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as Nimbys in some neighbourhoods oppose new lanes - so fast that my 2012 NYC cycling map already feels quite badly out of date.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.

Do as you like, motorists - and don't blame us for the deaths

It’s a disturbing scene to encounter on the way to work. Every morning recently that I’ve cycled to the office, I’ve come part way down West 54^th Street on a badly-damaged airport shuttle minibus. The passenger doors on one side are mangled; the right-hand front wheelarch obviously took a heavy blow and the front radiator grille is nowhere to be seen. It was, I instantly recognised, the result of a crash with a large vehicle, travelling at high speed, hitting the bus then spinning round to hit it a second time. Some research suggests a Mercedes Benz sped up Sixth Avenue early on September 16 and hit the minibus as it crossed at 50^th street. Some witnesses said the driver had been racing another vehicle. He was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. Not surprisingly, given the vehicle’s condition, four passengers and the bus driver were badly hurt - one had a fractured skull, while others suffered head and neck injuries.

The crushed minibus of W54th street: yet more evidence
that cyclists are the true menace to New Yorkers

Injuries and deaths from traffic accidents like the one involving the minibus are growing more common after years of declines in New York. In the year to June, 291 people died in traffic accidents of various kinds in New York City, up 23 per cent from the previous year. The numbers of pedestrians and cyclists killed rose 11 per cent to 176. The same goes for the UK, from which I've just moved. Statistics released in the last week show 3 per cent more people died in road traffic accidents in the UK in 2011 than in 2010, well above the increase in traffic volumes. Civil servants and politicians in both places profess bemusement at the reversal of fortunes.

But it’s hard to believe the puzzlement is sincere. From a crime point of view, New York City has become a far, far safer place than a couple of decades ago – it's just the city won't use the policies it applied to crime to stamp out bad driving. In the UK, transport officials know that speed and traffic light cameras can sharply reduce road deaths – and have encouraged their removal because drivers don’t like them. The question is how many more minibus passengers and drivers have to be rushed to hospital on both sides of the Atlantic before the various authorities start to do something.

I’m lucky that both my encounters so far with officers of the New York Police Department have been fairly benign. On September 29, when I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan, I met a police officer leading thousands of people marching towards Brooklyn for a charity event. It wasn’t safe to cycle, he said, because of the numbers of people. I huffily dismounted and pushed my bike towards City Hall. A few weeks earlier, I’d passed a mounted policeman during my morning ride to work along the Hudson River Greenway. I then dutifully stopped at red traffic lights where a road crosses the path – only for the officer impatiently to tell me to get on with it and keep riding.

A typical Manhattan intersection, making it clear why the police
should prioritise cracking down on cyclists

Other cyclists' experience of the NYPD is very different. Last year, the NYPD issued 50,000 tickets of various kinds – for running red lights and so on – to cyclists, compared with only 25,000 for trucks. The division set up to get trucks to follow the law issued more tickets to cyclists than to trucks. Cyclists – who account for maybe 1 per cent of New York traffic and barely ever kill another road user – received around 5 per cent of all traffic tickets. Cyclists should follow the rules of the road, as should every other road user type. But the NYPD is so keen on ticketing cyclists that even perfectly legal cycling gets the treatment. At the height of the NYPD’s effort to intimidate cyclists last year, the filmmaker Casey Neistat received a ticket for cycling outside the cycle lane – which is simply not an offence.

The NYPD no doubt feels that its crackdown on poor cycling is simply bringing to road safety of the “broken windows” approach that’s generally thought to have helped to bring down other kinds of crime in New York. In the 1990s, Bill Bratton, then the police commissioner, and Rudy Giuliani, then New York’s mayor, told the police to tackle petty, “quality-of-life” pieces of anti-social behaviour, which they'd largely ignored before. Police started arresting vandals and the men who extorted money from motorists by cleaning their car windows at intersections. The approach is generally thought to have played at least some part in making the sitting a significantly less scary place to live. Cyclists certainly seem to be feeling the heat for some of the same reasons vandals and squeegee men started getting arrested. There are stories of community meetings with police where residents' top demand is a crackdown on allegedly scofflaw cyclists.

