A daily obstacle course, a problem denied - and why I think it's vital to tackle congestion

One of the many old habits I’ve resumed since returning to London is to buy my lunch from a branch of Eat cafe very close to my office in Southwark, on the south bank of the River Thames. I head up the stairs from my first-floor desk, leave the building by the second-floor entrance on Southwark Bridge, then cross the road before descending again to reach the cafe, on the riverside walkway.

But a key aspect of the experience has unmistakeably changed in the four years I’ve been away in New York. The challenge used to be to dodge cars and trucks speeding across the bridge towards the City of London, the financial district. The task most days now is to pick a way between the long line of vehicles backed up across the bridge.

Traffic on Southwark Bridge: a barrier between me and
my lunchtime pie

The Southwark Bridge hold-ups are only one manifestation of a gradual worsening of traffic congestion across London in recent years. The problem has grown despite the gradual decline in traffic levels as a result of the Central London congestion charge and the general absurdity of bringing a private car into London. Average motor traffic speeds in London in the first quarter this year were down 3.9 per cent on a year before, according to Transport for London statistics, despite a 1.1 per cent decrease in the volume of traffic on major roads.

I first noticed the change on July 7, the day I returned from New York. It took me and my family a good two hours from Heathrow Airport to reach our temporary accommodation in Stepney. Forced to take a taxi by the challenges of moving five suitcases and a bicycle, we sat in nose-to-tail traffic for nearly the entire journey.

Yet I have the feeling I’m relatively rare among London cyclists in thinking that this congestion is a serious problem, which cyclists have at least as much a stake as others in having tackled. Most comments from cyclists about the issue on Twitter dismiss the problem as a reflection of motor traffic’s fundamental inefficiency. There has been particular anger over a flawed report by David Begg, a transport economist whom I’ve known for 20 years, that linked the delays facing bus passengers partly to the building of London’s segregated cycle superhighways on some roads.

Yes, the mode on the left wastes road space and, yes,
the mode to the right takes up less road space than some
critics contend. But it's still worth pondering how scenes like
this look to people stuck in traffic jams.

But, having cycled the past four years in New York, I worry about how present conditions might influence policy, particularly as Sadiq Khan takes over from Boris Johnson, champion of the superhighways, as mayor. I’ve lived, after all, through the long backlash that followed the departure from office of Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s former pro-cycling transport commissioner, at the end of 2013. For most of the time I was in New York, few new cycling facilities were built and those that were constructed were insultingly inadequate. Those already in place were allowed to decay or become useless through non-enforcement of rules over parking or yielding to cyclists.

As long as cyclists downplay or ignore the seriousness of London’s current congestion problems, the debate about how to tackle the problems will be left to others. The ultimate risk is that London’s authorities follow the lead of Ed Koch, New York’s mayor from 1977 to 1989. In 1980, concerned about high fuel prices, Koch installed high-quality protected bike lanes along many of Manhattan’s busiest avenues. Stung by criticism of their effect on congestion and modest use levels, he then went on to rip the lanes out again within weeks. His volte face was so complete that he even sought to have cyclists banned from midtown Manhattan altogether.

I should stress, of course, that none of my concerns means I’m accepting the simplistic account of London’s congestion problem that attributes a significant role to the reallocation of road space to the cycle superhighways. Transport planners have known for many years that the number of lanes on a road has far less effect on its capacity than might be supposed. A large amount of congestion comes from motorists’ unnecessary lane-changing, which elimination of a traffic lane can actually reduce. It’s also clear - as David Begg tells me he now accepts - that the figure of 25 per cent for the reduction in road space is a ridiculous exaggeration.

The north-south Cycle Superhighway in Waterloo:
no mistaking the success

It’s also unmistakeable that the segregated superhighways are proving hugely popular as a commuting route. This past Thursday, when we moved back into our house in Brixton, I cycled in the morning rush south down the north-south cycle superhighway. I was astonished at the vast numbers of cyclists heading the other way, north into central London. Pelotons of 30 to 40 riders powered past me in clumps formed by the timing of the traffic lights. Much of the time, there must have been at least as many people using the narrow cycle track as using the far wider road for motor traffic. That striking result has been achieved only a few months after the cycle paths’ opening and before the two main cycle tracks have been extended as far as is eventually intended.

