Routes - and Why I Prefer Developing my Hippocampus to my Quadriceps

It’s fairly easy for even a casual observer to spot what cycling does for some bits of my body. While I’m far less fit than I’d like to be, I boast thighs that some mature trees would be happy to call their trunks. Since moving to New York and cycling farther each day, I’ve also lost some weight, as testified to by the sag in my trousers’ waistbands below the belt loops.

I’ll probably never know, however, precisely what I’m doing to the posteriors of my hippocampi, two tiny glands on either side of my brain that help me to find my way around. I get just as much satisfaction, nevertheless, from the idea that I’m making them bigger, more complicated and more useful than they used to be as I do from my bulging thighs and slimming-if-still-overlarge waist.

 

The Invisible Visible Man's CaBi bike at Union Station:
mission accomplished

That satisfaction came home to me particularly forcefully this past week after I conquered my nervousness to have a go at cycling between Arlington, Virginia and my train home from Washington’s Union Station. I headed off tentatively on a Capital Bikeshare bike, worrying that my only rudimentary sense of the area’s geography would soon leave me hopelessly lost. I very nearly gave up immediately after getting the bike out of the docking station, alarmed at the bike’s handling when loaded with all my various bits of baggage.

An hour or so later, however, I was pushing the bike’s wheel into the Union Station docking station, feeling strangely elated. It was, it occurred to me, the kind of satisfaction that's soon going to be available to more people in New York, with the introduction of the Citibike bike share system. I’d tackled the mental puzzle of working out my way and reached a satisfactory conclusion.

My interest in the hippocampus dates back, however, to long before I ever set foot in the United States. I first heard of the brain structure while studying psychology at St Andrews University. I particularly associate it with a visit once with a friend to a room lined with cages full of rats. The friend was a PhD student working with the rats on neurophysiology, had gone in to check on them over the weekend and invited me along.

On the room’s ceiling, I could see the outline of a now-removed round disc. It marked, my friend told me, where Richard Morris, a neurophysiologist, had first conducted a famous experiment on the hippocampus’s role. He had set up a pool in the room with a hidden platform that the rats had to find. A video camera in the ceiling disc’s middle tracked their progress. Rats proved good at learning where the platform was. But, when Prof Morris injected a drug into their hippocampi to stop them working, they were no longer able reliably to locate it. The hippocampus seemed to organise their memory for direction.

The Jefferson Memorial, during my great, trans-Washington
bike ride. Yeah, the picture's squint. I took it seated on a bike.
Get used to it already.

I made a connection between the hippocampus and my getting about by bike when I heard about Eileen Maguire’s research on taxi drivers. In a series of studies, Prof Maguire – of University College London - has examined changes in the posterior hippocampus in London taxi drivers as they first learn the Knowledge – the test they have to pass on the city’s geography – then apply it. The posterior hippocampus – the rear part of the structure - tended to be bigger and more complex in drivers who had passed the Knowledge than in would-be drivers who had failed it, she found.

My brain, I recognised, was probably undergoing similar changes to the taxi drivers’. The gradual trial-and-error process of learning how best to get to a place – the frustration at missing that vital turning again, the fear at suddenly finding oneself unintentionally on an over-busy road, the satisfaction on finally getting a route right – were playing themselves out in my hippocampi. New neurons were growing and new connections were forming as I gradually built up a more solid picture of the best ways to get about.

Streets in the City of London: it may look a mess to you -
but the Invisible Visible Man's mental maps can help you
round this maze

The process, however, has been nothing like as clinical as a neurophysiological description might imply. I recall, for example, how, shortly after moving south from Edinburgh in 1997, I set off, cycle map in pocket, to work out my route from home in Brixton to my employer’s offices. The 4½ mile journey took me 45 minutes of missing turnings in my bike route, failing to understand how traffic flows worked and repeatedly checking the map.

Latterly in London, I could make it home on a good night in 20 minutes – albeit down busier main roads. My mental map of South London’s cycling routes could switch more smoothly and efficiently than any satellite navigation device. By the time I left London, I knew every pothole and manhole cover of many of the roads I’d cycled most often, preparing to avoid them well before I had reached them.

My mental map spread well beyond my regular commuting area. I’d feel a little surge of excitement if, for example, I got invited to some press event 15 miles from the office in Wembley. Why, I hardly ever got to use my carefully-memorised route out to that area, I’d think to myself. I was surprised and delighted one time when I found another reporter had made the same decision as I to cycle from Central London. We earnestly swapped thoughts on busy roads and helpful shortcuts.

 

The Shard: on my route to City Airport

It was my enthusiasm for the route that gave me a bias in favour of flying from London City Airport. My route for the 13 or so miles from my house to the airport – which distinguished itself by having good bike parking – was, I often felt, something of a work of art. I would pedal across the Thames, down Cable Street in the densely-packed East End, past Canary Wharf, then out into the grim housing estates of still working-class docklands. I would encounter evidence of every period in London’s history, from the Romans to the new Shard skyscraper. There can be few better ways of feeling at one with a city than to know intimately a route like the one I used to reach City Airport. It would take me from a beautiful but obscure quiet Georgian Square then out across the internationally-recognised landmark of Tower Bridge.

I’ve experienced something similar in New York. When apartment hunting, I found myself a couple of times nastily off course – on the wrong side of a busy expressway from where I wanted to be or careering down a six-lane avenue of scary, fast-moving traffic. But I know my mental map of the city is slowly but surely stitching together, somewhere in the back of my hippocampi. Without thought, I head north a couple of blocks to avoid the most constricted sections of W54 street most mornings, then south again before the office. I’ve been trying out a route up the east side bike path some other mornings. I take joy in now knowing the Lexington-Park-Madison-5th sequence of avenues I cross as I head to work. But I shun that route in the evenings, well aware, after previous experience, of the miseries of trying to head southbound on 2^nd avenue.

