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 Brooklyn Heights commuter, an untimely Queens death - and how attitudes to roads might be the least of our problems

I’ve come across few sights on New York City streets that excited such mixed feelings in me as the one I encountered one morning last month on Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights. Just in front of me in the cycle lane on the street, which fills up with cars and taxis every morning, was the only child – he was probably ten or 11 – I’ve ever encountered riding on his own to school in New York City on the road.

I was, on one level, hugely excited. It would be an enormous improvement for every city in the industrialised world if the queues outside schools in the morning were of children waiting to park their bikes, not sports utility vehicles waiting to double-park. The boy had clearly been thoroughly trained and looked attentively from side to side at every junction.

 

Clinton St at Atlantic Avenue: I was excited to see a child
cycling here - but also apprehensive

But I also, I’ll confess, felt fearful. Motorists are apt to turn left or right suddenly on Clinton St or lurch into the cycle lane to avoid a suddenly-stopped taxi.  Drivers are prone to driving through the slow-moving traffic texting or sending emails. Car doors are apt to spring open or pedestrians to step into the street without looking. Knowing my own concerns about using the street, I willed the young man to make it to school safely. He eventually did.

That young boy’s been back in my mind since I heard on Friday about another boy going to school elsewhere in New York who didn’t make it safely.

On Friday morning, Mauricio Osorio-Palaminos, a truck driver, drove his truck out of 61^st street in Queens left onto Northern Boulevard, cut well onto the side of the street for oncoming traffic and caught Noshat Nahian, eight, with the trailer’s rear wheels. Noshat, who was hurrying to school with his 11-year-old sister, died shortly afterwards in hospital.

The street Osorio-Palaminos was leaving was not, as far as I can tell, a designated truck route. Pictures showed his truck far over to the wrong side of the road. The driver was also the second in recent weeks to kill a pedestrian in New York City while driving commercially with a suspended licence.

 

The Invisible Visible Boy on a truck
meant to show cyclists how hard they are
to see. Let's hope New York's DoT trains
its drivers in spotting cyclists too.

Yet commenters on online news reports about the death homed in instead on police reports that Noshat had his hood up and was looking down when hit. There was abuse for his parents. One commenter said Noshat must have been looking for “suicide by truck”.

Noshat’s death is at least the 11^th of a pedestrian under 13 so far this year in New York. Many people’s instinctive reaction has been to blame the victims.

In November, I attended a rally in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, calling for enforcement of traffic laws after a speeding driver killed Lucian Merryweather, nine, on a sidewalk. The rally heard a brave and heartbreaking speech from the mother of Samuel Cohen Eckstein, 12, who died in October when a car hit him on a crosswalk on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. She was speaking a few days after what should have been Samuel’s bar mitvah.

Many internet commenters on Samuel’s death focused on how he was hit after going after a ball that had bounced into the street. They ignored how he had the light when he entered the crosswalk. Several cars stopped for him before a speeding van hit him.

 

A memorial where Lucian Merryweather died. I'd love
to take half the internet commenters on road safety
to this unspeakably sad spot.

The father of Allison Liao, three, who was killed in October crossing the street in Flushing, Queens, looked on, weeping, as Samuel’s mother spoke. Initial reports on Allison’s death focused on how she had allegedly broken away while crossing the road from her grandmother, who was holding her hand. Yet Allison’s family insist she was holding her grandmother’s hand – and the driver who hit her barged through the crosswalk when he should have yielded.

The circumstances of Noshat’s death are very similar to those surrounding the death in East Harlem in February of Amar Diarassouba, a seven-year-old. He also died under a truck’s rear wheels as he headed to school. Erik Mayor, a restaurateur whose business is near the crash site, despicably tried to blame that crash on Amar’s older brother, saying he “wasn’t paying attention.” The driver involved had, as in other cases, driven through a crosswalk when he should have yielded.

They’re stories that won’t surprise many adults who walk or cycle around New York City – or any other big city in the United States. When I cross streets on foot, vehicles constantly barge through crosswalks when I have the light in my favour. I have found myself caught unawares by the line a truck’s rear wheels have taken through a crosswalk and been forced to jump backwards out of the way.

On my bike, on the 1^st Avenue bike lane in Manhattan, I need constantly to look over my shoulder at westbound cross-streets, knowing that cars will try to turn across my path. I have to signal forcefully to drivers to stop if they’re behaving dangerously. I need the sixth sense of the experienced urban cyclist to spot the vehicles that are about to pull out without looking from a parking space.

There’s an invidious assumption that, if children can’t at least match my skills at navigating streets, they shouldn’t be on the streets at all. The attitude is sometimes reminiscent of the sexual harassment that faces single women in some places in southern Europe. Anyone silly enough to enter the environment, it seems to be assumed, is fair game for any untoward consequences. A responsible parent, it’s  assumed, transports his or her children by car, prioritising their safety over that of others.

A cyclist on 55th Street in Manhattan. Remember: if
anything bad happens to a kid in this traffic,
it's probably the kid's fault.

Looked at dispassionately, however, the adults are behaving like stereotypical children. Many of my closest calls are with drivers who simply lose patience with waiting and pull out without looking from a traffic line. Most parents try to teach their children the kind of patience that drivers who drive while using their mobile telephones haven’t learned. Children are encouraged to face up to their responsibilities – yet many commercial trucking companies seem to employ unlicensed drivers. The police seem to shirk their duty to hold the worst drivers accountable.

I’ve come across plenty of children taking road rules far more seriously than many adults. The boy pedalling down Clinton St was paying far more attention to road conditions than most of the motorists. Esme Bauer, a young woman from Fort Greene, was one of the most powerful speakers at the rally I attended in November.

Many of the adults seem to be products of recent decades when parents feared to teach their children to navigate the streets. Having grown up with parents scared to let them out on the streets, they now sit, sucking their teeth, in their cars. Why, they wonder, are these children wandering about on the streets? What are their parents thinking?

 

New York needs more children commuting like this -
but will it take the steps to get them?

It’s a cycle that it’s obvious needs to be broken. Enforcement, road layout and general attitudes all need to improve to rebalance streets policy in favour of the pedalling boy commuter of Clinton St and away from the bad drivers around him.

It’s a question that goes far beyond transport policy, however. The disdain with which I saw some internet commenters react to Noshat’s death toppled over, it seemed to me, into expressing a generalised contempt for the weak and powerless. It’s an ugly attitude at the best of times. In this case, it was being expressed the week before Christmas about a young Bangladeshi immigrant crushed by a truck as he headed to take part in his public school’s holiday play.

In a city where someone can accuse such a young man of wanting “suicide by truck,” I’m tempted to conclude that New York’s transport problems are, perhaps, only a symptom – albeit a serious one – of a wider social malaise.