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 heatwave - and the urban nature it lets cyclists sniff out

A few nights in the last few weeks, I’ve been working late and, realising I needed groceries but would miss the closing time of stores near my apartment, I’ve opted to make a treat out of a chore. I’ve headed five blocks north from my office and ridden into Central Park, heading for the Fairway Market on Broadway. I’ve swept downhill from Central Park South, leaving behind the oppressive heat thrown off by New York’s buildings and streets in the current heatwave for the marginally cooler park, surrounded by trees yet overlooked by skyscrapers.

Central Park: a treat to ride in - for those with a taste in
heated manure

But on Thursday night, after a particularly sulphurously hot day, the experience had an unexpected, added edge. Almost as if I’d ridden into a cloud of some pollutant, I found myself inhaling as thick a concentration of horse manure smells as I’ve ever experienced. The tourist carriages that I often follow in the morning from their stables on the lower west side had clearly been busy that day, I realised. That had left a generous coating of manure baking on the asphalt in 100F heat, with predictably stinky results.

The experience brought home to me how vital a part smell plays in the full-frontal assault of riding a bike in any large city during a heatwave. In New York, however, it currently plays a particularly special role. The city has been better in its gentrification push over the last 20 years at improving how it looks than how it smells. Many of the odours consequently represent the forces that even so controlling an administration as Michael Bloomberg’s still hasn't managed to rein in. They tell a story about the city that’s wafted only into the nostrils of the still fairly select bunch of people prepared to ride a bike in New York on a day when the thermometer is showing over 90F and one’s glasses steam up instantly one steps outdoors.

 

The East River: tell-tale salty smells

There are, of course, some smells that persist year-round. Sometimes when I'm riding by the East or Hudson Rivers, a boat's wash slaps into the promenade. As the spray splashes against the railings, there’s a salty smell in the air, an unmistakeable reminder that New York is a maritime city and that the rivers, as well as carrying water from upstate, are inlets of the sea. It’s the smell of the secret of New York’s success – a gateway between the interior that vessels sailing up the Hudson River serve and the wide Atlantic Ocean out beyond the harbour.

The same goes for the smell that meets me as I speed on my bike down the western side of the Manhattan Bridge. I think it’s a mixture of boiled duck, five-spice mixture and plum sauce, but there’s an unmistakeable smell to areas with a high concentration of Cantonese restaurants, like Chinatown, where the bridge emerges in Manhattan. In my mind’s eye, the smell forever has me sitting in one of the countless eating places in the heart of Hong Kong, at a Spartan formica table, with plates of steaming food being brought to me. The two places smell exactly the same.

Then there are the smells that testify to how my fellow New Yorkers’ behaviour changes as the heat rises.

Earlier in the summer, when the Hudson River Park was still closed off firmly every night at dusk, a late night ride down the neighbouring bike path was apt to prove a trial. As I passed groups of people congregated along the low stone wall by the path, the distinct, herbal smell of the marijuana they were smoking would tickle the upper reaches of the inside of my nose. By very late on a Friday night or early Saturday morning, the path was apt to become an obstacle course, as happy dope smokers milled around, their risk perceptions – seldom a strong point of path users – worsened still further by the weed.

The path is at least less cluttered now that the park is generally open late into the night. But, as I ride by the park’s helpfully-placed bushes, the strong smell bears testimony to park users’ continued desire to smoke dope while watching New Jersey’s lights becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.

 

Children play round a fire hydrant in The Bronx:
they'll be off for a barbecue later in the park

The city’s public parks smell different in daytime heat too. Taking myself once again out of the city on Saturday, I rode up (for the first time) to The Bronx, bound over the city line to Westchester County. In The Bronx, I found children playing in the water from opened fire hydrants. In Van Cortlandt Park, my nostrils and ears encountered a distinctive mixture: firelighter liquid, loud Latin music and the smell of barbecued meat, wafting from the elaborate set-ups that scores of families had lugged into the park.

But probably the most telling smells are the ones that testify to how much organic matter still lies festering, largely unnoticed, round the greatest city on earth.

It’s tempting to think of New York as forged out of concrete and steel, an entirely manmade creation. I’ve recently discovered that that’s not entirely fanciful. Midtown and lower Manhattan sprouted their skyscrapers precisely because the bedrock there is close to the surface. Many of the buildings there are plugged straight into the solid, unyielding bedrock, with no messy soil in between.

But the stench in Central Park is a reminder how the city continues to consume vast quantities of organic materials. Horses’ oats and hay end up caked on Central Park’s asphalt. The smell of rotting food from humans’ garbage, which I often smell as I cycle past the sanitation department depot in Chelsea, is far more widespread in summer. It hangs around the big piles of garbage bags piled on the sidewalk as the sun makes the discarded fruit and vegetables inside decay all the faster.

 

A New Yorker shelters from the glare of the sun:
and the smell of the sewers

Worse still is the stink emanating from some of the drains. The city might have eliminated graffiti and broken windows above ground. But there’s something far less readily controllable about the life of a drain. The whiff that wafts up from some gratings puts me in mind of a slum in Mumbai or Kolkata, where the same malodorous ingredients mingle in the open air.

Yet the smelly life that springs forth when the mercury jumps to 90 is far less surprising to a cyclist than to most people. Cyclists are close enough to see the rat dart across the cycle path, smell the garbage truck that’s blocking the road and notice year-round the surprising number of horses still at work in the city. All testify to a secret, natural life that teems under the city’s streets, in its open places and in hidden-away stables. Cities have been giving off these smells since the dawn of civilisation - the odour of people living close together satisfying their various natural needs. However much he or she might smarten up the city's look, no future mayor looks likely to eliminate them.