The Empire State Building in pink:
cycling to photograph it was more fun for me than a party

I felt that same sense of having access to secrets of the city closed to others when, one night recently, my employer organised on the Upper East Side a party to celebrate its 125^th anniversary. As others headed off afterwards to an after-party, I made excuses – but knew my main motivation was my desire to try the way home I’d crafted in my head. Before long, I was bowling down from the top of the Queensboro Bridge’s bike path, which I last used regularly in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Then I was into Queens and navigating streets under elevated subway lines so romantically urban they should have had a permanent Chicago Blues soundtrack.

 

I looked across as I headed down the East River at the Empire State building, lit up pink in honour of the anniversary. I was, I felt sure, enjoying myself far more on this solitary exploration of the city than anyone yelling at a colleague to be heard over the music at the party.

Which brings me back to Washington.

The US Capitol: how to get there by bike is now fixed in
the Invisible Visible Man's hippocampi

Whatever my initial misgivings, they disappeared immediately I found myself on a bike path by the Potomac and catching my first glimpse of the Jefferson memorial and US capitol sitting on the other side. I sped – as much as one can on a bikeshare bike – over the 14^th street Bridge and slowly worked out the best route along the National Mall. A little bit of guesswork once I’d got north of Pennsylvania Avenue and I was finally at the station, embarrassed to find myself feeling little less elated than Edmund Hillary can have felt on his first conquest of Everest.

But there were, it came to me, few satisfactions in life more total than completing such a journey. I had set out to tackle a challenge and, as I pushed the bike back into the docking station, comprehensively conquered it. I had made the journey entirely on my own resources. And, somewhere in my two hippocampi, just as those rats in St Andrews learnt where the platform was, my mental maps for cycling in Washington and northern Virginia were starting to form.

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 pain to use but a joy to be on: in praise of the Brooklyn Bridge

It was when my then 10-month-old son refused to go back to sleep one morning in July 2008 that I first crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. We were on holiday (vacation) staying in TriBeCa. On our second morning, the jetlag from flying from London not yet having worn off, he wouldn’t nod off again after waking up at 5am. I’d headed south with him the previous morning, down towards the Staten Island ferry terminal. This time, I decided, it was about time I saw this bridge across the East River that I hadn’t properly seen on any previous visit to New York.

 

Budapest's Chain Bridge:
diminished my expectations

Other old bridges in cities had shaped my expectations. I’d cycled across the Chain Bridge in Budapest – another 19^th century suspension bridge. I’d ridden over pretty much every Thames crossing between Tower Bridge and Windsor. I’d walked over the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol. I had even noticed – with mild irritation – the numerous references in The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough’s fine history of the building of the Panama Canal, to the Brooklyn Bridge. He had written a previous book on the subject. How big a deal, I wondered, could a bridge across a river in the middle of a city be?

All of which meant I was unprepared for what I encountered as I pushed my little boy’s pushchair (stroller) over the road beyond City Hall Park and started out on the long, sloping walkway. The twin archways of the bridge’s Manhattan pier stood hundreds of yards away, towering over even many tall New York buildings. The four enormous main suspension cables reinforced the bridge’s scale.

The Invisible Visible Boy:
wide awake on his first visit
to the Brooklyn Bridge

This, I suddenly realised, was more like some vast, cross-estuary bridge – I’ve ridden in the past over the Erskine, Forth and Tay bridges in Scotland – than almost anything I’d previously encountered in a city. Yet it was nearly 100 years older than most of those similar spans and taking off from the middle of one of the most densely-packed sections of one of the most densely-packed cities on earth.

I also, as I made my way out towards Brooklyn, started to notice the Manhattan-bound cyclists freewheeling down the slope. There were, it occurred to me, some lucky souls who got to commute by bike every morning over this marvel of engineering, taking in one of the world’s great views – lower Manhattan’s clustered skyscrapers. As I rolled the still wide-awake boy over the bridge, at an hour I’d normally still be sleeping, I started to imagine an alternative life from our existence in London. We would live in Brooklyn and I would get on my bike each morning and ride, amid the drama of the Brooklyn Bridge, to my job in Manhattan.

There will by this point be many people familiar with cycling in New York puzzled at my enconium for this particular bridge – and for good reason. The Brooklyn Bridge, oldest of the fixed East River crossings and the most distinctive, suffers as a place to cycle from its celebrity. I have endured journeys on sunny Saturdays when I’ve spent virtually every yard of the main crossing ringing my bell, shouting warnings or braking suddenly as heedless tourists have wandered into my path. I had a young woman shout at me, “This is a tourist area!” after I tutted at her dumping her suitcase right in the cycle lane by the Manhattan pier. Her view failed, I thought, to capture the structure's fundamental bridge-iness. Most bizarrely of all, I once had a wedding party remonstrate with me that I was cycling too fast (at a sedate 12mph) and had disrupted their efforts to pose for wedding photos in the bridge’s bike lane. I suggested that, if they didn’t mind obstructing traffic, the view from one of the adjacent car lanes might be even better.

But the challenges of using the bridge shouldn’t obscure how marvellous and unique a structure the bridge is. Using it can be one of those interactions with a city that cyclists are peculiarly privileged to enjoy. The bridge played a significant role in forming the current New York City. It's no accident that it was only in 1898, after the bridge's completion in 1883, that the cities of New York and Brooklyn merged to form one metropolis.

 

John Roebling's Gothic arches:
a bit mad when you think about it.

