A prosecutor's phone call, remembrance of stresses past - and why I'm glad of a public policy miracle

It was on Friday afternoon, as I was sitting at my new desk in my office in London, that a phone call took me lurching back into the stresses of my daily cycle commute in New York.

The North-South Cycle Superhighway, at Southwark Street: surprising balm for the soul.

The call came from a prosecutor at the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission who was dealing with a complaint I’d submitted in May. Within a few minutes, I was being sworn in and examined at a hearing of the commission’s tribunal. It was the first time, after a succession of driver no-shows and last-minute plea bargains, that I’ve actually had to testify against a driver. Then, I was cross-examined by the attorney for a driver who’d first tailgated me and a group of other cyclists then driven down a street yelling abuse at me. I felt my heart racing and my temper rise.

But it was only a little later, as I discussed the joys of London’s new cycle superhighways with colleagues, that it dawned on me why the call from New York had set off quite so many fight-or-flight responses. Having arrived back in the UK with my family early on Thursday, I’d had two days of mostly stress-free cycling riding on London’s new segregated cycle tracks. The experience, it dawned on me, had lifted a burden of anxiety that had sat on me all the time I battled with New York’s drivers. As I recounted the tailgating then dealt with the cross-examination from the driver’s attorney, the burden’s full weight came crushing down on me again.

That low-stress riding has produced in me - to my own surprise - an unusual feeling of lightness of spirit when I’m on my bike. This weekend, staying with my parents-in-law in rural Cheshire, I noticed when I took my bike on a muddy, sometimes hard-to-navigate country trail that I was willing to tackle trickier slopes and tougher surfaces than I had been when riding similar routes while living in New York. There are undoubtedly complex public policy questions about how much road space in London to allocate to bicycles and how much to other traffic. But, for me in the short term, the changes’ effect has been to liberate a little joy in my soul.

A muddy section of the Wirral Trail, in Cheshire:
site of my unaccustomed boldness

Even if I’d still been in New York, however, it would still have been stressful to relive the events of the morning of May 12 - all the more so because they reflected failings typical of New York’s streets. I’d complained about a taxi driver who drove close behind me and some other cyclists, trying to honk us out of his way, as we moved to turn left at the busy intersection of Canal and Allen Streets. After I photographed the driver so that I could report him, he drove parallel to me as I rode up Allen Street, shouting what sounded like abuse at me as I rode in the street’s - thankfully protected and segregated - bike lane.

The incident reflected many of the weaknesses of New York’s provision for cyclists. The two blocks of Canal St where I was riding connect the Manhattan Bridge bike path - one of the city’s busiest cycling locations - with the bike lanes on Allen St, a critical, high-quality, north-south route. Yet those two blocks are busy, chaotic and devoid of any cycling provision save for some rather optimistic “sharrow” markings. Those are generally obscured beneath double-parked vehicles.

Conditions were particularly challenging on the morning in question because Canal St had just been milled - had its surface removed prior to laying of new tarmac. The manhole covers and other ironwork - always potential landmines of the New York streetscape - were sticking up well above the temporary surface, presenting a high-stakes obstacle course for commuting cyclists.

The honking taxi driver of milled Canal St:
a picture to get the stress hormones racing

By contrast, the striking feature of my rides so far on London’s new cycle tracks is that they provide seamless journeys. The paths are generally continuous, mostly wide and, so far at least, have excellent, high-quality surfaces. I can think of almost no piece of cycling infrastructure in New York - including the Hudson River Greenway, the city’s best route - that so completely eliminates the challenge for cyclists of interacting with drivers.

The London routes don’t, like so much provision in New York, disappear at the points where conditions get most challenging. From my temporary accommodation in Limehouse, East London, I zipped to work on Thursday and Friday down Upper Thames Street, a traffic sewer through the City of London financial district. Riding there used to involve terrifying games of chicken with big trucks and black taxis. Last week, it was, for the first time I can recall, a positive pleasure to ride on, thanks to the east-west cycle superhighway, which bore me down towards Southwark Bridge untroubled by any interactions with the neighbouring vehicles. The contrast with the treatment of difficult areas in New York - say, the section of Second Avenue where cyclists have to deal with traffic turning into the Queens-Midtown Tunnel - could scarcely be more stark.

