A heatwave - and the urban nature it lets cyclists sniff out

A few nights in the last few weeks, I’ve been working late and, realising I needed groceries but would miss the closing time of stores near my apartment, I’ve opted to make a treat out of a chore. I’ve headed five blocks north from my office and ridden into Central Park, heading for the Fairway Market on Broadway. I’ve swept downhill from Central Park South, leaving behind the oppressive heat thrown off by New York’s buildings and streets in the current heatwave for the marginally cooler park, surrounded by trees yet overlooked by skyscrapers.

Central Park: a treat to ride in - for those with a taste in
heated manure

But on Thursday night, after a particularly sulphurously hot day, the experience had an unexpected, added edge. Almost as if I’d ridden into a cloud of some pollutant, I found myself inhaling as thick a concentration of horse manure smells as I’ve ever experienced. The tourist carriages that I often follow in the morning from their stables on the lower west side had clearly been busy that day, I realised. That had left a generous coating of manure baking on the asphalt in 100F heat, with predictably stinky results.

The experience brought home to me how vital a part smell plays in the full-frontal assault of riding a bike in any large city during a heatwave. In New York, however, it currently plays a particularly special role. The city has been better in its gentrification push over the last 20 years at improving how it looks than how it smells. Many of the odours consequently represent the forces that even so controlling an administration as Michael Bloomberg’s still hasn't managed to rein in. They tell a story about the city that’s wafted only into the nostrils of the still fairly select bunch of people prepared to ride a bike in New York on a day when the thermometer is showing over 90F and one’s glasses steam up instantly one steps outdoors.

 

The East River: tell-tale salty smells

There are, of course, some smells that persist year-round. Sometimes when I'm riding by the East or Hudson Rivers, a boat's wash slaps into the promenade. As the spray splashes against the railings, there’s a salty smell in the air, an unmistakeable reminder that New York is a maritime city and that the rivers, as well as carrying water from upstate, are inlets of the sea. It’s the smell of the secret of New York’s success – a gateway between the interior that vessels sailing up the Hudson River serve and the wide Atlantic Ocean out beyond the harbour.

The same goes for the smell that meets me as I speed on my bike down the western side of the Manhattan Bridge. I think it’s a mixture of boiled duck, five-spice mixture and plum sauce, but there’s an unmistakeable smell to areas with a high concentration of Cantonese restaurants, like Chinatown, where the bridge emerges in Manhattan. In my mind’s eye, the smell forever has me sitting in one of the countless eating places in the heart of Hong Kong, at a Spartan formica table, with plates of steaming food being brought to me. The two places smell exactly the same.

Then there are the smells that testify to how my fellow New Yorkers’ behaviour changes as the heat rises.

Earlier in the summer, when the Hudson River Park was still closed off firmly every night at dusk, a late night ride down the neighbouring bike path was apt to prove a trial. As I passed groups of people congregated along the low stone wall by the path, the distinct, herbal smell of the marijuana they were smoking would tickle the upper reaches of the inside of my nose. By very late on a Friday night or early Saturday morning, the path was apt to become an obstacle course, as happy dope smokers milled around, their risk perceptions – seldom a strong point of path users – worsened still further by the weed.

The path is at least less cluttered now that the park is generally open late into the night. But, as I ride by the park’s helpfully-placed bushes, the strong smell bears testimony to park users’ continued desire to smoke dope while watching New Jersey’s lights becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.

 

Children play round a fire hydrant in The Bronx:
they'll be off for a barbecue later in the park

The city’s public parks smell different in daytime heat too. Taking myself once again out of the city on Saturday, I rode up (for the first time) to The Bronx, bound over the city line to Westchester County. In The Bronx, I found children playing in the water from opened fire hydrants. In Van Cortlandt Park, my nostrils and ears encountered a distinctive mixture: firelighter liquid, loud Latin music and the smell of barbecued meat, wafting from the elaborate set-ups that scores of families had lugged into the park.

But probably the most telling smells are the ones that testify to how much organic matter still lies festering, largely unnoticed, round the greatest city on earth.

