An angry off-duty policeman, a rainy night - and why the suburbs are coming for your bike lane

It was 8.30pm on Friday and I was battling my way home from Greenpoint, at Brooklyn’s northern tip, through a thunderstorm of the kind that reminds one New York’s weather arrives partly from the tropics. I’d just got south of the Williamsburg Bridge on Kent Avenue when, looking ahead, I could see there was a car parked blocking most of the bike lane.

I naively assumed for a moment that perhaps the driver had made a mistake. Perhaps, despite the clear markings, in the torrential rain the driver just hadn’t spotted the bike lane.

The Kent Avenue bike lanes: a great place to park,
if you're entitled and unpleasant.

Instead, I was about to discover an almost beautifully distilled summary of what remains wrong with attitudes to cycling and road law enforcement in New York City. Some of those attitudes are peculiar to this big, crazy malfunction of a metropolis, while others are frustratingly widespread across the industrialised world. Cyclists, according to this attitude, are an odd, fringe group whose concerns needn’t be taken seriously.

But that’s putting the cart of theorising before the horse of anecdotal evidence.

The car stood out because it was so obviously in the wrong place. The parking spaces along Kent Avenue are all in the road, while a two-way bike lane runs along the kerb. The car’s headlights were glaring back at me, through the rain, more or less right in my path. Every other car for blocks was neatly parked outside the bike lane. As I approached, I expressed my irritation by waving to the motorist to move. It was a waste of effort. Even so, I might have said nothing if the motorist had not, as I rode slowly past in the remaining portion of the southbound bike lane, rolled down his window and said something, which I didn’t catch, but sounded abusive.

The insolence of the gesture switched me into “Invisible Visible Avenger” mode. I rapped sharply on the now-closed window and told the driver, “Shift! You’re in the bike lane.”

When the window rolled down again, the face looking back at me was a man, probably in his thirties, solidly built and wearing a baseball cap. He looked unimpressed with being asked to move.

“I’ll park wherever I want,” he replied.

“It’s illegal,” I said. “You’re blocking the bike lane.”

His reply alone would make a fascinating blogpost on its own – and certainly a fascinating contribution to Sarah Goodyear’s recent piece for the Atlantic Cities about cycling and masculinity.

“I’m picking up my baby,” he said. There was a child in a car seat in the back.

“What’s more important – my baby or your faggot-assed bike?”

The weight of his cultural assumptions was suddenly crashing and swirling around inside my head as frantically as the rain was lashing down outside it. There was the tone of injured innocence, so typical of a certain kind of self-righteous motorist. “I’m trying to go about my life the way normal, respectable people do,” he seemed to be telling me. “Yet here you, cyclist, are trying to intrude and ruin it.”

The assumptions behind the “faggot-assed bike” comment are even more breathtaking. He was driving a Dodge Avenger – a mid-size sedan with a more powerful than normal engine and an aggressive look. The car was an embodiment of his assumption that real men drive fast, aggressive cars. I, in my human-powered earnestness, represented weakness so transgressive as not to be fully male. My behaviour was so strange that even my bicycle suddenly assumed a sexual orientation.

And, of course, his attitude was turning this into a battle of wills, which I wasn’t prepared to lose.

“What’s important is that you’re blocking the bike lane,” I told him. “Look. I can call the police if you like.”

 

I use this photo for balance. The NYPD isn't the only
emergency service that ignores bike lanes

It was a bluff, based on my knowledge that no NYPD officer would deal with a call about a driver's obstructing a bike lane, particularly in a thunderstorm. But it opened up a whole new front in the battle.

“Call the police if you like,” he said, grabbing a sheaf of papers from his dashboard and shoving them towards me. They bore the logo of the New York Police Department and looked like some internal police directory. “This is the police right here.”

It would be reasonable to ask at this point why I believed him to be a police officer. Suffice it to say that I had a run-in once in London with someone who claimed to be a Metropolitan Police community support officer. His claim never rang true and, sure enough, when I complained to the police they said he was nothing to do with them.

The arrogance, self-confidence and sense of entitlement of the Angry Avenger Driver of Kent Avenue struck me as far more convincing.

It would be still more sensible to ask why, faced with a homophobic, cyclist-hating police officer who thinks his role entitles him to break the law, I didn’t cut my losses and leave. That, I imagine, is how a more balanced, contented person might have behaved.

Yet by now the Invisible Visible Avenger was in sole charge.

“What’s your badge number?” I asked.

“You got room to pass, don’t you?” he asked. “I ain’t stoppin’ you.”