Upper Thames Street: a cycling paradise if not exactly
regained, at least found for the first time

Yet the grudging tone of those involved in the Taxi and Limousine Commission hearing was at least as depressing as the recollection of the incident itself. There seemed to be a general feeling that for a group of cyclists to be followed closely by an angrily honking taxi driver wasn’t really that big a deal. The defence attorney, meanwhile, demanded to know if I’d been in the bike lane when honked at. The question suggested the attorney didn’t know the street had no bike lane. It was built on the false assumption that bike lanes should serve as prisons for cyclists, not havens. It also entirely missed the point that a left-turning cyclist could scarcely stay in a bike lane on the right, even had one existed.

The Victoria Embankment not only hosts
those darling little lights - but an actual,
well-designed cycle track junction

London’s new cycle tracks, by contrast, feel like acts of generosity. They are mostly wide and those I’ve used so far seem well designed. My enthusiasm for them isn’t unique. One colleague - previously only an intermittent commuter cyclist - raved to me about how she could scarcely believe London had built such things. “They’ve got those little lights!” she squealed excitedly, referring to the small repeater traffic lights positioned at cyclists’ eye level. The other striking point is how quickly it’s possible to get around a city by bike when one isn’t constantly dodging around cars double-parked in bike lanes or grappling with “mixing zones” of vehicles trying to cross one’s path. My bike computer is consistently telling me I’m going around 1mph faster on average than I used to in New York.

The tracks’ building is clearly an act of political boldness that far outstrips even Janette Sadik-Khan’s efforts to put in cycling infrastructure in New York. The scale of that boldness was clear to me as my family and I rode on Thursday morning from Heathrow Airport to our temporary accommodation. At mid-morning, as we were making the trip, motor traffic remained heavy and very slow-moving while, next to us, wide, well-designed cycle lanes stood, getting only relatively light use.

It is hard to imagine any contemporary senior New York politicians’ having the nerve to try to push such a network not only through the city council but also through the myriad of community boards that are determined to obstruct progress. My experience of testifying before the taxi and limousine commission’s tribunal was certainly a reminder that there is so far not even the vaguest consensus in New York that cyclists have a legitimate place in urban transport.

In London, meanwhile, I share my colleague’s wonder at the cycle tracks’ construction. The tracks are associated closely with Boris Johnson, a bumbling mayor whose other contributions to British public life - including his role in the recent European Union referendum - have been almost entirely negative. The tracks were shepherded through by Andrew Gilligan, Johnson’s “cyclist tsar,” who received substantial, justified criticism for his shoddy methods in the 2004 Hutton Inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly, a government scientist whom Gilligan had used as a source.

London cyclists like these were yearning
for a miraculous transformation.
Astonishingly, they seem to have found one.

The tracks came to be built only after Johnson rashly built a network of extraordinarily dangerous “cycle superhighways” consisting only of paint on very busy main roads. The decision to build something better followed the justified outcry over the number of cyclists killed riding on the old super highways. That such a flawed process and flawed individuals could end up producing excellent, well-designed infrastructure feels like a public policy miracle.

But, of course, the miracle is a limited one. The cycle tracks cover only a relatively small area of central London. When not on them, I’ve already had some negative experiences. I was, for example, chased down a bus lane on Brixton Road on Thursday by an impatient van driver who should not have been in the lane at the time. This evening, as I cycled home from Euston station, on one of the few parts of the journey where I wasn’t using protected infrastructure, a minicab driver cut me off as I sought to pull out round a parked car. I can only hope that the cycle tracks are not so bold a step that they end up ripped out, as New York’s first experiments in segregated bike lanes were, when the complaints from motorists complaining about congestion became too much.

The other worries are for the future, however. I continue in many ways to pine for New York - its unique atmosphere, the open, friendly people, even the excitement of discovering the city by bike. But London’s bold cycling experiment makes me glad, at least when I’m on my bicycle, that I’m here.

An oafish limousine driver, an English Channel passage - and why a metro makes the case for bike paths

It was as I was riding down 13^th St in Park Slope, not far from my apartment, last Sunday that I heard the sound of honking behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a black Lincoln Town Car – vehicle of choice for many New York City car services – barrelling down the street towards me and my son, who was on his trailer bike behind me.

New York City's official advice on where to ride in the road:
not bedtime reading, I'd suggest for the guy I encountered

But my response wasn’t what the driver obviously hoped it would be. Knowing that the street’s single lane, though wide, lacked the space for a wide vehicle to pass safely at speed, I steered into the very centre of the lane, preventing his attempted pass. At the next traffic light, he pulled up next to us and yelled how I should have been over to one side of the street. He then gave a loud blast on his horn and passed aggressively and fast. At the light after that, I asked his passenger please to withhold her tip.