But it’s hard to imagine that broken windows would have been judged a success if the NYPD had concentrated on the squeegee men at the expense of going after murderers. It’s well documented that NYPD’s current policy for accidents involving cyclists is to investigate only if the cyclist has died or looks like doing so. Even then, the investigations seem to be perfunctory at best. While the fatality figures for the last year don’t give much detail on the nature of the fatal accidents, it’s clear that deaths of car occupants are the ones that are going up sharpest – and it’s essentially impossible that cyclists caused any of them. The city is determinedly not prosecuting motor vehicle crime.

A food delivery cyclist on 6th Avenue:
spreading fear, no doubt, among those he may imminently crush

That view seems in no danger of changing. Amid the alarming reversal in the safety statistics, New York’s latest transport safety crackdown is not on the trucks that I see careering at 50 mph up Sixth Avenue but on food delivery cyclists. I bow to no man in my irritation when I find a vacant-looking man on an electric-assist bike carrying chop suey the wrong way up a bike lane towards me. But, given the numbers of families losing fathers, mothers and children to bad driving, it’s mildly obscene that the focus is on a minor irritant of city life. I would feel even stronger, I imagine, were I, say, a relative of the woman killed in a particularly disturbing incident in late August in the West Village where the truck driver was so oblivious to the woman he hit that he dragged her body in his wheels for two blocks before stopping. The same must hold for the family of the young cyclist killed in an incident on Queens Boulevard on September 25, where the truck seems to have gone straight through a stop line. These are clearly incidents for which no food delivery bike, no matter how poorly ridden, could ever be responsible.

A well worked-out effort to tackle quality of life crime on roads in New York City  - or pretty much any big settlement - would concentrate on prosecuting motorists’ red-light jumping at the most dangerous intersections, failure to yield to pedestrians when required, illegal turning across other vehicles’ paths and excessive speed, especially at the most deadly junctions. Perhaps most importantly, it would try to stop people driving while distracted by their telephones or iPads - an area where prosecutions have fallen sharply even as the habit has become more and more widespread. The strategy, in other words, would seek to catch the kind of person who thinks it’s appropriate to race a Mercedes up Sixth Avenue - and address his behaviour before he ploughs into a minibus. The problem, of course, is that speeding motorists are, by their nature, hard to catch. It can be tough to gather the evidence to prosecute a car driver for dangerous but non-fatal behaviour such as deliberately driving intimidatingly close to a cyclist (a regular event in New York). Police forces everywhere have a predeliction for detecting offences that have a 100 per cent clear-up rate, of which cyclists’ light-jumping is a perfect example. The offence will almost never be reported except by a watching policeman. The offender is easy to catch and unlikely to argue his or her innocence successfully.

The change in tone in the 1990s in policing in New York City – and many other large cities worldwide that followed its lead – resulted from a revolution in thinking. City bosses realised it was no longer acceptable to let crime make parts of the city uninhabitable. The puzzle is why such thinking goes only as far as the kerb, and not onto the roads.

A van yields to pedestrians in mid-town Manhattan:
life would be better if this always happened

The British statistics, meanwhile, take me in my mind back to May 2010 and the day when I and other reporters were ushered into a room in the UK’s Department for Transport to meet Philip Hammond, the then-new UK transport secretary. “We will end the war on motorists,” Hammond told us, a keen glint in his eye no doubt reflecting his personal excitement at gaining greater freedom to drive his sport cars. One peace dividend for the motorists was a cut in funding for speed and traffic light cameras. Local authorities weren’t exactly told to take the things down – but the government did the next best thing. It stopped telling them they had to use some of their central government money for cameras - and cut the funding for road safety spending greatly.

The ensuing changes took me a little under a year later to the village of Nuneham Courtenay, on a stretch of the busy A4047 road just out side Oxford. Residents there had grown desperate enough to offer to pay to have their speed camera restarted. Cars that had been slowing down sharply through the village when there as a speed camera now swept through at 60mph. The same day I visited, Oxfordshire police were reintroducing speed cameras throughout the county after scraping together the money to pay for their operation. Because I knew plenty of places were simply abandoning speed cameras and I'd read research saying they saved 80 lives annually in the UK, I'd known for a long time that the UK's record of improving road safety was likely to be spoilt as it was by the recent statistics.

