A midtown tragedy, a TriBeCa run-in - and taxi drivers' economic incentives

It’s a key survival skill for a New York city cyclist to learn to spot the looming lurch-out-of-the-lane – the manoeuvre whereby a frustrated motorist, tired of waiting for an obstruction to clear, pulls out of the line of cars into the bike lane without checking his mirrors. But, even by such moves’ poor standards, the sudden turn into my path late last year by a yellow taxi cab one evening in TriBeCa was a close-run thing. I managed to swerve round the cab into a delivery bay before getting back into the bike lane and catching up with the offending driver.

When I told the driver that he’d nearly knocked me off, however, he was not only indifferent but chased after me for a block, driving deliberately close to me and taunting me. So, at the next traffic lights, I took a different tack. I knocked on the passenger door. When the occupants – who turned out to be a group of fairly terrified-looking tourists – wound down the window, I told them: “Please don’t tip this man. He’s a dangerous driver. He needs to learn a lesson.”

A taxi blocks a cycle route on W54th street.
Who knows whether he'd do this if his fares
kept withholding tips when he did?

The incident in TriBeCa has been in my mind this week because of the grim series of events  last Tuesday in midtown Manhattan that led a taxi driver to drive his vehicle onto a 6^th Avenue sidewalk with a cyclist on the hood. He then slammed into a couple of British tourists, severing the leg of one of them, Sian Green, a 23-year-old woman.

My experience has made me look at the horrible, apparently deliberate crash a little differently from some other commentators, however. It is entirely true, as many commentators have said, that Tuesday’s crash would probably have been avoided if either the New York Police Department or the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission had taken seriously their duties to police motorist behaviour in New York City. It’s also true that, were it not for the widespread demonisation of cyclists and the poor understanding of their rights, the taxi driver - Mohammed Himon – probably wouldn’t have felt the same outrage at Kenneth Olivo, the cycle courier whom he knocked onto his vehicle’s hood. It’s certainly deplorable that some sections of the media have used the incident’s circumstances as yet another opportunity to vilify cyclists, claiming that Olivo, who was arguing with Himon about his efforts to pass him near a busy crosswalk, played a “big part” in causing the crash.

Yet that incident in TriBeCa - along with others where I’ve taken a similar approach – has also made me realise that it’s far easier to reach across the steel barrier separating taxi drivers and other paid drivers from those around them than it is with other drivers. All over the world, such drivers are open to price signals that anyone who cares about road safety can send or ask other people to send. The weak official response to Sian Green’s maiming – the taxi and limousine commission has so far suspended Himon’s licence for only 30 days – underlines how urgent it is that people in New York in particular start using such signals more regularly and concertedly.

 

A cab on Sixth Avenue illustrates the high driving standards
for which the profession is known in New York. Thankfully,
everyone in this incident seems to have kept their limbs.

It’s unfair, of course, as I’ve argued in the past when cyclists have done bad things, to extrapolate from a single incident to the behaviour of a whole wider class of people. There are many charming, considerate taxi drivers. Shortly after my run-in with the terrible turning taxi-driver of TriBeCa, I found myself riding one evening down W55th street with a taxi behind me. The driver not only let me pull over to take the lane at a point where the road narrowed but told me at the next traffic lights to “take it easy” after I’d visibly hurried up to avoid slowing him down.

It’s also worth pointing out that, just as minicab drivers in London appear to be on a collective mission to make black cab drivers seem courteous and sensible, New York’s limousine services make yellow cab drivers seem like airline pilots in their regard for safety. There’s a particular limo service operating near where I live in Brooklyn whose drivers I’ve given an especially wide berth ever since I saw one of their drivers dump a package out of the vehicle one Saturday lunchtime. It turned out to contain an empty spirits bottle. Shortly before my TriBeCa run-in with the cabbie, a limo driver had squeezed past me one morning on a wet, slippery W54th street when it clearly wasn’t safe to do so. When I told him he could have killed me, he answered laconically, “I still can.”

Nevertheless, in cities where roads policing and taxi regulation have been made lower priorities than they should have been it’s not unreasonable to expect the drivers putting in the longest hours in the most congested places to pick up bad habits. Serious crashes involving yellow cabs – many of them fatal – are a regular, depressing feature of New York life. Himon’s cab wasn’t even the only one to end up on a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue last week. Two days after Sian Green was maimed, two taxi drivers racing to get to the same fare collided with each other at 37th street, sending one cab onto the sidewalk.

 

Taxis on Sixth Avenue, not far from where Sian Green was hit:
sheer numbers make regulation both difficult and vital.

The sheer volume of yellow cabs in New York makes its challenges particularly acute. There are serious issues with cab driver behaviour nearly everywhere, however. The strict licensing requirements for black cabs in London - where drivers have to pass such a rigorous test that it changes their brain structure - make serious crashes less common than in New York. But I still had some seriously frightening run-ins with black cab drivers when I lived and cycled in London. The occasional helpful response to complaints from London’s Public Carriage Office only made its other complacent efforts to shrug off responsibility more frustrating.