It is clear, meanwhile, to anyone observing with an open mind that there have been far more dramatic changes on London’s roads than the handing over of a single lane on a small number of roads to cyclists. For example, the traffic that I dodge as I go to buy my lunchtime pie is currently made up far more than in previous years of heavy dumper trucks going to and from the huge numbers of development sites dotted across the City. The rise of Uber has produced a surge in the numbers of private-hire vehicles on the roads, which Transport for London has very little capacity to restrain.

In the past week, I’ve cycled on multiple bits of road whose capacity was restricted for one reason or another. But they included road narrowings for work on both Crossrail, the project to build an east-west rail line right across central London, and the extension of London Underground’s Northern Line to Battersea. Both of the rail projects are generating significant construction traffic and forcing the narrowing of roads in a number of places.

Cyclists by the new route over Vauxhall
Bridge: all modes are contending with
restricted road space.

Nevertheless, I keep returning to the feeling I had as I sat in that taxi from the airport on July 7 as I sat in stalled traffic. It was hard as I looked at nearly-empty, mid-morning cycle superhighways not to yearn for my taxi driver to turn onto the invitingly open stretch of tarmac to shorten our interminable journey. If I thought that as someone who would later the same day be cycling along the same routes, it’s hardly surprising if people with less stake in encouraging cycling feel frustrated at the current situation. If that feeling is not to end up leading to the abandonment of the superhighway programme, it is vital that something is done to tackle the on-street congestion.

That, David Begg tells me, is the essential argument he was seeking to put across in his report in June on the impact of congestion on bus passengers. While much of the commentary around the report focused on the erroneous 25 per cent figure and some loose phrasing that Prof Begg tells me he also now regrets, it’s hard to escape the report’s central argument. Boris Johnson encouraged changes to the use of London’s streets that were bound to make streets more congested without having the courage to make anti-congestion measures like the congestion charge more effective. The former mayor instead did a great deal to exacerbate the congestion crisis by removing the congestion charge in Kensington and Chelsea. He also replaced high-capacity, articulated buses with the lower-capacity New Bus for London.

Another day, another set of people failed by roads policy

If cyclists are not to suffer the consequences of Boris Johnson’s policy failures, it is vital that cycle campaigners start to recognise the nature of the competition under way for scarce road space. People who start cycling, after all, are mostly switching to riding from underground, rail or bus so are not self-evidently reducing the burden on the road network.

Cycle campaigners consequently have to start noisily pointing out that the present crisis’s causes extend far beyond the installation of cycle lanes. It's also vital to start advocating for measures to manage other modes' use of that limited space. There’s a powerful case, for example, for charging lorries far more for entering central London in peak hours, for encouraging the shift of far more short-distance deliveries by bicycle, rather than van and for installing new, better-protected bus lanes to ensure buses don’t sit trapped in traffic created by demand for Uber and Amazon Prime. It’s absurd that neither taxis nor minicabs currently pay the congestion charge when they enter central London and it’s imperative that they start to do so.

These are all sensible policy measures that I’d support even if I weren’t a cyclist. As a person interested in transport policy and determined in particular that bus passengers should get a better deal, I’m convinced on principle that it’s critical to come up with solutions to pointless, wasteful congestion.

The Great Bus Wall of Fleet St: proof of failing policies

But an experience on Friday underlined to me how it’s also in cyclists’ selfish interests to deal with congestion. Coming back from a meeting on High Holborn, I rode my way through the quiet urban oasis of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and out onto Fleet St, seeking to make my way to the east-west cycle superhighway. I was greeted, however, with a scene of chaos, a nearly immobile wall of buses crowded onto the historic street, edging forward at well below walking pace.

I was in the fortunate position that I could edge my way through cracks between vehicles the few hundred metres I needed to go, find an alley leading down to the Thames and escape to the generously-proportioned, fast-to-travel-on superhighway. I am conscious, however, that the passengers on the buses - a vital form of transport used disproportionately by the poor - lacked that option. They remained stranded as I slipped away. No-one who has London’s interests at heart can think such a situation should be allowed to persist.