The driver was inconsiderate and dangerous, as I pointed out in my subsequent complaint to the Taxi & Limousine Commission (top tip, for-hire drivers: behave especially well if you’ve got an easily-remembered licence plate). But he also misunderstood the complicated relationship between space and speed. There are circumstances where it might be safe for a 6’ 6” wide car to pass a bicycle on a 28’ wide street where parked cars are taking up 8’ on either side. But they don’t include occasions when a person is riding a bicycle laden with groceries and hauling a trailerbike at 17mph downhill.

In the debate about how best to allocate space
on the roads, New York's police department
prefers to make practical demonstrations
of its position.

It’s at the root of very many of my arguments with motorists that few seem to understand how I expand the buffer zone I’m mentally defending around myself as my own and other road users’ speed increases. I’m sure that many motorists see me and other cyclists squeezing past stationary cars and jump to the wrong conclusions. It’s a very different business riding close to a stationary motor vehicle and next to one doing 40mph while one’s riding at 20mph. Fast-moving vehicles travel far farther while the driver is processing the need to stop and then need a far greater distance to come to a halt. It should be obvious that every mile per hour of extra speed disproportionately expands the invisible balloon of space I need to keep free.

The point is especially important because so many of the disputes about how to accommodate growing levels of cycling use – or cities’ aspiration to have more journeys by bike – come down to the allocation of road space. The debate is an asymmetric one at present. Nearly anyone who regularly rides a bike in a city will have thought about the space he or she can use on the roads, how the space is apportioned and the issues that that allocation raises. Many people who drive cars around cities seem instinctively to think the roads should be freer of obstructions in front of their cars, wider and more conducive to high speeds. To such a view, any space taken away from cars is being stolen from its rightful owners.

The whole issue has reminded me of a reporting visit I undertook 10 years ago to Line 14 of the Paris metro, the city’s first entirely driverless metro line. I noticed how trains slowed down from their 80kph (50mph) top speed well in advance of the terminal station if another train was occupying the platform. But then, as the trains slowly negotiated the junctions at the end of the line before turning back, they would come almost in touching distance of each other. They were under the control of one of the world’s most advanced signalling systems. It was constantly calculating the balloon of space it needed to maintain between trains, providing many train lengths’ of empty space in front of each train at top speed but barely any at 10kph (6mph).

 

Smith St, Brooklyn: it's a bike lane but also, on a busy morning,
a corridor of collision uncertainty.

A chaotic, busy street makes far more sense if one pictures every object encased in balloons of space like those that Line 14’s signalling system projects in front of trains. Every vehicle operator should be maintaining in front of him or her enough empty space to stop safely in the event that an unexpected danger crops up. But, just as importantly, everyone on the street needs to plot the trajectories of other vehicles or other potential obstructions. Looked at this way, it’s clear why suddenly-opened car doors pose such a danger. No other obstruction can appear as suddenly or with as little warning as a suddenly-opened car door. I refused to let the angry car service driver past to avoid being forced into the door-opening danger zone. To the driver, I’m sure that looked like a willful refusal to go into an unused, empty zone.

It’s because I draw a safety balloon round any moving vehicle that I find myself at least once a week in shouted conversation with the drivers of vehicles that have started pulling into my path. “Stop!” I’ll shout as the vehicle keeps moving across my path. “I see you!” the motorist shouts, exasperatedly, as if I should implicitly trust that the driver of a slow-moving vehicle on a collision course with me will not immediately turn into a faster-moving one.

The APL Pearl turns at the Port of Salalah: I yearn for her
navigational equipment, if not her limited maneouvrability.

I yearn for something like the collision-avoidance radar I watched a pilot use seven years ago as the APL Pearl, a container ship on which I was travelling, negotiated the chaotic shipping lanes of the English Channel. Each vessel’s radar plot had in front of it a line showing where it would be within six minutes. Slow-moving oil tankers and bulk carriers sported only relatively small, short lines. The lines before container ships like our own were longer. However, a fast ferry emerging from the Port of Boulogne suddenly threw a long, worrying line across the paths of many of the vessels, including our own, sending the pilot into a brief frenzy of calculation about collision courses.

