t know it at the time but, the previous evening, half a continent away, a confrontation between a young black man and white police officers had ended tragically differently. In Ferguson, Missouri, a police officer had pumped six bullets into Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, who was apparently holding up his hands in surrender and saying, “Don’t shoot!” One shot – to the head – killed him. The source of the confrontation appears to have been a demand by the officer than Michael and his friends walk on the sidewalk, rather than the road.

The scene in San Francisco ran through my head over the next few days as we saw, despite our holiday isolation, pictures of police in Ferguson equipped for war but facing mainly peaceful protesters. I also found myself making mental links between the scene we’d encountered and a far less grave injustice that was closer to home for me – the New York Police Department’s disproportionately harsh Operation Cyclesafe crackdown on cyclists’ rule-breaking.

The street drugs bust, the events in Ferguson and the NYPD’s harassment of cyclists all look to me to be the work of police forces more concerned about asserting their own authority than actually making the places they police safer. It’s hard in light of these and other incidents to avoid the conclusion that many US police forces are currently bereft of ideas and moral sense. While UK police forces rethought some aspects of their policing 30 years ago after urban rioting, the Metropolitan Police’s recent purchase of a water cannon hints that such thinking is creeping back in the UK too.

NYPD cruisers: sensitive, intelligence-led policing

The priority is to end appalling injustices such as the killings of Michael Brown and, closer to my home in New York, of Eric Garner, choked in Staten Island as New York police officers arrested him for a minor alleged offence. But better police forces would also surely reassess which offences demanded most of their attention. They would surely take more seriously the dreadful toll of death and injury on the US’s streets and give that national – but largely unacknowledged – tragedy a far higher priority.

I wouldn’t say I was precisely naïve about the potential misuse of police power, even before recent events. In one obviously conflict-ridden society, Bosnia, I remember seeing Bosnian Croat police harassing the mainly Bosniak – Bosnian Muslim – passengers on a bus where I was travelling in 1995 during the Bosnian war. Hungary’s police seldom impressed me when I lived there.

 

A Kosovo Liberation Army "policeman"
smokes while supervising sales of
smuggled fuel: just one of many
less-than-impressive officers I've
encountered during more than two
decades' reporting.

I have a particularly vivid memory from my home country of watching the reaction of Northern Ireland’s Royal Ulster Constabulary in July 1996 to rioting by members of the mainly Irish Nationalist Catholic community on the outskirts of Portadown, in the centre of the province. For five days previously, the police – mainly pro-British Protestants – had reacted with remarkable restraint as Protestants rioted over the routing of a march by the Protestant Orange Order in Portadown. After the police finally forced the march down Garvaghy Road, against the mainly Catholic residents’ wishes, I watched the police fire rubber bullets freely. At one point, I saw people of all ages, violent and non-violent alike, flee into a narrow passageway between shops. The police pumped plastic bullets indiscriminately into the passageway, knowing they would hit rioters and non-rioters.

My personal experiences as a cyclist have made me realise that bad policing affects places other than obviously conflict-ridden societies and people other than clearly discriminated-against minority groups. I’ve been lectured by City of London Police officers who were themselves breaking the road rules about my allegedly irresponsible behaviour. In May, I encountered a man who claimed – to my satisfaction – to be an off-duty cop. He grew verbally abusive when I asked him to move his car out of a busy, two-way cycle lane. There are stretches of road in New York where I know I’m likely to encounter police cars or vans illegally parked in the cycle lane and to have to dodge around them.

Yet I had retained, I now recognise, a residue of rather British innocence about democratic countries’ police forces, a feeling that they must somehow be on the side of the law-abiding, no matter their colour or background, against those who would harm them. I remember the times my parents had to call on the police when I was young and their polite attitude when they visited our large, respectable house.

 

Broken windows might have helped to make it safe for me
to walk nearly anywhere in this picture - it hasn't necessarily
done the same for people with darker skin.

