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 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.

A broken-down church - and a broken, asymmetric flow of information

I was only a little way into my first ride to work after moving into my apartment in Brooklyn when I started to get into a terrible tangle. Trying to get down Kane Street, in Cobble Hill, I found the road marked closed. After heading past the road cones, I found it was a proper road closure, not the kind where one just wheels the bike on the sidewalk past the obstruction. The closure was absurd, I muttered to myself, as the one-way system pushed my route further and further from the one I’d planned. It was, I reasoned, probably some piece of stupidity on the part of the police, worried about being sued over an unlikely accident near some relatively innocuous building work.

Christ Church, Cobble Hill: source of frustration on
the Invisible Visible Man's commute

I calmed down considerably, however, after finding out via Google why the street was closed. On July 26, while I had been back in Europe, lightning had struck Christ Church, the Episcopal church at the junction of Clinton Street and Kane Street. The spectacular tower – and scaffolding around it – had come crashing down as Richard Schwartz, a pedestrian, was walking underneath. The falling scaffolding had killed him. The building was a serious danger – and hadn’t yet been made safe.

The incident helped to crystallise an idea that had been slopping in fluid form around my mind for a while. I’d never have been irritated about the Kane St closure, I realised, if I’d had better information in the first place. It was, it occurred to me, one of many instances where confusion arises because two different parties – the New York City Department of Transportation and myself, in the Kane Street case – have different understandings of what’s going on on a road. The asymmetric information sharing had at least left me only inwardly irritated, however. The more I thought about it, the more I realised there were times when such information asymmetry probably killed people.

I encountered one potentially serious example the other morning while riding to work. I waited at traffic lights by the start of the Tillary Street segregated bike lane near the Brooklyn Bridge. When the lights changed, I moved off, only to find turning across my path a car heading in the other direction that should have been yielding to me. The driver’s behaviour was entirely wrong, based on his failure to understand what I knew - that the bike lane was as much part of the traffic flow at the intersection as the roads he was using. But, as he moved across my path, he leant out of his window. “Green light!” he yelled at me, self-righteously.

Traffic on W54th street. Those tainted windows don't,
in the Invisible Visible Man's experience, conceal
motorists pondering hard what information they might lack
about other road users' rights

Cycle lanes can give rise to information asymmetry as well. As I approached my office one morning last month, a truck driver opened his door in my path as I made my way up the side of some stalled traffic. He didn’t need to look for cyclists on that side of W54th street, he argued, because there was a bike lane painted down the other. Because of our asymmetric understanding of cyclists’ road rights, he had understood the cycle lane – which I knew to be a refuge for cyclists that didn’t stop me from using the rest of the road – as a kind of prison, to which cyclists should be confined.

Perhaps the most striking and persistent problem of information asymmetry that I’ve come across, however, was in London, where I lived until last August. Most traffic lights at busy intersections in London feature an “advanced stop line” for cyclists – an area where cyclists are meant to wait ahead of the other traffic for the lights to change. Many cyclists value advance stop lines as an idea, since they should, in theory, allow cyclists to get away after lights change, get clipped back into their pedals and get back into a suitable line on the road before the motor traffic catches up. Few motorists, however, seem to have much idea either about the principles of the advanced stop areas or when they should stay out of them. At least one motorist informed me, indignantly, when I complained about his occupying the area that when he’d arrived there had been no cyclists waiting, so he’d simply driven into the bike area.

Advance stop lines were involved in all three of the worst confrontations I had with motorists in London. In one case, a motorist deliberately drove very close to me and then very dangerously overtook me after I remonstrated with him about his driving into the ASL area as I was using it. A bus driver assaulted me (abandoning a bus full of passengers to do so) after I photographed his occupying the ASL area at a particularly dangerous junction. I had to call the police to stave off a threatened assault from another motorist to whom I’d complained about his driving into the ASL area.