The more one ponders the complexity of the interactions on a shared-use street – or the English Channel - the less one becomes surprised at people’s tendency to crash into each other. The surprise is how effectively most of the time people manage to miss each other.

Yet a trip the week before my run-in with the Impatient Car Service Driver of 13^th Street suggested a different lesson about space. I was visiting the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad in North Dakota, where sudden, unexpected growth in both agricultural and oil traffic has led to significant congestion. As we drove by the company’s main line across the region, we saw an Amtrak passenger train zipping along the main line at 70mph, far faster than the 50 or 60mph common for freight trains on the route. “I’ll bet that really eats up capacity,” I said to the railroad people, to a resigned harrumph of acknowledgement.

A BNSF oil train near Ross, North Dakota: the drivers are
probably not grateful they share their tracks with faster,
lighter passenger trains.

No railwayman relishes running trains of sharply-varying speed next to each other. The fast ones constantly catch up with the slower trains in front, leaving unused space behind them. The slow ones constantly fall behind, leaving unused space in front of them.

It's key to improving road safety to control vehicles' speeds on city streets and New York in particular needs to do a far better job of the task. But there is also, it occurs to me, an Amtrak-type effect on many congested streets where bikes, cars, buses and others share space. The differing braking and acceleration statistics of the different vehicles waste space and capacity as effectively as if the New York subway decided to run the F Train with a mixture of the latest electric subway trains and its plodding diesel maintenance trains. Were New York’s Department of Transportation to provide properly-segregated bicycle lanes on downtown Brooklyn’s most chaotic streets, it’s easy to imagine that they would instantly become far more efficient places, as well as far safer ones. It’s perhaps time to label such streets as optimised streets, rather than simply safe ones.

It will, of course, be some time before all the hundreds of backstreets like the one where I was riding last Sunday will justify such optimisation. While the ultimate cure for episodes like the one I encountered might be surgery for the street, the short-term response will still be for the driver to take a don’t-be-an-inconsiderate-fool pill.

But the spaces under the streets of many cities and the rail lines that march across many countries’ open spaces show that transport can be conducted in an orderly, safe, efficient manner. It would be a tragedy not to learn at least a little more from them.

Update: I've just heard (on February 25, 2015) that the limo driver who harassed us has been dealt with - with a $200 fine an no points on his licence. I'm glad he's faced some penalty. But this strikes me as fairly paltry - and heightens my concerns about Taxi and Limousine Commission procedures.

An idle hour, worried taxi drivers - and why only the dumbest don't plea bargain

The man looked me up and down and, mistaking my light grey, Brooks Brothers suit for a sign I had an official role at the Taxi and Limousine Commission tribunal, asked me, “Are you the lawyer?”

“No, I’m a witness,” I replied.

A brief, awkward silence ensued.

“You are in favour of the driver?” he asked, in the accent of somewhere in South Asia.

“No,” I said. “The driver tried to assault me, so I’m very much not in favour of the driver.”

 

New York City taxi drivers, before humanisation

The man’s error, I realised during the 90 minutes I spent this past Thursday at the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, was an understandable one. We were all at the TLC’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings because of things that had happened somewhere on New York City’s streets. The steady stream of mainly South Asian men that trooped out of the elevators on the 19^th floor of the TLC’s building in the Financial District had all, presumably, done something negligent or dangerous that would have infuriated or horrified me if I’d witnessed it. There’s an equally strong chance that, had we encountered each other on the street, we'd have been yelling at each other.

But, as I waited for my moment of courtroom drama, I found myself viewing the drivers, shorn of their yellow cabs or Town Car limousines, differently. They were hard-working immigrants worried about what their day at the tribunal would mean for their livelihoods. Once there was no obvious sign (apart from the pair of pannier bags at my seat) that I was a cyclist, I suddenly turned into someone who might make this bad day better for them. Off the roads, our shared humanity came to the surface.

 

The scene of, if not the crime, at least the breach
of Taxi and Limousine Commission regulations

Not that the reason I was there was touching or reassuring. I was due to attend a hearing over my complaint against a car service driver that I found one night in March blocking a cycle lane at a particularly dangerous junction in downtown Brooklyn. Since he was leaning against the car and there were plenty of legal alternative places to park, I asked him to move. After he angrily refused to do so, I tried to take a picture as evidence for the TLC. That sent him spiralling into a far more intense fury and he not only swore at me and called me a “white devil” but made grabs for both my camera and bike.