Recent events have washed that residue out of me. I increasingly recognise how it was my family’s whiteness and respectability that won the police’s politeness. If I were black or belonged to some other obviously marginalised group, I would have far more – and probably far worse – stories about police behaviour. I’m more and more sceptical of the policing philosophy that’s come to dominate much of the western world in recent years – the idea that police intolerance of minor misdemeanours is critical to tackling crime overall. Bill Bratton, the police commissioner who returned to the top post in the NYPD earlier this year, pioneered this “broken windows” approach in New York City. Its apparent success in making the city safe again in the 1990s has led to its widespread acceptance as a policing approach elsewhere.

It’s to some extent because of broken windows that officers felt justified, I suspect, in violently restraining Eric Garner while arresting him for the minor crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. It’s because police officers are encouraged to create an orderly atmosphere on the streets, I suspect, that officer Darren Wilson thought it important to confront Michael Brown and his friends about where they walked. It’s a sense that street drug-dealing is worse than more discreet drug-dealing that leads to scenes like the one we encountered in San Francisco. I’ve long had a strong sense that the broken windows approach explained the NYPD’s tendency to give disproportionate numbers of traffic tickets to cyclists. If one believes that a police force’s main goal is to tackle the problems that create most noise at public meetings, it might well make sense to run a two-week crackdown on dangerous cycling.

 

Midtown Manhattan: a bad place to break a window,
thanks to Bill Bratton, but not a bad place, necessarily,
to commit a serious fraud

The approach’s limitations are clear as soon as one starts examining them. Any strategy that deliberately devotes disproportionate resources to small, “quality-of-life” offences by its nature takes resources away from investigating the crimes – racketeering, murder, rape, fraud – for which society imposes the harshest penalties. The approach quickly degenerates into an anti-intellectual tendency to go after the crimes whose victims make the loudest noise, rather than those that are the biggest problem. It’s obvious that the arrest of one street-level dealer is unlikely to do anything to eradicate demand for illegal drugs in San Francisco or the business of supplying them.

Some good might yet come out of the grim events in Ferguson and elsewhere in the US this summer if they prompt a thorough re-examination of how the US is policed – a change that would surely have repercussions in other countries too. It would be heartening to see police forces question whether the constant harassment of the poorest groups under broken windows makes sense. There is surely scope to ponder which offences cause the most overall harm and start to tackle them.

I’ve argued before that traffic policing would be far better if commanding officers’ pay depended partly on the numbers of people injured on their areas’ streets, rather than the numbers of tickets handed out. A police force focused on preventing crime rather than enforcing order would surely not have thought a confrontation over where a group of young men walked worth provoking. Intelligent traffic policing might even seek to encourage cycling, recognising that cyclists are far less likely to kill other road users than motorists are.

It’s hard to be optimistic that such changes are coming soon, however. Reaction to the events in Ferguson has followed a pattern all too familiar in the contemporary US – right-wingers have defended the police, while the left have criticised them. On Twitter last week, Bill Bratton wrote that he was “gratified but not surprised” that New Yorkers appreciated “quality of life enforcement measures”. I’ve seen even cyclists welcome Operation Cyclesafe’s misdirection of resources, saying that, since they never break the rules, they have nothing to fear from it. Few people seem to recognise how crackdowns on minor crime misdirect resources.

 

Operation Cyclesafe made this cycle lane on my route to work
no safer for me to use

Two experiences on our return from California crystallised the nature of the problem. I returned to my regular cycle commute in the last days of Operation Cyclesafe to find that the crackdown had unsurprisingly done nothing to make the streets safer for cyclists. The cycle lanes appeared still more regularly blocked than normal and drivers’ behaviour still worse than normal.

The Invisible Visible Woman, meanwhile, heard two women discussing Eric Garner’s death on the street. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that broken windows policing has turned some police forces into vehicles for the kinds of prejudice our neighbours were expressing.

“People say they heard him say, ‘I can’t breathe’,” one of them commented to the other, who nodded sagely. “But you have to remember – this was a man who’d been to prison ten times.”

An uncritical readiness to go after the offences that most annoy people quickly degenerates into a readiness to go after the people that most annoy the majority. That will sometimes be cyclists. It will far more often – and with far more deadly outcomes – be poor people like Eric Garner, condemned by prejudice to miserable and public deaths.