A changing junction, a political bike ride - and the progressive case for cycling

As I ride home from work in the evenings, an intersection in downtown Brooklyn often prompts me to ponder New York City’s attitude to cycling. The southbound bike lane on Smith St at Fulton St used to move out gracefully round a waiting area for taxis and car-service vehicles. Then, recognising that the lane was constantly blocked by parked vehicles, the city decided to repaint the lane so that the parked taxis would no longer block it – though cyclists would have to perform a dangerous swerve out into traffic to round the parked vehicles. More recently, it’s been repainted yet again – and the lane’s now back to guiding cyclists smoothly through the junction – and once again perpetually blocked.

Smith St at Fulton: as it was before it became a symbol
of the city's vacillation about cyclists.

The intersection is a beautiful concrete – or asphalt – illustration of New York City’s equivocal attitude towards encouraging cycling. The city has been prepared to paint bicycle lanes on streets – although it’s now retreating even from that in favour of the dreadful “extra-wide parking lane”. But the city has been far less ready – particularly since Janette Sadik-Khan left as transport commissioner at the end of 2013 – to recognise that to accommodate cyclists well in a given road space it is also often necessary to inconvenience motorists. There has lately seemed to be a waning of the confidence under Michael Bloomberg, the previous mayor, that by promoting cycling the city was making progress towards being a better city.

A bike ride last Thursday prompted me to ponder further the politics of this change. I rode with members of New York city council’s progressive caucus from Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to highlight the importance of cycling. A Manhattan delegation, having ridden from Union Square, met us at City Hall. As I rode with Brad Lander, Carlos Menchaca and other left-leaning individuals, I got into discussion about the “progressive” agenda for transport in the city and how intimately cycling is linked to making the city better for all its inhabitants.

 

Brad Lander addresses the bike-to-work ride outside Borough
Hall: a reliable progressive enthusiast for cycling.

I came away convinced that there are many progressive politicians in the city who recognise that the way people get about significantly affects how equitable and safe a city is for all its inhabitants. But I also left worried that some other progressive politicians fail to grasp what a big role changes to those patterns of mobility could play in achieving their wider goals.

Even the term progress is a pretty significant stumbling-block when thinking about these issues. The term implies that humans are learning from previous generations’ mistakes to make the world a steadily better place. It’s a view of the world that sits uncomfortably with the multiple areas where the world appears to be going into reverse. Among those are the rise of vicious Islamist radicals like the Islamic State and the takeover of the US’s Republican Party by groups that appear to reject the reliability of the scientific method for deducing facts about the world. The term also calls into question what “progress” is. Does it entail everyone’s growing steadily richer and buying ever more cars and consumer goods? At its worst, the goal of pushing towards “progress” has justified appalling acts of political repression.

Nevertheless, I’m confident that in most industrialised societies people’s political instincts divide fairly neatly into conservative and progressive camps. Conservatives tend to believe the past was better than the present and that society’s existing power structures are there for fairly good reasons. Progressives tend to think the future can be better than the present and question the power structures currently in place.

 

I don't know the politics of these people waiting to participate
in last week's ride with progressive city council members -
but it's a fair guess many would call themselves progressives.

It’s no surprise that many cycling activists, as I do, place themselves broadly in the progressive political camp. Since cycling currently accounts for only a small proportion of journeys in many rich countries, arguments for cycling are by their nature arguments for building a future that’s better than the present. Conservatives such as Boris Johnson, London’s elected mayor, are rarer – but often seem to value the bicycle as a symbol of how things were done in the past. Far more conservatives - including Jeremy Clarkson, formerly of the BBC’s Top Gear franchise – seem to identify with car culture.

But that point doesn’t fit with recent shifts in attitudes towards cycling in New York. Following the election in late 2013 of Bill de Blasio – a Democratic mayor about as far left as any conceivable mayor of the US’s main financial centre – it’s clear that cycling has moved well down the city’s list of political priorities. Compared with Michael Bloomberg, his far more conservative predecessor, the current mayor seems to see little reason to encourage cycling to work or the completion of the city’s cycling network. In fact, the fading paint on many of the city’s cycle lanes is a neat illustration of how fragile progress in such an area can be. With less active support for cycling promotion, the previous gains are almost literally fading away.