The aesthetics of the Great East River Bridge – as it was known during construction – also summarise something about the city itself. When John Roebling, the bridge’s designer, was planning it in the 1860s, he could easily have gone for a different look. There is, in retrospect, something eccentric about giving what was then the world’s most ambitious, modern bridge two twin stone archways in the European gothic style. The mixture of modern steel cables and gothic styling must initially have seemed as strange as, say, one of the modern-day shopping malls in Dubai themed around the medieval Muslim world.

Yet the slightly pompous adoption of European styles and modern construction techniques turned out to be the perfect mixture for a city taking over from Europe the mantle of world leadership. There were buildings in New York and Brooklyn in an archaic style before the Great Bridge. But it’s hard to believe that mixture of old and new would have become quite as prevalent without the Roeblings’ bridge. Look at the Brooklyn Bridge’s towers and you’re seeing, right there, where Gotham City’s Gothic aesthetic was born. It helps that the bridge's mix of styles is unique. As McCullough's book points out, it was one of the first suspension bridges on such a scale – but the last big one before steel towers became standard. None of the Great Bridge’s East River successors features the mixture of stone and steel.

The commemorative plaque: heroes and villains side by side

A stop I made one morning in early March, however, has prompted me also to think about the human stories behind the bridge's construction as I ride across. Stopping to change from my warm cycling jacket to a cooler high-visibility vest, I spotted above where I rested my bike, on the bridge’s Brooklyn tower, the plaque that was unveiled on May 24, 1883 when the bridge, after 14 years’ work, finally opened to the public. Having read McCullough’s The Great Bridge since that day in 2008, I found many of the names bringing incidents during its building vividly to mind.

The name John Roebling, the bridge’s original engineer, was marked with a small cross and the date 1869. He had, I knew, died slowly and painfully of tetanus after being injured surveying the bridge’s Brooklyn landing, on a spot almost precisely below where I stood. The cables above my head – a mixture of stays to hold the bridge deck steady and conventional suspension cables - bore testimony to his continuing influence. Such dual sets of cables were a trademark of his bridge designs – and testimony to his caution and thoroughness.

The name Washington Roebling, John’s son, below him, conjured up still more stories. He suffered terribly for years from the effects – both on his nerves and his body – of tackling a fierce fire in the caisson that formed the base of the bridge’s Brooklyn tower. The caisson, complete with the wood he personally repaired, was on the river bed, directly below my feet.

 

The bridge from Manhattan: dodgy wire and all

The list of the bridge’s trustees was less inspiring, meanwhile. Henry Murphy and William Kingsley, the president and vice-president of the board, had both been involved in awarding the contract to make wires for the suspension cable to J Lloyd Haigh, a shady Brooklyn contractor. Haigh perpetrated a long-running fraud to supply the bridge with sub-standard wire. It was thanks to them that the cables whose width I'd noticed in July 2008 were so thick. Washington Roebling had added extra wire to them to protect against weaknesses in the sub-standard wire, still in place more than 130 years on.

I looked at the plaque with far less insight back in 2008. My son had finally fallen asleep when I reached the Brooklyn pier and I turned back towards Manhattan, eager to suggest the Invisible Visible Woman and the Invisible Visible Girl come back with us for a second visit to the bridge. That second visit - and a picnic lunch the next day with two old friends in Fort Greene - further nurtured my growing idea of how we could live in New York. The notion of relocation to the Big Apple remained strong enough, even though the prospects of its happening seemed remote, that I rhapsodised on the possibility of commuting over the Brooklyn Bridge in the first post on this blog. The notion made me all the keener to apply when, unexpectedly, a suitable job with my employer in New York became available.

Yet there was no inevitability about my using the Brooklyn Bridge, even once we'd selected a Brooklyn apartment. My early research revealed a strong bias among cyclists in favour of using the pedestrian-free Manhattan Bridge bike path to travel between downtown Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. I’ve used all three other East River bridges – the Manhattan for trips to Lower East Side destinations, the Williamsburg for an occasional change and the Queensboro for a few days following Superstorm Sandy.

 

The Invisible Visible Boy, now a Brooklyn resident,
on the bridge last Christmas Eve

But, unlike the others, I eventually realised, the Brooklyn Bridge would land me in the middle of lower Manhattan, less than half a mile from the Hudson River Greenway and four miles of convenient, traffic-free riding uptown. As a result, I am now one of those lucky souls I spotted freewheeling off the bridge in 2008. I’ve ridden when snow is accumulating on the wooden walkway and in torrential rain, as well as suffocating heat and on days of such wind I’ve walked over the bridge’s centre. I’ve seen days when fog obscures Manhattan from Brooklyn, those when mist collects in the Manhattan streets and the skyscrapers poke out up above and days when rain on my glasses obscures the whole scene. I’ve cursed the wood's slipperiness on wet days and the walkway's narrowness on sunny days that bring out the tourists. On one especially memorable evening, I rode home over the bridge as spectacular thunderstorms broke over New York Harbour, periodically highlighting the buildings around me against great flashes of sheet lightning.

Through all of that, there are still days – frequent ones, in fact – when the highlight of my ride to work is the moment when I turn a corner on the walkway and the bridge first comes into view. The Roeblings’ twin gothic towers come into view against a backdrop of lower Manhattan skyscrapers glistening in the sunlight – and I remember what made me want to live in this city in the first place.