It’s tempting to think of New York as forged out of concrete and steel, an entirely manmade creation. I’ve recently discovered that that’s not entirely fanciful. Midtown and lower Manhattan sprouted their skyscrapers precisely because the bedrock there is close to the surface. Many of the buildings there are plugged straight into the solid, unyielding bedrock, with no messy soil in between.

But the stench in Central Park is a reminder how the city continues to consume vast quantities of organic materials. Horses’ oats and hay end up caked on Central Park’s asphalt. The smell of rotting food from humans’ garbage, which I often smell as I cycle past the sanitation department depot in Chelsea, is far more widespread in summer. It hangs around the big piles of garbage bags piled on the sidewalk as the sun makes the discarded fruit and vegetables inside decay all the faster.

 

A New Yorker shelters from the glare of the sun:
and the smell of the sewers

Worse still is the stink emanating from some of the drains. The city might have eliminated graffiti and broken windows above ground. But there’s something far less readily controllable about the life of a drain. The whiff that wafts up from some gratings puts me in mind of a slum in Mumbai or Kolkata, where the same malodorous ingredients mingle in the open air.

Yet the smelly life that springs forth when the mercury jumps to 90 is far less surprising to a cyclist than to most people. Cyclists are close enough to see the rat dart across the cycle path, smell the garbage truck that’s blocking the road and notice year-round the surprising number of horses still at work in the city. All testify to a secret, natural life that teems under the city’s streets, in its open places and in hidden-away stables. Cities have been giving off these smells since the dawn of civilisation - the odour of people living close together satisfying their various natural needs. However much he or she might smarten up the city's look, no future mayor looks likely to eliminate them.

Cute deer, nature - and the fragility of civilisation

It’s perhaps because I normally ride nearly exclusively in cities that I initially assumed the heads I could see poking over the brow of the hill were other cyclists. But, as I got closer, it became clearer. Standing to one side of Henry Hudson Drive, in the Palisades Park in New Jersey, a couple of small deer were eyeing me warily. Taken aback at encountering such a sight barely 20 miles from my front door in Brooklyn, I stopped to watch them back. Then, after a moment, a car came the other way, the deer took fright and bounded off into the undergrowth.

 

Cute baby deer express their shock at seeing a genuine
urban cyclist out here in the New Jersey countryside

However brief, the encounter was the kind of experience that makes some people insist that cycling in the countryside is the only “real” cycling – that urban cycling, to get one from A to B, is a poor substitute. It’s a view that I resist so strongly that I’m sometimes almost reluctant to leave the city. “Go somewhere upstate? But the buildings will all be boring.”

Yet it wasn’t only the deer during my ride on Saturday – the first time I’ve ridden over New York City’s boundaries since moving here – that made my ride to the Palisades a fine advert for the rigours of cycling outside a city. It’s an opportunity to stretch oneself in ways that would be illegal or anti-social in a city. It offers a chance to wonder at sights one never sees in the city. It offers a fresh perspective on city life. But, for me, it's light relief from the serious business of using a bike to get about. I will never be one of the grim-faced riders I passed in the Palisades for whom recreational riding was clearly a serious End in Itself.

As with quite a lot of things I do, part of the reason I headed for the Palisades – an “interstate” park, since it stretches north from New Jersey into the New York State counties west of the Hudson – was negative. Many work colleagues, neighbours and so on, on learning I am a cyclist, immediately start raving about the attractions of the Palisades and how I really must go there. It was becoming frankly embarrassing to keep explaining that, no, what with working all hours and having two children whose idea of fun wasn’t riding 17 miles to reach a park with nice cycling routes, I hadn’t yet got round to riding there. I wanted to join in those conversations better.

There was also the relish for a new challenge. I’ve written before about the pleasure of finding one’s way in a new place. A ride to the Palisades would take me north of the furthest north point I’d ridden in Manhattan and across the dramatic George Washington Bridge. Hitherto, I’d only seen it straddling the Hudson in the distance.

Most powerfully of all, perhaps, I’d told people this was one of the things I’d do with a free Saturday in July, when the family were going to be away for three weeks. I was going to feel frankly foolish if by the time they returned I, er, hadn’t got round to it.