It wouldn’t be surprising, in fact, if the mayor were a little distrustful of those of us who lobby for cycling. The mayor fought the election on the basis that he would campaign for the second New York that had been neglected during the Bloomberg years. From the perspective of poor neighbourhoods far out in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, those of us from brownstone Brooklyn and nice parts of Manhattan who lobby for better cycling provision must seem like representatives of the elements in the city that are already well catered-to.

Poverty-stricken Coney Island after Superstorm Sandy:
cycling promotion probably wasn't on many locals' minds after
this catastrophe.

It must also make a great deal of sense looked at from poorer neighbourhoods for the mayor to focus much of his transport energy on the Vision Zero programme of reducing road deaths. A disproportionate number of those who die on the roads are people like Noshat Nahian, an eight-year-old child of Bangladeshi immigrants killed by a turning semi-trailer truck on Northern Boulevard in Queens, or Amar Diarrassouba, the six-year-old son of immigrants from Cote d’Ivoire killed by a truck in February 2013 as he walked to school in East Harlem. There’s no doubt that trucks and cars – which predominantly support the lifestyles of New York’s richer people – exact a disproportionate toll in death and injury on poorer New Yorkers. The mayor is quite right to try to address that.

Yet it’s a significant failure of imagination not to try to do more than that. Because New York state’s gas tax and other fees for driving cover only 56.1 per cent of the cost of providing the state’s road system, poor state taxpayers without cars are forced to pay much of the cost of maintaining the road system. That’s even before considering all the other costs that the road system imposes – the costs of crashes, congestion, atmospheric pollution and noise, all of which are shouldered by ordinary taxpayers. Any effort to make New York City less car-dependent is inevitably a progressive step away from the regressive effects of the current system of funding for roads. It would also make perfect sense for a progressive mayor to support Move New York’s sensible plans to charge all vehicles entering lower Manhattan a fee that would be used to support the city’s subways and other alternative means of transport. The higher charges would fall predominantly on the city’s wealthiest people, while a great many of the benefits would flow to the city’s poor.

The Manhattan Bridge bike lane on bike-to-work day:
I don't want to see more bike traffic jams like this - but there's
a clear progressive case for encouraging these people
to keep riding their bikes.

An increase in the number of people cycling would serve many of the political goals for which the mayor and many other progressives purport to be aiming. It would reduce the cost burden of maintaining the road system, reduce pollution – another ill that disproportionately harms the poor living by arterial roads – and improve New Yorkers’ overall health. Despite some high-profile incidents, it's also far safer for pedestrians to be around people using bicycles than people using cars.

There is no good reason either why, with better cycle provision, people in some of New York’s more central public housing projects should not take to cycling far more than at present.

Yet the scene at the corner of Smith and Fulton illustrates the challenge. The Department of Transportation was prevailed upon to change the bike lane arrangement at the corner in the interests of preserving a single parking space. The city’s willingness to get people cycling has melted in the face of a backlash by those who see parking spaces as their own private property. There could scarcely be a more reactionary force than groups determined to preserve the right to store their private luxury items on-street for free, but their indignation seems for now to have intimidated many progressive forces into leaving parking spaces well alone. Vested interests can also push the apparently progressive side towards reactionary stances. Both Ben Kallos and Robert Cornegy, council members who turned up at last weeks’ cycling event, have backed a bill supported by transport workers exempting them from legal penalties if they hit pedestrians and cyclists who have the right of way.

 

Whatever the precise politics of Jay St's cycle lanes,
they certainly feel regressive

Such equivocation about improving conditions for cycling explains a great deal of what the ride from Brooklyn Borough Hall experienced on the first section of our ride to the Brooklyn Bridge. We left the Borough Hall by way of Jay St and found ourselves jostling among heavy traffic, including at least one double-parked car in the bicycle lane. It wasn’t hard to see, taking in the scene, why only 1 per cent of New Yorkers’ commuting trips are currently by bicycle.

New York and many other cities would be a better, fairer place if more of its citizens were getting about by bicycle. Increasing the share of journeys made by bicycle should, consequently, be part of the progressive agenda alongside more obvious causes such as improving urban education and housing. But, if progressives continue to lack political courage when tackling car-dependency or conservatives stay entrenched in power, it’s hard to imagine conditions improving dramatically in the immediate future.