None of this is to say it's easy to stop future Mercedes bashing into minibuses. There's an urgent need to revise deep-seated attitudes about the priority given to cars and drivers’ rights. The driver who smashed into the minibus might, I suppose, have been a first-time offender whom an effort to target the riskiest drivers would have missed. But there’s a steady, demoralising stream of news at the moment on both sides of the Atlantic – a young musician killed on his bike in Queens, an elderly woman hit on a pedestrian crossings in London, a man hit on a crosswalk in Manhattan. As long as officials put off using speed cameras more and targetting the riskiest motorist behaviour, they're throwing away the chance to slow the flow at least a little.

Feeling the fear - and doing it in a scaredy way

As I wheeled my bike towards the junction of Reade Street and West Broadway in lower Manhattan, I looked round at the three lanes of traffic waiting at the intersection. Many of them were big, mean-looking concrete mixers and other trucks servicing the area’s post-9/11 reconstruction effort. They would be roaring after me the moment the lights changed. Then I glanced at the road surface – a peculiarly New York mixture of steel plates and potholes. The sky was so dark with a looming thunder storm that I’d put my lights on, at 11.30am on a summer’s day. I felt my lower stomach start to knot up as I fretted about whether, confronted by this, I’d remember to manoeuvre correctly. New York, after all, drives on the other side of the road from London, where I’ve done the vast bulk of my urban cycling. Long story short, I was scared.

The South Street bike lanes could seem scary -
or romantically urban, depending on mood

My moment of fear on Monday morning was not the first I’ve experienced over riding my bike in heavy traffic. Unless my fears were so well-founded I’m crushed tomorrow by a truck, it probably won’t be the last. Fear is, at the very least, an understandable emotion for a person riding a light, human-powered vehicle among big, heavy, fast-moving vehicles. It plays an even more important role in the thinking about cycling of people who don’t do it. In most countries with low cycling levels, non-cyclists give fears about safety as their main reason for refraining. Safety worries are a popular excuse at least partly because they sound less lame than admitting one’s lazy. But it’s also reasonable to assume that fear is paralysing a fair proportion of potential riders out of taking to the roads.

I didn’t, however, ditch my old hybrid for the subway. I instead swung my leg over the saddle, headed off down Reade and was soon enjoying a remarkably smooth and speedy ride by the Hudson River Greenway towards my new office.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I am impressed with human beings’ irrationality. They consistently let their emotional instincts – the feeling emanating from the guts that I felt knotting on Monday – dictate to higher brain centres.

People particularly consistently miscalculate the risks involved in getting about. Many pedestrians, for example, feel themselves genuinely at risk from cyclists. They vastly underestimate, meanwhile, the extent of the risks motor vehicles present to them.

Yet human beings enjoy such long lives partly because they also have some healthy fears – and strong instincts to avoid the biggest risks. The trick, it seems to me, is to sift the warnings from the useful instinct from the constraining voice of the irrational one.

It was after I narrowly avoided an inattentive car in London the weekend before last that the distinction between my own fear types struck me. I was cycling north through Tooting along part of one of London’s ironically-named Cycle Superhighways when a vehicle suddenly turned out of a traffic jam into my path. Jamming on my brakes, I screamed at the driver to watch, managed to swerve - and narrowly avoided being hit.

The physical danger bothered me far less than what followed, however. Surrounding motorists either shouted angrily at me for having stopped and held them up or shouted mocking abuse over how I had reacted. They were expressing the kind of unrestrained, uncivilised venom and cruelty that surfaces in the worst kind of school playground. Having comprehensively failed to handle such environments well as a child, I reverted to being the little boy of nearly 40 years ago. I felt a pathetic, weak instinct to curl up in a ball and weep. The personal cruelty and anger – which posed no real threat – had got to me far more than the physical danger.

Taxis rush past the New York Central Building:
they're almost certainly not hurrying to the aid of a stricken cyclist,
the Invisible Visible Man can confirm.