Subway fares, gas tax - and why it's too expensive to cycle in New York

There are few New York businesses that command as much of my loyalty as 718 Cyclery, a friendly, specialist bike shop near where I live in Brooklyn. But there’s no question that I’ve handed them a fair amount of my money lately. A quick check through past bank statements suggests that in less than four months since last October 30 I’ve given this deserving business around $270 in spending on my own bicycle, plus another $14 or so on the Invisible Visible Girl’s machine. That’s leaving aside another $30 or so on bicycle maintenance at other bike shops and the $33 I shelled out yesterday for a replacement clip-on light for one that had gone missing. It’s cost me, in other words, around $80 a month over the last four months to keep my bike on the road.

The Invisible Visible Man's Surly Long Haul Trucker:
fun to use - but not that cheap

Some of that spending was certainly making up for a near-absence of spending in the few months before October. But add in the cost of the extra food I guzzle to fuel my nine-miles-there-nine-miles-back commute and the cost of the higher wear and tear on my clothes and it’s not clear I’m doing myself a financial favour by using transport that I don’t pay for daily. At the current basic New York subway fare of $2.25 for a single ride, four weeks’ commuting would cost me $90 – and there are numerous ways of getting the rides cheaper than that. Even a looming – and highly controversial – hike in the basic fare to $2.50 may not put me in the black.

But it’s not the bike shop’s fault I’m getting a relatively raw deal. It’s noticeably cheaper to keep my bike maintained in New York than it was when I lived in London. 718 Cyclery has been more than generous in carrying out free adjustments and calculating its labour charges. I’m at a disadvantage because pretty much every other means of getting about New York City gets a significant explicit or implicit subsidy of some kind.

It’s not a purely New York City problem. Virtually no developed country charges drivers enough in fuel taxes, tolls or car ownership fees to cover the costs that congestion, crashes and pollution impose on everyone else. Nearly every big international city tries to encourage commuters to shift to other transport means by susbidising public transport.

New York is nevertheless an extreme example. According to the Tax Foundation, a think-tank, taxes, tolls and other charges on motorists in New York State cover only 43.8 per cent of spending on the state’s roads. The proportion of the New York subway’s running costs covered by fares is still lower – and the system is visibly crumbling through lack of maintenance and upgrade expenditure. One might think that, along with reducing the appalling death toll on the city’s streets, a comprehensive rethink of charging for and funding of the city’s transport network would be the top subject for debate ahead of this year’s mayoral elections.

Yet there have been only two big transport talking points so far among the likely candidates to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor. One is whether the city should hand over a few more slivers of its vast road network to cyclists or, indeed, start taking out the bike lanes already in place. The other has been whether the city should turn its back permanently on congestion charging – the one policy that any city has shown can tackle problems like New York’s.

The Brooklyn Bridge: majestic - and under repair after
its pounding from all those New Jersey-bound drivers

Those problems, meanwhile, are immediate and practical. While the £10 ($16) congestion charge used to funnel through traffic away from my cycle route to work in central London, New York’s current financing arrangements actually push such traffic towards me. Every morning in TriBeCa, one of the most densely-packed areas of lower Manhattan, I see swarms of New Jersey-registered cars heading from the Brooklyn Bridge towards the Holland Tunnel going to New Jersey. Many seem to be avoiding the $13 toll charged westbound on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge further down New York Habour linking Brooklyn, Staten Island and ultimately New Jersey. Further uptown, the streets east of Central Park swarm with the traffic that pours from Queens across the free Queensboro Bridge to avoid the tolled alternative routes.

Yet it’s hard to imagine persuading men like the motorist I encountered on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn the other day that higher fuel taxes are the answer. Clambering out of his car with a weary look, he cast a wary glance over my bike and said, “Well, you’re certainly saving money on gas, buddy.” Precisely because US motorists pay far lower taxes on fuel than road-users elsewhere, they’ve seen far bigger percentage hikes in costs from recent years’ high oil prices. It’s impossible to imagine any politician persuading a US electorate in the foreseeable future of the case for increased fuel taxes.

The F Train at 57th street: cheap to use - but not much fun

Nor is it easy to imagine any politician raising subway fares to a level close to covering the system’s high costs. Visiting the New York Transit Museum last Tuesday, I read the grim story of how politicians have always struggled to raise fares on the system, first from a nickel to a dime and then gradually upwards. The problem is further exacerbated by the system’s inability to charge different fares for different distances. Most people would surely agree that $2.25 is a bargain to ride from Coney Island to the outer reaches of the Bronx. But start talking about raising fares and people picture themselves paying $3 to ride from Penn Station to 59^th street, a different prospect altogether.

Central Park: scenic - and a neat northern border
for a charging zone

The only feasible answer, it’s clear, is for the successful mayoral candidate to resurrect plans to charge cars to enter the area where they are least needed and do most damage – Manhattan south of Central Park. The area is well defined, excellently served by public transport and currently blighted by vast quantities of traffic, much of which could go elsewhere. A reasonable charge would not only raise badly-needed revenue but also make a subway fare hike far more politically feasible. Those two manoeuvres together could unclog Manhattan’s streets, increase the incentives for drivers to switch to other modes and actually make it financially advantageous for commuters to switch to walking and cycling – the only modes doing virtually no damage to the city's environment or infrastructure. There’s no mystery about such a policy’s effectiveness. Congestion charging has reduced sharply and continuously the number of cars entering central London since its introduction 10 years ago. New York could surely come up with a more cost-effective charging system than the British capital.

Yet Christine Quinn, the city council speaker and the person many people expect to be elected mayor later this year, earlier this month said she didn’t anticipate congestion pricing’s “coming back around” after an effort she spearheaded to introduce the policy in 2007. That effort died after state-level politicians in Albany vetoed it. She has subsequently recanted slightly, saying she still supports the policy but doubts it can be successfully introduced.