“Are you a police officer?”

“Yes, I am. You shouldn’t be riding in the rain.”

 

There are two ways to read the NYPD's decision to put
"Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect" on the side of their
vehicles. They're either wholly out of touch or - which I
prefer - have a brilliant satirist in their image department

“Tell me your badge number.”

“Stop ridin’ in the rain.”

“What’s your badge number?”

“I don’t have to tell you shit.”

It was the last I heard from him. Silently, recognising reason wouldn’t work, I strode over to a nearby wall, leaned my bike against it and started to get my camera out of my pannier bag. Recognising, I suppose, that his bosses might take a dim view of discovering his views on a whole range of matters, the officer made off into the dark, rainy night. My sole sliver of victory was that I’d got him out of the bike lane. I felt far less fearful than after some previous confrontations with recalcitrant motorists.

But, as I headed on homeward, water squelching in my waterlogged shoes, I felt depressed. The previous morning, I’d been delighted as I rode to work to see a police officer ticketing a driver parked in the bike lane on Jay St in downtown Brooklyn and had shouted my thanks to him. The Kent Avenue encounter made me think that other reports I heard last week – of the police ticketing cyclists for relatively harmless breaches of Prospect Park’s one-way rules, for example – were more representative of current police attitudes.

The officer’s self-righteousness bothered me most. The comment about how I shouldn’t be riding in the rain suggested a strong underlying assumption that cycling was a trivial, leisure activity while driving a car was the serious act of a responsible person. Illegal driving consequently trumped perfectly legal cycling.

My mind went back to when two City of London police officers stopped me in London, accusing me of cycling dangerously by squeezing past their vehicle. They and other motorists had been illegally blocking an intersection where I had the light. In both that and Friday’s incident, there was the sense that the police officers, in their car, were implicitly the responsible grown-ups.

The officer’s arrogant assertion of his right to park wherever he liked spoke to something similar to the previous day’s ticket blitz in Prospect Park. The traffic rules for some police officers seem unimportant on their own terms – as a means to prevent people’s being harmed – but a series of traps, like the Russian tax code. They’re there to use as a stick to beat whatever group one wants to beat today or to fill up an unfilled quota of tickets.

 

NYPD cruisers in midtown: five carloads of suburban
assumptions, coming your way

The proliferation on New York City cars of stickers showing the driver’s allegiance to this or that police benevolent association – lucky charms to ward off the evil eye of an arbitrary traffic stop – suggests others share my perception of police attitudes.

Not that, for me, the consequences were ultimately important. As a middle-aged white professional, I’m self-evidently a poor target for a harassment arrest. Had I been a younger black or Hispanic man, I would probably have made off the moment I realised I was dealing with the police.

Blacks, Hispanics, gays and many other minority groups face far worse than cyclists generally do at the hands of the NYPD. I’m certainly in a far better position than the 28-year-old mentally ill man who used to live round the corner from me. After he stabbed – but only lightly wounded – his uncle, the police pumped seven bullets into him, killing him.

 

Williamsburg, near the scene of my encounter: no vision
of suburban respectability

Yet I don’t think it’s a stretch to see in the dismissive attitude of police in London and New York to cyclists’ complaints a symptom of the disconnect between police and policed. In both cities, officers live in outlying, suburban areas where car use is a symbol of a certain kind of conventional respectability. It’s not hard to imagine such officers are fundamentally at odds with much of the reality of the urban life they’re policing, from casual, harmless use of illegal drugs to rising levels of cycling.

Both cities’ residents have fought long battles with their police forces – over their racism, their homophobia, their sense they’re above the law. Yawning gaps persist between police and public attitudes. This year in New York started with bold declarations about eradicating road deaths. I arrived home on Friday discouraged, feeling that some of the police who should be helping towards that goal are part of the problem rather than the solution.

The delivery cyclist: an appreciation of the under-appreciated

It was one evening a few months ago that I encountered the cyclist with the battered road bike and back pack. I was shuttling my bike-cleaning equipment up bit by bit from the yard of our building when I found him sharing the elevator with me. I launched into the kind of small talk I’m practised at using on cycling neighbours. “Do you ride far?” I asked.

It was only after I left the elevator that I realised he wasn’t a neighbour. He had come from a Mexican restaurant in Red Hook, he said. They had a huge delivery area - but used specially-designed insulated back packs to keep the food warm. I had, it dawned on me, just for the first time talked to a New York food-delivery cyclist about subjects beyond which bag held the plum sauces or whether I could pay by credit card.