Which brings me back to my experience in TriBeCa.

I have no idea whether the tourists I accosted withheld the driver’s tip, as I requested. The chances are that they didn’t. Even I when in a motor vehicle with a taxi driver tend to feel a certain fellow feeling with him or her that makes it awkward to criticise the driver’s conduct. The emotional cost of the conflict with an unhappy driver refused a tip can certainly seem higher than the few bucks’ cost of peace.

But the fate of poor Sian Green and the crash later the same week on Sixth Avenue are both reminders of where the economic incentives for drivers currently point. Under current circumstances, higher speeds and refusal to yield when required to pedestrians merely get taxi drivers faster through their current fare or to the next fare more quickly. Only a change in the value of the tip – a higher tip for good driving, a lower one for poor behaviour – can shift the balance in the other direction.

All that would change, of course, if city authorities were to start enforcing traffic rules in a systematic, sensible way. Speeding would become a costly activity for taxis. The price of blowing through a crowded crosswalk might be permanent loss of a licence.

 

The taxi driver who nearly doored me. His intense interest
in my comments on his conduct is evident

But two scenes I encountered in the week before Sian Green was maimed illustrate how far New York City at least is from such a logical system. On Wednesday, August 14, as I cycled to work, Sebastian Delmont, a safer streets activist who was commuting south on the Hudson Greenway, warned me that police were stopping cyclists further up. Sure enough, at 39^th street police were stopping cyclists who failed to stop for the red light by an exit from a ferry terminal where most of the time barely any traffic crosses. They were ignoring the next intersection, at 40^th street, where taxis and buses regularly refuse to yield to bikes and pedestrians.

The following morning, meanwhile, I was forced to brake hard as I rode to work when a taxi driver opened his door into the bike lane on Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights. His response when I asked him what was wrong with him was to reply, “I saw you.”

As long as traffic police in big cities worldwide think cyclist harassment a better use of their time than policing speeding and taxi drivers have no fear of the consequences of bad behaviour, it’s incumbent on everyone else to act. I plan to step up my efforts to make professional drivers’ tips reflect how they respect other road users. I hope other readers of this blog will do the same.

Routes - and Why I Prefer Developing my Hippocampus to my Quadriceps

It’s fairly easy for even a casual observer to spot what cycling does for some bits of my body. While I’m far less fit than I’d like to be, I boast thighs that some mature trees would be happy to call their trunks. Since moving to New York and cycling farther each day, I’ve also lost some weight, as testified to by the sag in my trousers’ waistbands below the belt loops.

I’ll probably never know, however, precisely what I’m doing to the posteriors of my hippocampi, two tiny glands on either side of my brain that help me to find my way around. I get just as much satisfaction, nevertheless, from the idea that I’m making them bigger, more complicated and more useful than they used to be as I do from my bulging thighs and slimming-if-still-overlarge waist.

 

The Invisible Visible Man's CaBi bike at Union Station:
mission accomplished

That satisfaction came home to me particularly forcefully this past week after I conquered my nervousness to have a go at cycling between Arlington, Virginia and my train home from Washington’s Union Station. I headed off tentatively on a Capital Bikeshare bike, worrying that my only rudimentary sense of the area’s geography would soon leave me hopelessly lost. I very nearly gave up immediately after getting the bike out of the docking station, alarmed at the bike’s handling when loaded with all my various bits of baggage.

An hour or so later, however, I was pushing the bike’s wheel into the Union Station docking station, feeling strangely elated. It was, it occurred to me, the kind of satisfaction that's soon going to be available to more people in New York, with the introduction of the Citibike bike share system. I’d tackled the mental puzzle of working out my way and reached a satisfactory conclusion.

My interest in the hippocampus dates back, however, to long before I ever set foot in the United States. I first heard of the brain structure while studying psychology at St Andrews University. I particularly associate it with a visit once with a friend to a room lined with cages full of rats. The friend was a PhD student working with the rats on neurophysiology, had gone in to check on them over the weekend and invited me along.

On the room’s ceiling, I could see the outline of a now-removed round disc. It marked, my friend told me, where Richard Morris, a neurophysiologist, had first conducted a famous experiment on the hippocampus’s role. He had set up a pool in the room with a hidden platform that the rats had to find. A video camera in the ceiling disc’s middle tracked their progress. Rats proved good at learning where the platform was. But, when Prof Morris injected a drug into their hippocampi to stop them working, they were no longer able reliably to locate it. The hippocampus seemed to organise their memory for direction.

The Jefferson Memorial, during my great, trans-Washington
bike ride. Yeah, the picture's squint. I took it seated on a bike.
Get used to it already.