That leaves New York City in a far worse state transport-wise than London before its congestion charge’s introduction. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority spends much of its income servicing its growing burden of debt, rather than improving the subway. New York City’s roads are crumbling under the weight of cars that pay far too little to make the damage good. The incentives for other mugs to join me on a less damaging transport mode remain negligible.

Future generations will look back with amazement at such predicaments in New York and elsewhere, shaking their heads and wondering why no-one had the courage to take the obvious policy steps. Some kind of charge for road use in Manhattan and many other big centres will inevitably come along. The spread of electric or partially electric vehicles – which pay no fuel tax – ensures it. In London’s story we already know it was the unlikely figure of Ken Livingstone – left-wing firebrand and scourge of Margaret Thatcher – who finally had the courage to bring in such a policy. For New York, it remains a mystery which visionary mayor will have his or her picture in the museums as the transport system’s saviour.

The tragedy for New York is that the identity of its transport system's saviour looks set to remain a mystery for many more years - through the whole administration of Christine Quinn or whichever other uninspiring choice next sits in City Hall.

Staten Island and why the Invisible Visible Man is the Opposite of a Canary

It was a brief taste of how most of suburban America and Europe lives and it wasn’t, frankly, terribly pleasant. This past Wednesday, for work reasons, I took my bike and, for only the second time in my life, travelled by ferry to Staten Island, an island off the New Jersey shore that historical accident has made part of New York City. Having mostly developed only in the 1960s after the opening of the Verrazano Narrows road bridge to Brooklyn, it was designed around the private car far more than other parts of the city. It’s the nearest thing in New York City to a chunk of true American suburbia – featureless apart from occasional strip malls and criss-crossed by wide, fast-moving, multi-lane expressways.

A shared cycle route marking in St George: much the likeliest
way to see a bike on the road in Staten Island

I began to have concerns about cycling conditions even before I was properly out of St George, the borough’s capital. A bus driver drove at me, apparently astonished that my being ahead of him in traffic meant I thought I should go first through a pinch point. Later on, I started to wonder if I had put myself in serious danger. Unable to use the seafront cycle path – still blocked with sand from Superstorm Sandy – I headed inland along long, straight six-lane avenues. The 30mph and 35mph speed limits on these roads seemed to be regarded as minimum permissible speeds. Encountering a cyclist, such drivers simply drove straight on, at speed, towards the bike, on the apparent assumption the cyclist would scuttle out of the way.

Duane Square, TriBeCa: not specifically cycle-friendly
- but not hostile either

But I probably shouldn’t have found the conditions surprising. While I have multiple complaints about cycling conditions in brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan – the places where I currently mostly ride – and in London – where I used to ride – these are actually atypically cycle-friendly environments. Many roads are narrow – inhibiting drivers’ tendency to speed – and the traffic’s sheer volume makes the speeds on Staten Island mostly impossible. The obvious attractions in such an environment of the bicycle – which can slip along such streets while cars remain gnarled in traffic jams – have contributed to recent years’ rapid growth in inner-city cycling numbers. Better provision is slowly arriving in the wake of increased cycling.

Conditions on Staten Island are far more typical of the places that most rich countries’ inhabitants live. Such places provide most inhabitants with a house on its own plot of land – but suffer from the sheer volume of traffic that sprawling, low-density cities generate.  I’ve encountered similar conditions in parts of commuter-belt Oxfordshire, Cheshire and Scotland’s central belt. Cyclists tend not to give much thought to such places for the simple reason that very few cyclists live in them.

The natural reaction might be to conclude that cycling is impossible in such places, to avoid visiting them as far as possible and to leave the bicycle behind when circumstance forces one to do so. The only alternative is a wholesale rethink of the car’s role in such societies.

It’s often said that cycling children are a kind of “canary-in-the-coalmine” of cycling policy. If you disperse pretty much every danger factor for cyclists in your city, you’ll find primary school children riding to school. Let even a few of them creep back and the kids will disappear.

After his Staten Island visit, the Invisible
Visible Man will hardly complain in future
about scenes such as this in Manhattan.

By that standard, I’m closer to being the explosion in the coalmine. I regularly cycle along fairly busy, high-traffic roads, including fast-moving dual carriageways in the UK. If the danger factors somewhere have built up to the point somewhere that they’re intimidating me, it’s a reasonable sign cycling conditions are seriously, dangerously hostile.

I mostly managed in Staten Island to stick to the principle that a cyclist should boldly take the lane and force motorists to manoeuvre safely around him. But even I at points hugged closer to the kerb than normal, darting out into the threatening traffic mainly to get round obstructions such as parked cars. It felt hard to keep taking the lane on seeing a line of fast-moving SUVs, three abreast, bearing down on one, giving no sign whatever of yielding to a cyclist in front of them. I wasn’t confident I wanted to waste my dying breaths explaining to some over-sized car’s driver precisely why my road craft should have prevented him from running me over.

So is there an alternative for cyclists to the appalling conditions that currently exist in Staten Island and many other suburban areas? One standard cycling lobby answer is to argue that entirely separate cyclist provision is needed and that to call for anything less is counter-productive. Cyclists and such heavy, fast-moving traffic can never co-exist.

Yet I left Staten Island doubting that calls for a network of dedicated cycle lanes on Staten Island would get very far under current conditions. I saw, as far as I can recall, one other cyclist during an afternoon and early evening on the island. It’s hard to see that a democratic society can risk spending heavily to create facilities for a group – Staten Island utility cyclists – that might not even emerge in the end. That’s all the more the case at the moment, when my cycle route took me past large tracts of shoreline land that remained flooded and empty in the wake of Sandy’s devastation of the island. Even as a dedicated cyclist, I think finite budgets at the moment are best spent on ensuring all Staten Island’s people again have waterproof, heated houses.