 

Delivery cyclist, rain, Sixth Avenue.
Sure, you might sometimes choose to ride in such weather.
But would you want to ride in it or be fired?

It’s probably revealing that I got into the discussion having mistaken the delivery biker for a neighbour. I regularly engage other commuter cyclists in chat at traffic lights. I remark on their bikes (especially if they’re fellow Surly owners) the weather (alternately superb or not a great advert for cycle commuting) or the behaviour of New York City drivers (on whom I don’t generally heap praise). I don’t on the other hand tend to strike up conversation if I find myself next to a man with bags of lo mein dangling from his handlebars or carrying a basketful of tacos. I don’t seem to regard these cyclists – or, to some extent, working cyclists generally – as part of my cycling tribe.

City authorities worldwide tend to be still less warm-hearted. The couriers that played a vital role in ferrying documents around the City of London were a still bigger target for the City Police’s ire than cyclists in general. New York City Council has a history of regarding the working cyclist – the person who delivers the documents and food that keep the city’s financial services and media industries functioning and fuelled – as a problem on a par with the city’s rat or bedbug problem. It probably can’t be stamped out but needs controlling by whatever means possible.

New York's City Council also seems to listen to working cyclists – who work long hours in far-from-safe conditions for minimal wages – about as attentively as it listens to the vermin. I’ve never seen any sign that the city councillors most vocal about the delivery bikers’ perceived shortcomings are pressing their employers significantly to improve their conditions. Nor have I heard of any taking any interest in the welfare of the bikers who deliver their own pizza or noodle boxes.

Yet working cyclists are the only cyclists in most big cities whose numbers and cycling conditions non-cyclists can directly influence. Call out for lunch and you’re pitching some poor Vietnamese or Mexican delivery cyclist onto the streets, regardless of whether or not you think they’re safe. Tell your secretary in Mayfair to get a document to Canary Wharf within an hour and you’re ensuring that some young man on a fixed wheel bike has to fight his way through Piccadilly’s traffic in a hurry.

 

Snow in March: Thoughtful New Yorkers preferred letting
cyclists riding in this to messing up their shoes

The working cyclist’s plight came home to me particularly starkly in March, when a surprise late snowfall blew in, turning midtown Manhattan into a miserable, low-visibility mess of slush and dampness. It was one of a handful of days since I arrived in New York that I decided cycling wasn’t the best way to get to work. Other commuter cyclists, I knew, were forsaking their normal means of transport for the comforts – if that isn’t too strong a word – of the subway. But, as I walked, head down, towards my lunchtime kebab cart, I noticed there seemed to be more delivery bikers than normal out there, not fewer. In the skyscrapers around me, office workers were looking out their windows, shuddering at the idea of subjecting their fancy shoes to the soggy sidewalks and phoning for some poor immigrant to bring them lunch on his bike instead.

But, while the delivery cyclist bringing food or documents to one’s own desk is performing a vital service, those serving other people’s needs seem to be a confounded nuisance. Bike couriers tend to be firmly among the "cyclists who get cycling a bad name" for the kind of person who sucks his or her teeth over the behaviour of London cyclists. In New York, it's axiomatic to complain that food delivery bikers all constantly ride the wrong way down one-way streets, terrorise pedestrians at red lights and ride on the sidewalks. New York City Council’s transport committee, putting to one side the challenges of tackling the city's 250 to 300 annual deaths in motor vehicle crashes, has passed a bill in the past year demanding, among other things, that delivery cyclists display a personal identification number and the identification of their business. There’s also been an attempt to crack down harder on e-assist bikes – a fairly transparent effort to get at a means of transport popular with delivery cyclists.

The very name of one piece of city council legislation raises questions about how big a problem delivery bikers really are. The law is named after Stuart Gruskin, who died after being hit by a delivery cyclist going the wrong way on a street in March 2009. Tragic and painful though Mr Gruskin’s loss undoubtedly must remain for his family, no-one has died after colliding with a cyclist in New York City in the four years since.

I certainly wouldn't defend all working cyclists' standards. I had a nasty near-miss in Cobble Hill late one night with a delivery cyclist who ran a red light into my path. I’m frequently unimpressed with the way some riders squeeze past me in the evening on the W55 street bike lane. The only other cyclist I’ve ever knocked off was a courier who made a foolhardy, last-minute swing in front of me at a junction in London just as the lights turned green.