Something similar was at work as I prepared to embark on my current house-hunting expedition to New York – and my forthcoming full-time move across the Atlantic. The sheer venom of most of the comments accompanying any article about New York cycling – including coverage of accidents affecting entirely blameless cyclists at the hands of hit-and-run drivers – has, I will admit, intimidated me. New York as a city seems still more irritated than London by the effrontery of anyone's trying to navigate the city on two, human-powered wheels. Many of its citizens seem openly to wish myself and my fellow cyclists harm. The emotion picked up from those comments played on my mind. It added to my long-standing feeling, engendered by the atmosphere of the deep, canyon-like streets, my nervousness over following a different set of traffic rules and the New York City police’s reputation as scourges of cyclists, to put me thoroughly on edge.

New York City's authorities seem, like so many city governments,
to have only imperfectly grasped the point
that cyclists need to ride their bikes on cycleways

At its very worst, such fear can be self-reinforcing. At one point yesterday evening, unsure both of the line I should be taking on the road and the behaviour of a looming taxi driver, I dithered, wobbling about – and succeeded in both irritating the driver and making myself feel more nervous still. It’s when intimidated like that that I sometimes let drivers force me too close to the side of the road, before passing aggressively and too close. Nervousness over the close pass then makes things still worse.

Yet I’ve been prepared to cope, I think, at least partly because of  past periods of deep, far more rational nervousness. Having long boasted I had never been knocked off my bike in London, I was hit twice in just over five weeks in early 2009, once by a motorist turning across my path without looking - and then by a cyclist running a red light. I found myself grasped by an almost paralysing sense of my own vulnerability, reaching for the brakes at the slightest provocation. I recalled, every time I did so, the sensation of being pitched suddenly down to the tarmac. I felt again the jolt that ripples through the muscles at meeting a sudden, unexpected physical force.

My fear gradually distilled, however, into a habit of looking still more carefully than before for signs of sudden, unexpected movements. Even on apparently quiet roads, I now look far more than before over my shoulder, scanning the road for the next motorist seeking to cut across my path. It was at least partly because of those experiences I was able to spot, and avoid, the Inattentive Turner of Tooting.

And, of course, if avoiding fearful situations were my main priority, I wouldn’t be here in New York tackling a new challenge. I’d probably never have lived in south London. I’d certainly never have lived in Budapest. I’d ride my bike only down dull little paths in the country, having brought it there specially on the roof of my car.

The truth is that fear plays a part in the tingling sensation one feels before embarking on something difficult and challenging – whether a difficult bike ride, a new job or some new relationship. It’s the risk of failure that creates the sense of intense alertness that makes them enjoyable. It’s the feeling of having conquered the fears and the difficulties that makes it satisfying to finish.

The Invisible Visible Man's Marin Muirwoods before
the Embarrassing Case of the Pedal Incompetence

The 65 miles or so I’ve so far cycled around Manhattan and Brooklyn certainly haven’t been trouble-free. It turned out, for example, that I’d messed up screwing on and off the pedals on my old, spare bike when bringing it on the ‘plane. A pedal fell off on Sunday in Prospect Heights, thanks to stripped screw threads where it attached to the pedal cranks. Much of the honking one hears in New York traffic turns out to be directed at blameless people who have merely chosen to use their bicycles in parts of the road clearly marked for doing so. I suffered a particularly long tirade of abuse from a man who thought I should squeeze against the cars on a narrow road in Carroll Gardens so that he could drive his RV a few inches from me. I was, after all, delaying by milliseconds his arrival at the end of a traffic jam. I’ve cycled more slowly and carefully than normal, listening to my useful fear about the limits of my proficiency so far in New York traffic.

The Manhattan Bridge: a rare chance to race subway trains

But I’ve taken my old bike speeding in glorious sunlight up by the Hudson River, looking over to New Jersey. I’ve climbed up and over the Manhattan Bridge, relishing the rare prospect of racing subway trains as we both labour over the bridge then accelerate down the other side. I’m not yet regularly commuting over the Brooklyn Bridge, as the first ever post on this blog said I aspired to do. But I've enjoyed several times the beautiful vista from New York's oldest bridge towards the towers of lower Manhattan. I looked up the other day riding down second avenue to see the spire of the magnificent Chrysler Building looking down at me.

Those aren’t experiences I’ve enjoyed despite my fear. They’re not feats that have required any special bravery to accomplish. But they’ve been ones that have been all the more rewarding because I’ve overcome a slug of my own cowardice on the way.