When I arrived at the office at 8.50am on Thursday, however, I recognised none of the drivers waiting anxiously for hearings. A short while later, a TLC prosecuting attorney emerged to tell me my driver had so far not turned up. If he hadn’t arrived by 10am, he would be in default and found guilty of all the charges. He apologised for making me wait.

A New York taxi cab in action: quiet professionalism

But I was already growing interested in the transactions I could hear taking place around me.

“OK, so the complaint’s withdrawn,” I heard a TLC official telling a woman I took to be a driver’s lawyer. “So he doesn’t have the points. You just have to make sure he doesn’t get two more points or he’ll get another summons.”

Another driver was standing, head cocked, listening carefully to a TLC attorney.

“This is the offer,” he was being told. “We give you a $300 fine and no points.”

 

There was then some discussion about whether the driver had been given a previous chance to consider the offer, before it became clear that he would accept it.

“If that’s what you want to do, we’ll go in front of the judge and withdraw everything else,” the official told him.

Would you feel like veering left round a limo parked
at this intersection? One evening back in March, I didn't.

The tribunal, I started to realise, seldom dealt in courtroom drama of the To Kill a Mocking Bird kind. I’d carefully taken pictures of the intersection involved to show the judge how dangerous it was to park in that bike lane. But I’d never been likely to get my moment in court. The tribunal dealt instead in the kind of mildly unsatisfactory plea-deal compromise that Maurice Levy would persuade a drug gang’s members to accept in The Wire. The transactional nature of the interactions was such that I even heard someone who seemed to work at the TLC shouting cheerily to someone who appeared to be a driver, “Nice to see you here again!”

My mind went back to my most recent journey in a New York City taxi – my first since I moved permanently to the city nearly two years ago. Arriving at nearly midnight at LaGuardia Airport ten days ago, I opted for a taxi over the late-night vagaries of bus and subway. I found myself hurtling at 70mph along the uneven surfaces of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The driver hunched over the wheel of his Ford Escape, a hunted look in his eyes.

It was obviously dangerous driving – he tailgated other vehicles, drove too close to the concrete dividing barriers and generally, I eventually told him, drove like someone who would one day kill another road user. He didn’t seem in any way a bad person, however. He was remarkably calm and receptive once I started fully explaining to him why his driving terrified me. I slightly reduced my tip in line with my previous advice on how to shape taxi driver behaviour. I couldn’t help wondering how well the endless transactions at the TLC fulfilled the wider goal of persuading drivers like mine to use their vehicles more safely.

Yeah, sure it looks like a clear rule breach
to you. What will it look like after a
plea bargain?

Yet, as my hour ticked by, it became clear I’d got into a row with one of the few for-hire drivers who didn’t understand how to play this game. My driver had been charged with three counts – a parking violation; harassment; and making threats of, or actual use of, physical violence. He faced points on his licence for the parking, a $200 to $1,000 fine for the harassment and a fine of up to $1,500 for the violence element. He could, in theory, face a suspension or revocation of his licence but the prosecutor made it clear the judges didn’t like using that.

Having listened to the other conversations, I’m confident the prosecutors had foreseen a deal dropping the violent element in exchange for guilty pleas to the two other charges. As it turned out, unless the driver can provide a good reason why he didn’t attend, he’s been found guilty of all the charges and could face the maximum penalties.

It was an outcome that initially pleased me. I headed back outside to find the Financial District bathed in bright, warm sunshine I’d been unable to see inside, unlocked my bike and prepared to head back to the office. I remain grateful to the TLC for taking my complaint seriously and acting on it. It’s better than the only previous time I complained to them, when they insisted they couldn’t identify the driver involved based on his licence plate number.

But Beaver St, outside the offices, was packed with cars, their drivers leaning impatiently on their horns. As I headed north towards the Hudson River Greenway, motorists were cutting inside each other, jostling for minuscule advantages with little regard to the danger or inconvenience their behaviour was creating for other people. As I rode home that evening, I once again had to dodge round a for-hire vehicle parked exactly where the driver I encountered had been. I hadn’t the heart to ask him to move.

I’d won one hollow, easy victory in the campaign for more civilised streets. But I got home far from certain the war was being won.

Update, June 10: I've just heard that the driver was indeed found guilty. He will have to pay a $3,050 fine and have four points on his licence.