Leaving aside the more eye-catching incidents, ASLs were a daily source of tension and frustration. I’d often squeeze past a line of stationary traffic to reach what was meant to be a haven for cyclists – only to fill it full of motorists grumpy at one’s presumption in seeking to get a jump on them at the lights. It’s reasonable, I think, to assume that even a fairly modest publicity campaign might have let at least a little of the fresh air of information into the foetid atmosphere of confrontation surrounding ASLs. In New York, it surely wouldn’t take much of a campaign to educate drivers about the role of bike lanes and the dangers of passing bikes too close to improve driving standards at least a little bit. The New York cycling map, after all, features excellent advice for cyclists on how motorists should give cyclists at least three feet's clearance when passing.

It isn’t, after all, a neutral thing to encourage new cyclists onto a city’s streets and then not tell motorists how to behave around them. Nature seems to abhor an information vacuum just as much as a literal one. In the absence of the pure oxygen of accurate, well-founded information, the information vacuum fills up with the carbon-monoxide-laden air of motorists’ assumptions about cyclists’ rights and responsibilities. It’s perhaps hardly surprising, given that no-one’s telling them otherwise, that so many motorists assume cyclists who ride well outside the door zone away from cars are acting maliciously, rather than entirely sensibly. In New York, it’s still less surprising given how many bike lanes – including most of those I use every day – are painted in precisely the part of the road – next to the parked cars’ doors – that cyclists know to be the most dangerous.

The air has grown still more poisoned because the agency meant to set the limits of acceptable behaviour in most modern societies – the police force – so often seems to have abandoned that role with regard to the road rules. Motorists, after all, like most other people see what they see others doing unmolested and assume it’s acceptable. One telling recent case I spotted involved a police effort to start fining motorists who drove in a bike lane on a narrow street at Twickenham, in South-West London (I’ll give New York cyclists a moment here to come to terms with the idea that, just across the Atlantic, there’s a police force that has, at least once, acted against motorists using a bike lane). A local newspaper quoted Nick Blyth, an officer involved in the enforcement effort, as saying: “Most of the motorists tend to comment when stopped that everyone else does it and they were just following them.”

 

Park right across one of New York City's busiest bike lanes?
Until someone says you shouldn't, you probably will.

It’s hardly surprising, given the New York Police Department’s reluctance to enforce a wide swathe of road rules, that few motorists seem even to understand the harm they cause when double-parking in bike lanes or refusing to yield to a cyclist in a bike lane. Nor, in London, is it terribly surprising that ASL infringements continue at the rate they do when even the Metropolitan Police department charged with processing complaints against motorists from cyclists (normally backed by helmet camera evidence) is currently pleading with leading London cycle bloggers to tell people to send in no more pictures of ASL infringements. They say, to all intents and purposes, they’ve no interest in prosecuting them.

The police’s attitude reflects, in an understated way, the strangeness of the political discourse around cycling. Politicians are eager, when announcing new policies between elections, to borrow cycling’s mantle of greenness and modernity and to encourage its growth. Closer to election time, meanwhile, many seem to revert to a different type – to claiming, like one minister I met, that cyclists were“their own worst enemies” or claiming like Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, that “typical” cyclists had skinny legs and ran red lights. No politician engaged in this delicate dance between pro and anti-cycling positions is likely to back a public information campaign explaining to frustrated motorists why, yes, that cyclist who yelled at you about your dangerous driving actually had an excellent point.

However, until such information is made more widely available and police across the industrialised world are backing up the politicians’ line with proper enforcement, few people will experience the relief I felt at letting go of my frustration over the Kane St closure. Relief is certainly not the emotion that comes naturally to me each morning as I ride along the now-reopened Clinton St towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I am all too often forced into the narrow bike lane, in danger from car doors, as motorists seek to push past me. But, as I reach the Kane St intersection and see Christ Church, still wrecked but now made safe, I still recall at least a little bit of that feeling.

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.