There are nevertheless compelling reasons beyond encouraging cycling to stop the cancer of car-dependence from draining the life out of Staten Island. The wide, uncalmed roads, it was clear, were intimidating away people other than cyclists. I saw just as few people walking the sidewalks of the busiest roads as I saw people cycling. The excellent “weekly carnage”feature on Streetsblog, the transport website, features regular stories of Staten Island’s elderly and other vulnerable people crushed by motor vehicles refusing to yield at corners. Many of those fast-moving vehicles end up ploughing into each other, at a high human cost. There’s every reason even for someone who’s not a cyclist to support the installations of road designs that slow drivers down and speed cameras.

Ideally, the United States would increase fuel taxes to cover more of the costs cars impose on places such as Staten Island. A rational system of per-mile charging could calm down the worst of the congestion. Research suggests that cars might even get where they’re going faster under such a regime than they do at present.

Manhattan approaching, from the Staten Island ferry:
a welcome sight, from a cyclist's point of view

A new approach to cars would, of course, produce a better environment for on-road cycling too. It’s far from impossible that in Staten Island calmer, less threatening roads might start to entice out of their hiding places some of the bikes that must be lying unused in the borough’s homes. The island might start participating more fully in the cycling boom that’s taking place, to varying degrees, in New York’s other four boroughs. That, in turn, might make it easy to justify new cycle-only lanes for some future reporter who finds himself heading to a distant corner of Staten Island on an assignment.

As it was, finding dark had descended and contemplating the prospect of a 10½ mile ride on threatening roads back to the ferry, I took, unusually, the line of least resistance. Fending off threatening cars, I rode half a mile to the nearest Staten Island Railway Station and, my bike leaning against my seat, took in the island’s night-time lights as most of its inhabitants do – from within the comfort of a metal shell.

A blown nose, a blown world environment - and why some people confuse the two

It’s one of the few times I’ve managed seriously to annoy a motorist while stationary on my bike. One dark winter night a couple of years ago in London, I blew my nose while waiting at traffic lights. But, lacking the time to fish out a handkerchief, I snorted onto the road.

Traffic queuing in Miami Beach. Some of these cars might look to you
like polluters - but the drivers might think snot more offensive

It can’t, I accept, have made for a pretty sight. But the reaction of a woman in a car behind still surprised me. Leaning on her horn, she gesticulated her disgust wildly. The irony instantly struck me. In contemporary society, it’s regarded as entirely acceptable to make urban journeys in vehicles that spew out gases that will pollute and warm the atmosphere for a century or more. Clear one’s airways of a little biodegradable mucus, however, and one puts oneself entirely beyond the pale.

But the more I’ve thought about it since, the more I’ve realised the Outraged Driver of Kennington Park was exhibiting attitudes to environmental pollution and emissions very common in industrialised societies across the world. She regarded herself as having the right to an environment treated as she wanted. She felt perfectly entitled to criticise others’ treatment of that environment. Her attitudes, however, made no reference to any ultimate yardstick about the fate of the world environment as a whole.

I’ve said before on this blog that I am nothing like as exercised about environmental issues as many people assume cyclists are. I enjoy the overall sense that cycling is a rational way to get around – that it makes good use of scarce city space, that it contributes very little to congestion, that it keeps me healthy, that it’s enjoyable. It’s part of that picture that each trip contributes hardly at all to overall carbon emissions. But the environmental factors form only one corner of the overall scene.

A car abandoned in the lot the Invisible Visible Man
helped to clear. Some scientists reckon the car's emissions
helped to cause the destruction in this corner of Brooklyn

That said, I regularly currently confront vivid evidence of the seriousness of the world’s environmental problems. Parts of the Hudson River Greenway, which I use for nearly half my daily commute in New York City, were under five feet – 1.6m – of water at the height of Superstorm Sandy in October. Many scientists think such extreme weather events are becoming more common as the world’s climate changes. Yesterday, I cycled down to Coney Island, one of the parts of the city worst-hit in the storm, to help clear out a vacant lot that was under seven feet of water on the night the record high water swept up New York Bay. The weather was so unseasonably mild that on the way home it felt oppressively warm. There’s an undeniable sense that climate change is becoming a more urgent, practical issue, which anyone who takes an interest in the wider world needs to address.

A modern, fuel-efficient container ship:
a surprisingly clean way to import food

Yet few of the responses to the issue rise much above the level of honking one’s horn at behaviour one dislikes. I’ve frequently heard it averred, for example, that it’s good for the environment to eat local, seasonal produce. But very few of the people who claim that can give a detailed accounting of local, seasonal produce’s carbon costs – even though the ships that import food to temperate, rich-world countries use remarkably little fuel. It’s certainly far from clear that buying fruit imported on such a ship from a country where it grows easily is worse than eating greenhouse-grown local fruit that’s come to the farmer’s market in a small, inefficient van.

Railway lobbyists also make blanket claims that their transport mode is invariably more environmentally friendly than using a car. But, while that is undoubtedly true for a well-filled train in the London rush hour, it isn’t true for a nearly-empty train spewing diesel fumes into the air to move a couple of passengers to their destinations. When I lived in the UK, my most regular long-distance rail journey was London to Chester on a Super Voyager diesel-powered train. I would give a rueful smile as I remembered that the complex, heavy but fast train issued much the highest level of emissions per seat mile of any UK train model. It was, on average, a better environmental bet to take the train for that journey than to hire a car. But the margin was not very wide at all.