A barging garbage truck, a slippery Greenway - and why New York's bike routes are like a 747

It was far from being the most dignified manoeuvre I’ve ever made on a bicycle. Around 9.25am on January 29, as I rode to work down Prince St in lower Manhattan, I heard a garbage truck approaching me from behind, its driver blaring the horn. Since the bike lane was still full of snow and I was in the middle of the street’s single travel lane, I was immediately in the vehicle’s path – and fearful the driver wouldn’t stop before hitting me. I pulled over into a clear patch of the bike lane, jammed on my brakes and apologised to the cyclist following me for pulling across her path. The garbage truck careered past.

A bike on Vandam Street, SoHo, testifies to my fellow
cyclists' enthusiasm for tackling New York streets in the snow

The next morning, chastened by my experience and with fresh, light snow falling, I decided to mix with motor vehicles as little as practicable, to ride over the Brooklyn Bridge, through TriBeCa and up the Hudson River Greenway, which had been well cleared of snow the night before. But, when I pulled onto the Greenway, I found there had been no new treatment following the light overnight snow. I rode very gingerly uptown, worrying that the layer of slushy slow would cause my tyres to lose their grip.

The two experiences encapsulated the challenge that even I, a fairly hardy cycle commuter, face when trying to get around a city by bicycle, especially in winter. I need a network of viable routes I can follow to get places. I’m more likely than many people to regard a route that includes jostling with motorists or that isn’t marked as a bike route “viable”. Yet people unused to city cycling or in areas with poor infrastructure probably spend most of the time feeling the way I do when there’s snow and ice about. It’s as if the subway offered a choice of only highly circuitous routes or routes that stop every few blocks and required one to walk.

 

The Hudson Greenway after snow: a slippery connection in
the network

The realisation explains a fundamental disconnect I’ve noticed in perceptions of New York’s efforts to boost cycling. I regularly hear from cyclists in other places – particularly London – who’ve seen pictures of New York’s flagship cycle infrastructure projects and been impressed with the city’s apparent commitment to boost cycling. Few accept my reply that, since only 1 per cent of commuter trips in New York are by bicycle, the efforts are at least partially failing. “At least it’s better than we’ve got here,” they tend to reply, gazing longingly at pictures of the Prospect Park West bike lane or Allen St.

Still fewer correspondents contacting me from London accept my follow-up point. Although London currently lacks many showpiece, well-designed facilities to match the best in New York, I point out, 4 per cent of commuting trips in London are by bicycle. There is clearly some aspect of cycling policy in London – bedevilled as it has been by a lack of boldness and a reliance on dubiously effective road markings – that has proved vastly more successful than New York’s approach. The question is what’s making the difference.

 

London from St Paul's Cathedral; there are networks there,
if you know where to find them

The answers, of course, don’t lie entirely in road layout. London has, for example, the Central London congestion charge, which over the last 12 years has sharply cut the numbers of vehicles entering Central London daily. Thanks partly to Sheldon Silver – the recently-disgraced former speaker of the New York state senate – New York lacks such a mechanism to keep through traffic out of lower Manhattan.

Public transport in London is also far more expensive than in New York, making a switch to cycling far more attractive financially.

London’s streets are, in addition, far safer than New York’s, even if that’s damning London with faint praise. For 2013, the last full year for which figures are available, there were 294 road fatalities in New York, which has a slightly lower population than London, including 168 pedestrians and 10 cyclists. In London in the same year, there were 132 road deaths in total, including 65 pedestrians and 14 cyclists. London’s far higher cycling rates make it clear that it’s a far safer place to ride per mile travelled than New York.

Yet one of the biggest parts of the answer, I’d suggest, can be found in thinking about the fate of the Boeing 747. The jumbo jet, hugely successful though it has been, faces phasing out at least partly because it was designed for an era when airlines sought consistently to operate “hub-and-spoke” services, feeding traffic from around a given region into a hub. Passengers would be transferred at those hubs onto long-haul flights on airlines’ hyper-efficient 747s.