I do, however, recognise that even I find New York's grid system frustrating as a cyclist - and I have the luxury of never riding in city traffic more than a few times a day and not losing any pay if I'm late.  Would I follow all the street direction rules if the restaurant where I worked were on a one-way street and it would add five minutes to every trip to go the right way round the block to reach it? Would I wait at the lights every time if I knew that doing so would leave me scores of times a day jostling with several streams of fast-moving, inconsiderate taxis? Would I expect my bosses to back me if I explained that my productivity was lower than other delivery bikers’ because unlike them I assiduously followed the rules?

A courier on W55th street. It's the kind of day when
riding round the city must have its upsides.
But would you want to judge the traffic lights knowing
doing so all day could lob a fifth off your wages?

It would be easy to construct an alternative narrative about working cyclists. They are after all ready every day to take significant risks in traffic, get food and documents to people faster than a motor vehicle could and create virtually no carbon emissions or pollution in doing so. I admired how the delivery bikers in March's snow negotiated piles of slush that must be making conditions under their wheels treacherous. I tend to believe that a great deal of the anger directed at delivery cyclists reflects general prejudices against cyclists. In the case of food delivery bikers, there's the added element of the racism often directed at poor immigrants in unpopular, poorly-paid jobs.

There should certainly be some scope for cycling advocacy groups to stand alongside working cyclists on some issues. It's hard to imagine that a movement in the highly-fragmented, ultra-competitive New York catering industry will look quite the same but in New York in 1987 couriers and commuter cyclists stood together against efforts by Ed Koch, then mayor of New York, to ban day-time cycling in midtown Manhattan. The measure was intended mainly to make bike couriers' lives more difficult. The successful protest movement encouraged the development of some of the cycling advocacy groups still at work today in New York.

All delivery cyclists, meanwhile, can deploy the devastating argument that occurred to me when, one Saturday afternoon, my family and I were passed far too close in Brooklyn Heights by a poorly-driven car bearing the logo of a nearby pizza restaurant. The alternative to negligently, lawlessly handled delivery bicycles probably isn't polite, legal delivery bikes but negligently, lawlessly-driven motor vehicles. It may even - who knows? - have been that the restaurant turned to cars to avoid New York's new, strict delivery biker regulations.

Sure, it's annoying that the delivery guy from the local Mexican comes the wrong way down the bike lane at you. Sure, the pizza joint guy shouldn't have buzzed you in the crosswalk as you crossed. But thank goodness they didn't do it with a car.

Cops, pedallers and why they're picking on me

It was as I started pedalling across Southwark Bridge from Lower Thames Street in the City of London that I spotted the police car chasing after me, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I was about, for the first time in my life, to be pulled over by the police.

Southwark Bridge: the only place the police
have ever pulled me over

I hadn't broken any road rules, however, as the cyclophobes might assume. In fact, the policemen were angry that I’d signalled at them to leave me enough space to negotiate safely the junction I’d just passed. A lively discussion ensued as they told me that I – the innocent party – could have caused a crash by waving at them. They had obstructed the junction, I pointed out. There had been nothing to tell them it was a junction, they replied. “Except for the telltale meeting of two roads,” I retorted.

I would have minded the City of London Police's zeal far less, however, had it not contrasted so sharply with the attitude of the police officers I've asked to help me deal with far more serious wrongdoing by motorists. Having been knocked off once in London by a motorist paying no attention, assaulted once by a bus driver and threatened very frighteningly by another motorist, I’ve yet to see anyone lose so much as a single point on his licence as a result of illegal road behaviour around me. It has always been deemed “not in the public interest” to prosecute. Many British cyclists who’ve suffered far more serious incidents have been even worse served.

The emblematic episode for me was a journey home one summer evening along Brixton Road. A series of motorists obstructed the cyclist-only areas along the route, drove too close to me and generally harrassed me – in full view of a British Transport Police car also caught up in the heavy traffic. I eventually concluded it simply couldn't be the job of BTP officers, who police the UK's mainline railways and the London Underground, to deal with illegal driving. But then a cyclist further up the road lost patience with the delays and rode through a set of traffic lights at red. The police car’s flashing lights came on, its siren started and the officers sped up the road after him. The disparity in attitudes was so stark that I briefly contemplated stopping to ask the officers about it - and then, remembering my Southwark Bridge experience, elected to cycle on past.