There are some similarly questionable attitudes towards cycling’s environmental performance. I’ve recently come across a number of attacks on cycling’s environmental record that point out, for example, that manufacturing bikes produces carbon emissions – an undeniable point, which makes it clear that one shouldn’t replace one’s bike more often than necessary. Such attacks generally go on to point out that fuelling a bike involves carbon emissions. There are carbon costs to moving the extra food that cyclists eat that they otherwise wouldn’t. And the food generates emissions that the Outraged Driver of Kennington Park would presumably dislike even more than mucus – in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon monoxide from cars.

The most entertainingly bonkers attack of this kind I’ve encountered was a recent blogpost from an Ian Pearson who claims to give “a more accurate guide to the future” (How can he tell?) on bikes’ carbon performance. Cycling might well, Mr Pearson accepts, produce next-to-no carbon emissions per kilometre. But, when a cyclist rides in traffic, he asserts, the extra carbon cost of attending to accidents – and the effect on cars’ carbon performance of slowing down then accelerating to overtake cyclists – probably produces so much extra carbon that it would have been more environmentally friendly for the cyclist to go by car.

This new Ford pick-up truck concept will be more fuel-efficient
when it launches than its current equivalent.
But that won't make its drivers necessarily
friends of the environment.

The common thread between all these questionable assertions is that they treat the environment’s fate as an abstract matter – as susceptible to objective observation as the question of how to live the good life or whether God exists. People who profess concern about the environment often have a bias in favour of things that appear traditional and prepared without the benefit of complex, modern scientific advances. Many assume locally-produced food must be better for the environment because, well, it feels as if it should be. Similarly, people who are relatively unconcerned about environmental issues have a tendency to work back from their own behaviour to a spurious justification. “My car’s not as polluting as it might be” gets rationalised into “I am environmentally virtuous”. “I don’t like manoeuvring around these cyclists” becomes “these cyclists are bad for the environment”.

Yet, for the effects of air pollution and global warming, it is ultimately possible to estimate the effects objectively. Scientists now have a reasonable idea of what kind of damage different levels of carbon emissions produce. It is even possible to come up with rough figures for the costs that different kinds of emissions impose on wider society.

In a rational world, governments would now be rushing to take the guesswork out of estimating environmental impacts. Food products would include a label detailing the carbon costs of their production and include a tax reflecting them. Air tickets would include something similar, while the carbon costs of burning each unit of fuel would form a clear and distinct part of the petrol price at the pump. Past experiments with introducing new prices for previously-free goods – such as the Central London Congestion Charge – suggest consumers would move swiftly away from the most environmentally damaging behaviours towards less damaging ones.

I am robustly confident that such an exercise would make far clearer than the existing tax systems in most rich-world countries that bikes have big environmental advantages over most other transport modes. It is hard to imagine that the change would not significantly increase cycling levels.

A bicycle sign on New York's W54th street:
the kind of decisive action on the environment
that many governments are taking

The challenge, however, is that such a move would upset groups commonly supposed to be hugely influential – motorists, regular air-travellers and the owners of big houses – while pleasing few others. Governments consequently lay down a few cycle lanes on the roads, offer some subsidies for electric cars, meet some of the cost of better home insulation and generally gesture vaguely in the environment’s direction. Action that would make a real difference remains resoundingly untaken.

Yet that, perhaps, should be no surprise. Across the industrialised world, governments depend on the votes of people as inconsistent as the Outraged Driver of Kennington Park, Ian Pearson and, come to that, each of us reading (and writing) this blog. There’s no firm consensus yet among all those people in favour of firm action to rein in the galloping horse of the worsening global climate. That many governments consequently seem little more rational on the issue than an irritated, late-night driver may be sad – but it is depressingly understandable.

My ride to work - and why the cars resemble little hurricanes

Very few of the runners, stroller-pushing parents, drunks and others who wander into my path each day on the cycle lane up New York’s Hudson River Greenway strike me as especially brilliant people. If they were, they might spot the signs telling them they’re not allowed on the path and stick to the rather pleasant waterside walkway that’s been provided for them.

The runner on the left has, remarkably, chosen the footpath on
the Hudson River Greenway. One can only hope she made
the kind of solid risk assessment the Invisible Visible Man advocates

But, disturbingly, the cycle lane obstructors (CLOs) seem to be better at prioritising the risks facing pedestrians than the head of the New York Police Department’s traffic squad. The CLOs have decided that, if they’re going to obstruct traffic, it’s many, many times safer to get in cyclists’ way than cars’. Having so far seen hundreds – possibly thousands – of CLOs in four months’ cycling in New York, I’ve yet to see one choosing to take his or her chances running down the fast-moving, multi-lane West Side Highway next to the cycle path.

Yet Brian McCarthy, a deputy chief of the NYPD with responsibility for traffic policing, explained in October to WNYC, the public radio station, why its ironically-named Operation Cycle Safe – the programme that focuses police resources on fining cyclists, rather than the road users that cause traffic deaths – was now mainly tackling riding on the sidewalk (pavement, British readers). This behaviour, he reasoned, posed particular dangers to pedestrians. But, while I can find no recent record of a cyclist’s killing a pedestrian on a New York City sidewalk, it is depressingly regular for motorists to do so through excessive speed or lack of attention. The NYPD barely ever prosecutes the motoring offences that lead to such deaths. Its prioritisation is so skewed that, for it to be correct, I should probably be spotting runners every morning taking their chances with speeding SUVs on the highway, away from the terrifying bicycles.