The Allen St bike lanes: enjoy the view, wistful Londoners -
but be sceptical this picture tells the whole story

The jumbo is suffering partly, analysts say, from improving efficiency - the biggest 777 aircraft can carry pretty much as many people with just two engines. But it is also losing out to aircraft such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 that can fly long distances but are far easier to fill up. It’s much simpler with such aircraft to offer passengers direct flights from the city where they’re starting out to the city on another continent where they want to go. It turns out passengers don’t crave the excitement of running to transfer between flights at big hub airports, worrying whether their baggage is being treated with the same urgency. There's a growing preference for going the lowest-stress, most direct route.

 

New York, I’d suggest, has done an excellent job of sorting out a few key hubs for a network – protected lanes up Allen St and along Sands St sorting out some of the trickiest approaches to the Manhattan Bridge, for example. There’s a protected bike lane along Prospect Park West funnelling cyclists through Park Slope. There are bike paths along parts of the two sides of Manhattan. New York has provided the Atlanta-Hartsfield or London Heathrow type hubs and some of the routes that link them. But the system features too many disconnects – too many frantic dashes across the system’s gaps – to offer a full range of comfortable, point-to-point journeys.

First Avenue’s bike lane – often praised as a good example of recent improvements – disappears suddenly for 10 blocks (or half a mile) between the United Nations and 59^th Street, pitching cyclists into chaotic motor traffic climbing towards the Queensboro Bridge. Worse still, anyone who has successfully cycled to the Upper East Side and is wondering how to head south again will find not even a painted bike lane for more than three miles on 2^nd Avenue between 100^th St and 34^th St. The 8^th Avenue bike lane disappears for five blocks around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the chaotic point on the trip where cyclists are most in need of protection. The 9^th Avenue bike lane disappears for a couple of blocks around Penn Station. There are more.

 

A sharrow marks a bike route in St George, Staten Island:
this look like part of a network to you?

Instead of a network, New York has built a series of sections of bike lane, with noisy objections to the loss of parking or some other complexity keeping the sections all too often separate from each other. The regular changes in colour of the routes on the city’s bike map – indicating a change from a protected lane to a painted lane, to mere “sharrows” then back – are testament to New York officials’ weakness in the face of noisy, local protest. Perhaps the emblematic failure relates to the Hudson River Greenway. It’s one of the safest, most comfortable to use bike facilities in the city. But nearly every means of accessing it south of 59^th St involves a suicidally dangerous manoeuvre amid lines of fast-moving cars seeking to reach the West Side Highway.

It’s little surprise that, presented with confusing routes that disappear in the most dangerous places, relatively few New Yorkers are taking up the invitation to start cycling.

When I lived in London, by contrast, my head was full of the routes – often complex and roundabout, admittedly – of the London Cycle Network. The LCN – now out of fashion, since its introduction was overseen by Ken Livingstone, the former mayor - follows routes mainly along back streets across the city. It is so comprehensive that, by the time I left London, I could do 30-mile round trips on it without consulting a map. London’s existing Cycle Superhighways – appallingly designed as most are – at least seek to provide routes that take people to places. Both reflect what seems to me a greater tendency on the part of London’s planners than New York’s to think in terms of routes, not isolated projects.

Southwark Bridge, London: a key part of my mental map
of London's cycling networks

This week’s decision by Transport for London, the London mayor’s transport body, to go ahead with a comprehensive network of segregated bike paths should make the position far, far better. Unlike New York’s rather disjointed system, they should act more and more like the most efficient networks – like metro systems that draw commuters in from distant suburbs into heavily-used, highly-efficient core areas or express parcel networks. Such networks’ strength is their comprehensiveness – well-planned new metro lines generate disproportionately high numbers of journeys because they unlock new point-to-point journeys both on the existing network and the new line. London’s networks, at least in theory, aim to provide a reasonably consistent journey for a high proportion of the trips in the city that are possible by bicycle.