I made a connection between the hippocampus and my getting about by bike when I heard about Eileen Maguire’s research on taxi drivers. In a series of studies, Prof Maguire – of University College London - has examined changes in the posterior hippocampus in London taxi drivers as they first learn the Knowledge – the test they have to pass on the city’s geography – then apply it. The posterior hippocampus – the rear part of the structure - tended to be bigger and more complex in drivers who had passed the Knowledge than in would-be drivers who had failed it, she found.

My brain, I recognised, was probably undergoing similar changes to the taxi drivers’. The gradual trial-and-error process of learning how best to get to a place – the frustration at missing that vital turning again, the fear at suddenly finding oneself unintentionally on an over-busy road, the satisfaction on finally getting a route right – were playing themselves out in my hippocampi. New neurons were growing and new connections were forming as I gradually built up a more solid picture of the best ways to get about.

Streets in the City of London: it may look a mess to you -
but the Invisible Visible Man's mental maps can help you
round this maze

The process, however, has been nothing like as clinical as a neurophysiological description might imply. I recall, for example, how, shortly after moving south from Edinburgh in 1997, I set off, cycle map in pocket, to work out my route from home in Brixton to my employer’s offices. The 4½ mile journey took me 45 minutes of missing turnings in my bike route, failing to understand how traffic flows worked and repeatedly checking the map.

Latterly in London, I could make it home on a good night in 20 minutes – albeit down busier main roads. My mental map of South London’s cycling routes could switch more smoothly and efficiently than any satellite navigation device. By the time I left London, I knew every pothole and manhole cover of many of the roads I’d cycled most often, preparing to avoid them well before I had reached them.

My mental map spread well beyond my regular commuting area. I’d feel a little surge of excitement if, for example, I got invited to some press event 15 miles from the office in Wembley. Why, I hardly ever got to use my carefully-memorised route out to that area, I’d think to myself. I was surprised and delighted one time when I found another reporter had made the same decision as I to cycle from Central London. We earnestly swapped thoughts on busy roads and helpful shortcuts.

 

The Shard: on my route to City Airport

It was my enthusiasm for the route that gave me a bias in favour of flying from London City Airport. My route for the 13 or so miles from my house to the airport – which distinguished itself by having good bike parking – was, I often felt, something of a work of art. I would pedal across the Thames, down Cable Street in the densely-packed East End, past Canary Wharf, then out into the grim housing estates of still working-class docklands. I would encounter evidence of every period in London’s history, from the Romans to the new Shard skyscraper. There can be few better ways of feeling at one with a city than to know intimately a route like the one I used to reach City Airport. It would take me from a beautiful but obscure quiet Georgian Square then out across the internationally-recognised landmark of Tower Bridge.

I’ve experienced something similar in New York. When apartment hunting, I found myself a couple of times nastily off course – on the wrong side of a busy expressway from where I wanted to be or careering down a six-lane avenue of scary, fast-moving traffic. But I know my mental map of the city is slowly but surely stitching together, somewhere in the back of my hippocampi. Without thought, I head north a couple of blocks to avoid the most constricted sections of W54 street most mornings, then south again before the office. I’ve been trying out a route up the east side bike path some other mornings. I take joy in now knowing the Lexington-Park-Madison-5th sequence of avenues I cross as I head to work. But I shun that route in the evenings, well aware, after previous experience, of the miseries of trying to head southbound on 2^nd avenue.

The Empire State Building in pink:
cycling to photograph it was more fun for me than a party

I felt that same sense of having access to secrets of the city closed to others when, one night recently, my employer organised on the Upper East Side a party to celebrate its 125^th anniversary. As others headed off afterwards to an after-party, I made excuses – but knew my main motivation was my desire to try the way home I’d crafted in my head. Before long, I was bowling down from the top of the Queensboro Bridge’s bike path, which I last used regularly in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Then I was into Queens and navigating streets under elevated subway lines so romantically urban they should have had a permanent Chicago Blues soundtrack.

 

I looked across as I headed down the East River at the Empire State building, lit up pink in honour of the anniversary. I was, I felt sure, enjoying myself far more on this solitary exploration of the city than anyone yelling at a colleague to be heard over the music at the party.

Which brings me back to Washington.

The US Capitol: how to get there by bike is now fixed in
the Invisible Visible Man's hippocampi

Whatever my initial misgivings, they disappeared immediately I found myself on a bike path by the Potomac and catching my first glimpse of the Jefferson memorial and US capitol sitting on the other side. I sped – as much as one can on a bikeshare bike – over the 14^th street Bridge and slowly worked out the best route along the National Mall. A little bit of guesswork once I’d got north of Pennsylvania Avenue and I was finally at the station, embarrassed to find myself feeling little less elated than Edmund Hillary can have felt on his first conquest of Everest.

But there were, it came to me, few satisfactions in life more total than completing such a journey. I had set out to tackle a challenge and, as I pushed the bike back into the docking station, comprehensively conquered it. I had made the journey entirely on my own resources. And, somewhere in my two hippocampi, just as those rats in St Andrews learnt where the platform was, my mental maps for cycling in Washington and northern Virginia were starting to form.