The contrast between the CLOs and Deputy Chief McCarthy illustrates something profound about the vagaries of human beings’ efforts to assess risks. Most humans are reasonably adept at spotting and assessing the most immediate dangers. It’s pretty clear even to a stupid, inconsiderate runner unconcerned about inconveniencing others that it’s less foolish to take the chance of a collision with a cyclist riding at 20mph than a motorist driving at 50mph (the West Side Highway speed limit is 35mph – fun fact that most motorists entirely ignore). Very few people, however, are good at assessing risks in an abstract context such as a decision about how to allocate police resources. The NYPD, as I pointed out in a previous post, hands out 5 per cent of its traffic violation tickets to cyclists, way out of proportion to cyclists’ roughly 1 per cent share of city traffic. But a cyclist last killed someone in New York City in March 2009 – and even that incident wasn’t on the sidewalk. Around 1,000 people have died in the time since at the hands of motor vehicles. A sober risk assessment aimed at bringing down the number of deaths in the city would target an entirely different set of behaviours.

The problem appears to be a widespread one. In the UK, newspaper reporting about the crash that injured Bradley Wiggins – one of my great heroes – ended up producing the same, predictable commentary claiming cyclists endanger pedestrians and, somehow, cars. That’s even though the Tour de France winner’s accident involved his colliding with a car that seems to have pulled out into his path from a filling station without looking. In other words, people started complaining on the basis of the kind of accident that happens quite a lot (one where a negligent motorist injures a cyclist) about things that hardly ever happen – accidents where cyclists hurt other road users.

The question is whether it’s possible to get better to get better at understanding the risks the roads and other places pose - and to start reacting to them more rationally.

A subway station closed for Hurricane Sandy. New York's subway
turned out to be better at assessing risk than many New Yorkers.

My mind’s been particularly drawn to risk assessment in the last three weeks because of events in my new home city. At the end of the week when superstorm Sandy hit New York, I took a trip to Staten Island to report on some of the damage there. Person after person told me they’d ignored the evacuation order for the area on the grounds that a previous hurricane last year – Hurricane Irene – had mostly turned out less damaging than expected. As the sea swept in and inundated their street, they found themselves cowering in their homes’ upper storeys, with waves lapping at the windows even there. A person died in the basement of one of the houses in the street I visited, electrocuted when he stepped into flood water that had electric current flowing through it. The storm was on an entirely different scale from Hurricane Irene.

That miscalculation, it seems to me, is of a piece with people’s miscalculations about road use. In both situations, people rely far too much on personal experience and the evidence of their own senses. In the run-up to the storm, it was clear that the city was very windy but not immediately obvious that the storm would cause historic levels of damage. To realise that, one had to pay attention to something one couldn’t see – the vast storm surge that forecasters were predicting that was preparing to push its way into New York Bay to flood large tracts of the city.

Many people assessing the risks of cycling, meanwhile, look at cyclists in traffic and conclude that the slender, unprotected machines among the big metal boxes are more vulnerable than most figures actually suggest them to be. They see a cyclist on a sidewalk and assume that his greater speed compared with the pedestrians makes him a significant risk to them. It only adds, it seems to me, to people’s irritation with cyclists that bikes are quiet and people tend to notice them only at the last minute. This seems certain to trigger the kind of last-minute, fight-or-flight response that must have been useful for vulnerable cavemen. It’s a far less reliable indicator than people think of the risks around in a complex, modern urban streetscape.

Most people have particular lacunae when it comes to rare events that pose catastrophic risks. A hurricane is precisely such an event. There are fine, hard-to-discern differences between a hurricane that will do little damage – as Hurricane Irene did – kill scores of people and do billions of dollars of damage – as superstorm Sandy did – and one that will kill many hundreds – as Hurricane Katrina did. It is far beyond a normal person’s gut instinct to discern which storms need special attention, yet ordinary people continue to use their gut instincts to assess how they should react.

The motorists are blocking the bike lane. The cyclist's too close to the cars.
And they'll probably all get away with the risks they're taking.

In a road context, the catastrophic events are crashes involving cars, buses and trucks. It’s so common to see motorists driving while ‘phoning, speeding, giving cyclists too little room and so forth that it’s easy to conclude that these behaviours are trivial and pose little risk. Many people compare them with the alarming experience of finding a cycle messenger rush past their nose on a pedestrian crossing and conclude that it’s the cyclist who poses the real danger. The truth is that each time a motorist drives too fast, drives while distracted or turns without looking for cyclists he or she is involved in profoundly risky behaviour – and it’s only the luck of the particular circumstances that divides the outcome from nothing at all and a multiple-fatality crash.

People are still more blind to their actions’ long-term consequences. Almost no-one sees a cyclist on a busy street and remembers that he or she is far less likely to die of heart disease or diabetes in several decades than the neighbouring motorist cursing him or her from the exercise-free cocoon of his or her motor car. The global warming that may be making hurricanes more frequent is a still more remote such risk.

None of this is to excuse stupid behaviour by cyclists. It’s worth stopping for red lights, giving pedestrians plenty of space and going the right way up one-way streets. It shows an example of good practice and avoids annoying one’s fellow citizens. I do my best to obey the rules.

But industries prone to catastrophic but rare risks – the nuclear power industry, for example, or railways – tackle them by looking for the near-misses and minor accidents that suggest people are indulging in risky behaviour. Police forces that hold off warning motorists about dangerous behaviour and minor accidents explicitly miss the chance to follow such a policy.

I at least can do my part. I accept that runners will bound into my path on the Hudson River Greenway and cycle at a speed and on a line that means I should avoid them. I know that cars sometimes sweep across even some lightly-used crossings on the route from angles that are hard to see. So I stop for those red lights as other cyclists and runners speed past me, no doubt thinking me an over-cautious worrier. I do my best to assess when I’ve done something foolish and to avoid repeating the mistake. I can only hope that, as New York and other cities start to grapple with a future made more complicated by extreme weather, far more of those around me start to give the matter the same consideration too.