 

A London cycle path: an example of
the "infrastructure" that made me once
doubt infrastructure was the answer

Not, of course, that the simple dichotomies are the whole story. London’s cycle planners are, I know, prone to some of the same shortcomings as those in New York. I so despaired when I lived in London of the dire quality of much of the existing cycle infrastructure that I preferred an approach that sought to make onroad cycling safer. The roundabout, backstreet routes I often used are so circuitous that many simply won’t use them. In thousands of rides past South London’s busy Elephant & Castle interchange, I took one of the avoiding routes off the main roads every single time. To many other people, that route is so painfully slow that they prefer the main roads, where there are regular deaths.

New York’s project-based approach has at least improved some of the biggest barriers to cycling, even if it has always joined the bits together. I find the experience of mixing with fast-moving traffic on multi-lane New York streets sufficiently scary that I welcome any relief from it. I also understand, given the challenges of getting anything meaningful done in New York, why Janette Sadik-Khan - the city’s former, much missed, transportation commissioner – focused so hard on some flagship projects. The projects have proved resounding successes – had she sought to turn the projects into perfectly-realised networks, she could easily have become bogged down in the bureaucratic malaise that seems to have swallowed Polly Trottenberg, her well-meaning successor.

 

Copenhagen: an acutal cycle network, in magnificent action

Nevertheless, New York currently risks, it seems to me, watching from the sidelines as London’s new network of protected routes turns the city’s existing provision into a still more successful network. It’s hard to imagine New York’s achieving anywhere close to its target of having 6 per cent of trips by bikes by 2020 until it starts taking the challenges of providing a real network seriously.

Ms Trottenberg may be about to start tackling the issue in earnest, even if her department's record of retreat on markings for "slow zones" suggests otherwise. But the history of the Bleecker St – Broadway-Lafayette station on the New York City subway is a stark reminder that such changes don’t happen on their own in this city. The city’s IND subway network built Broadway-Lafayette station in 1936 immediately under Bleecker St station of the Interborough Rapid Transit Corporation. In 1940, the city subsequently took over the IRT and its rival BMT subway, forming them with the IND into an allegedly unified system enjoying the benefits of being a single network. Yet it was only in June 2012, after I arrived in New York, that a full connection between the two stations – which had sat immediately adjacent to each other for 76 years – was finally opened.

If New York is serious about encouraging more than a hardy band of souls to cycle round the city, changes to its cycling infrastructure cannot possibly take that long.

A dead mayor, a live cycling boom - and why cycling might be back to stay

For new residents of New York City like me, there has been something almost mind-bending about the last couple of days. Ever since Ed Koch, the city’s mayor from 1977 to 1989, died in the early hours of Friday, obituaries have been transporting us back to an unrecognisable city. Drug addicts lie prone on Manhattan streets, looting breaks out when the power fails and the subway is celebrated mainly for the range and inventiveness of its graffiti. It’s hardly surprising that the person who pitted himself against this chaos had a personality as pathologically extroverted as our current mayor’s is buttoned-up and controlled.

Sixth Avenue: bike-lane-less, as Ed Koch
preferred it on mature consideration

But, for a newcomer who’s a cyclist, one detail of the Ed Koch saga highlights a particularly striking change in the city. In 1980, at the height of the second oil price shock, Koch ordered the installation of segregated bike lanes on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues and Broadway in Manhattan. Then, only weeks later, having been ridiculed for his bike lane “fetish,” Koch had the lanes torn out again. He went on, in 1987, to try to ban cycling altogether from mid-town Manhattan. While that set-back took years to overcome, Koch nevertheless died in a city criss-crossed by a growing network of bike lanes. Installation is moving – despite setbacks as Nimbys in some neighbourhoods oppose new lanes - so fast that my 2012 NYC cycling map already feels quite badly out of date.

Thinking about that sharp turnaround – a tribute to the commitment of Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor, and Janette Sadik-Khan, his transport commissioner - has linked up in my mind several hopeful signs for cycling over the last couple of months. In both the US and the UK – the countries where I’ve done most cycling – cycling numbers are going up and official acceptance of cycling appears to be growing.

The question is whether this is a fundamental, long-term shift or just another short-term bit of faddism like Ed Koch's.

A Detroit Madison Street: borrowed chic for Lincoln

The question brings to my mind a mental picture of a copper-and-black Detroit Bicycle Company fixed-wheel bike. As someone who likes both gears and highly practical bikes, it’s not a machine I aspire to own. But I came across the bike – a Detroit Madison Street, trivia fans – in the unlikely setting of the Lincoln stand at Detroit’s annual North American International Auto Show. It was being held up as an example of the kind of finely-made luxury product of which Lincoln – which is trying to relaunch itself as a desirable luxury marque – approved.