The question I would have loved to have asked the officers, however, would have been the key one to any discussion of cycling and policing: why do so many police officers worldwide seem to be so alive to the relatively harmless wrongdoing of cyclists and unaware of motorists' far more often deadly misdemeanours? It would have been no less worth asking, I think, because the police officers' faces would probably have looked back at me with blank incomprehension. The injustice, like many worldwide, is, I strongly suspect, mostly a result of subconscious attitudes rather than conscious prejudice.

At least part of the answer lies in the conversation I had with the detective handling the last complaint I made to the Metropolitan Police about a driver’s behaviour – when I reported earlier this year the case of the driver who had threatened me with assault. I complained not only about the driver’s threats but also about his deliberately driving across the path of another cyclist. That incident – which struck me as far more dangerous than his threats to assualt me – must, I’m sure, have been captured on a closed circuit television camera.

New York City traffic. If one of those cars
hits your bike without killing you, the NYPD's message
is simple: fuggeddaboutit.

Yet the detective replied that it would not be “an appropriate use of police resources” to try to track down the footage. I didn't necessarily agree with his decision in my case. But his answer highlighted how, however much one might like to see the police investigate and report to prosecutors every offence they notice, not every red-light jumper will be tracked down, nor will every speeding motorist. Every police force in the world has to make some calculation about where the balance lies between tackling the crimes that most worry its political masters, the concerns of the community it polices and the resources needed to address them. Many of the outcomes are entirely rational. There aren’t many policemen worldwide happy to let murders go unsolved. There are mercifully many who have made their peace with letting litterbugs go unpunished.

The problem is that so few police forces worldwide seem to allocate resources for dealing with crime against cyclists in the way that natural justice for the victims - and the public interest in boosting cycling - would appear to demand. In New York – a city whose affairs are engaging me particularly closely as I’m about to move there – the police department’s policy is not to investigate crashes that look set merely to leave the victims maimed for life, rather than killing them. There are almost no prosecutions in New York for careless driving. Even in London, where the situation is less serious, it remains tempting to conclude many British police forces have dealt with the problem of prosecuting dangerous driving the way that Bunny Colvin, fictional commander of Baltimore’s western district in the TV series The Wire, dealt with drug dealing. They have, to all intents and purposes, legalised it.

The City policemen’s attitude towards me hinted, I think, at the subconscious attitudes involved. They spoke to me on the assumption that I had deliberately endangered myself and others out of ignorance. It took ten minutes of arguing before they realised I had taken the most reasoned, sensible approach I could to negotiating a junction where cyclists’ way across was perpetually blocked by rule-breaking motorists. The starting point seemed to be that I belonged to an out-group, beyond the civilised community they were protecting and too ignorant to handle themselves properly. Most police officers I've encountered seem, by contrast, very alive to the pressures that might make motorists break speed limits, take ‘phone calls while driving or commit other offences. That was certainly the message of the behaviour of the BTP officers I observed. The motorist rule-breaking that they ignored posed some significant threats to others. The cyclist they pursued was riding against the lights across a junction unoccupied by motorists or pedestrians.

Such attitudes, nevertheless, aren’t immutable, to judge by the history of London's Gay Pride march. When the march was first held in 1969 – at a time when nothing the organisers advocated was illegal – police officers accompanying the parade disgracefully barracked those taking part. A contingent of gay police officers, in uniform, takes part in the march now. Cyclists face far less pervasive discrimination than gay people – but a similarly comprehensive revolution in attitudes is required.

The effects of the current attitudes came home to me only last night as I cycled home. As I rode down a four-lane road, I spotted a white van speeding down the kerbside lane towards me, at high speed, illegally undertaking the vehicle in the offside lane. I swung in towards the kerb and stopped, the van only just missing me. When I saw the vehicle again at the next traffic lights, the driver shouted, “Sorry about that, mate”. When I pointed out that he was driving illegally and dangerously, he retorted that I, riding around a metre from the kerb, was to blame for “riding in the middle of the road”.

The driver involved poses a clear danger to cyclists. A rational system, aimed at reducing road deaths, would seek to discourage such driving. A serious approach to complaints from cyclists would be a step in that direction.

That, however, is utterly at odds with the approach of any police force I’ve encountered. There was no prospect, I realised, that the police would take any action against the driver. I decided against even trying to photograph the offending vehicle for fear of provoking another assault that the police would also ignore.

The driver involved might well one day soon kill a cyclist. An open police approach to tackling driving like his might conceivably have encouraged me to report him and led to his behaviour’s being addressed. For the moment, however, it remains far easier to chase after and catch a handful of slow-moving, vulnerable cyclists than tackle the sheer, overwhelming volume of motor vehicle misbehaviour.