Still more remarkably, it was one of quite a few bikes I spotted around the show floor.  The Smart stand boasted an E-Bike, which the manufacturer will be selling, while Toyota displayed a concept for a conventional bike. Kia was showing a small-wheeled bike that it sells in Korea, while Hyundai had a fixed-wheel bike sticking out the  back of a coupe. Subaru had stuck a couple of mountain bikes on the roof rack of one of its vehicles.

The unmistakeable impression was that carmakers thought bikes now had a certain cachet – which they wanted to borrow. Compare that with how the UK’s Raleigh in the 1960s felt it had to ape motorbike design to get kids to ride bikes.

The bikes’ presence on the automakers’ stands struck me all the more forcibly because of an article I’d written in my day job just before Christmas. It detailed how all the Detroit Three big automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – were struggling to reverse or live with recent years’ steep decline in young people’s learning to drive and subsequent buying of cars. Part of the carmakers’ problem stems from a gradual revival in recent years of the US’s inner cities – which are less littered than they once were with unconscious drug addicts - and, for some of the residents, a drift away from cars and towards bicycles. It’s the kind of gain for cycling that would have been scarcely imaginable in most industrialised countries 25 years ago when Mayor Koch was trying to ban cycling altogether.

A YouTube video posted by Gaz, a keen helmet-cam user reminded me that the process has already gone far further in the UK. His video – shot one recent January day – showed 50 cyclists on one short stretch of Cycle Superhighway 7 (a former Roman road, as it happens). If so many people are cycle commuting in January, Gaz suggests, the spring and summer are likely to see London’s highest cycle commuting numbers in many years.

Kent Ave, Williambsurg: Denis Hamil wants
those bike lanes gone

The worry, of course, is that cycling also looked so much like the coming thing in 1980 that a gadfly populist such as Ed Koch briefly took the risk of backing it. If car companies thought there was a way other than sticking two bikes on the roofrack to show their car was associated with an outdoor, aspirational lifestyle, I’m sure they’d happily use it. Denis Hamil, a columnist in the New York Daily News last week said he would support any mayoral candidate who promised to scrap the current crop of bike lanes. One of the likeliest contenders for mayor – Christine Quinn, a Democrat – has sought to appease bike lane haters by saying lanes are “controversial” and advising people not to discuss them at dinner parties.

In London, even Boris Johnson, the mayor, who is a daily cyclist, fell before the last mayoral election into the trap of caricaturing cyclists as dread-locked red-light jumpers. As with road safety – where the current UK government has reversed years of steady improvements by cutting funding for speed cameras – there is always a risk that someone will take steps that reverse apparently inexorable progress in a positive direction.

It doesn’t, for what it’s worth, feel as if such a step is coming immediately either here in New York or in the UK. Concern about the environment, changes in living patterns, concern about health and cycle technology improvements are all conspiring to make this cycling boom feel far more solid and longer-lasting than the second oil shock one.

Yes, cycling's made progress. But, as long as FedEx drivers
think across one of  New York's busiest bike lanes is a good place
to park, it won't be mainstream

But it’s worth remembering that, even after recent years’ quadrupling of New York cycling numbers and the last decade’s doubling in London, riding a bike remains a fringe pursuit that’s far from winning mainstream acceptance.

That point came home to me particularly clearly one Friday night just before Christmas. Riding home around 10pm down W55th street from my office, I was surprised to find a limousine pull up next to me and wind down its window. Inside was a curious tourist who couldn’t understand what I was doing. No, I told him, I wasn’t delivering anything. Yes, I was just riding home from my office.

Recognising that he wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it, he finally said: “Just seems kind of… European.”

The incident set a new mental benchmark for me for cycling in New York and other big cities where it’s still not one of the main modes of travel. Cycling, I’ve decided, will finally be mainstream when an encounter with a commuter cyclist is no longer one of the “darndest things about New York” that a returning tourist recounts to his friends in Peoria.