 

Midtown Manhattan does its best to imitate grease spots on a
paper bag, in this picture from the George Washington Bridge

So, despite humidity so oppressive the air outside felt no fresher than my apartment’s bathroom after my morning shower, I headed out just before noon. I lunched by the river in the Upper West Side and found my way, heaving myself up some steep and awkward slopes on the way, onto the George Washington Bridge. The bridge was a product of New York City’s building boom in the era of Robert Moses – whose legacy I only recently criticised – albeit built by another authority. It offers remarkable drama for a humdrum link in the interstate highway system, leaping between high cliffs on either side of the Hudson River, taking vehicles hundreds of feet over the water down below. Looking down the river, the heat haze spread a white, translucent curtain over midtown Manhattan. A series of grey shapes loomed out of the haze, like the outline of greasy goodies seeping through a paper bag from a patisserie. It was beginning to feel as if I’d got myself properly away from my normal surroundings.

The view, however, didn’t prepare me for one of the great pleasures of countryside cycling – that there are greater extremes involved. It was a point I’d almost forgotten before, 17 miles into my trip, I passed the park entrance and reached Henry Hudson Drive, which snakes between areas well up on the riverside cliffs and areas right down by the river’s edge. Suddenly, I was using capabilities of my bike and myself that I’d almost forgotten were there. On the downhills, I was riding for long stretches at more than 20mph, looking out for rough patches of road surface, using my largest chainring to push that bit harder. On the steepest uphills, I was occasionally onto the smallest – hardly ever used – chainring, straining to climb in air so humid it felt as if I was hauling the water in it uphill along with me.

 

A snake skin - which the Invisible Visible Man was surprised
to see didn't occur naturally only on handbags or boots

The nature was a more unexpected surprise. Having ridden five-and-three-quarter miles from the entrance, I decided to turn round at a little bridge. In contrast with the sounds of city cycling, I could hear nothing but a waterfall splashing down the cliffs behind. It was a little startling to look out across the river and see The Bronx, a part of New York City so thoroughly urban it was the birthplace of rap music. It felt still stranger when I noticed that, at one end of the bridge, a snake had recently shed its skin, leaving a long, patterned, transparent sleeve among the ivy.

The deer, encountered on the way home, only confirmed my sense of wonder. They were a reminder of how wild this part of the United States naturally is. The surprise should perhaps not be that there are deer wandering around within sight of The Bronx but that nature has been so thoroughly eradicated in the built-up parts. As recently as the early years of the 20^th century, after all, Jackson Heights in Queens, where I catch the bus when I use LaGuardia Airport, was Trains Meadow, a marsh area noted for its richness in waterfowl. It’s now as densely-populated an area as any in the United States.

Yet, however magical some of my experiences in this potted little bit of countryside might have been, I didn’t feel any reluctance about returning to the city. I hauled myself back up the hill to the bridge and once again over the Hudson. I navigated the unfamiliar streets of Manhattan’s northern tip and was soon pedalling along a path beside the river I’d just passed so high overhead.

 

The Invisible Visible Man freely admits he'd happily ride
on more roads with this many cars on them

Many of the other cyclists I’d seen in the Palisades wouldn’t, I suspect, have enjoyed the urban portion of my journey. I know at least one person who declines to ride his bike in New York City except to reach the bridge and the purer cycling experiences in northern New Jersey. Many of the other cyclists I saw wore the fixed expressions of men and women locked in their own personal battles over a Strava segment.

The rigours of urban cycling bring their own rewards, however, even if they're not measurable on a competitive cycling website. As I made my way down by the Hudson, I had to stay alert, speeding up and slowing down as I made my way round other path users. I had the pleasure of seeing how other people were interacting along the path, the ways people from different cultures were using the open spaces to barbecue or talk or flirt.

There were also, as ever, the awe-inspiring monuments of New York’s built environment, constructed on a scale to match the grandness of the Hudson’s cliffs. I remember particularly spotting the Italianate spire of Riverside Church poking above the trees of Riverside Drive.

My pleasure in such sights was all the greater for the sense of how thin a veneer such signs of civilisation have laid over nature, even in the area around greater New York. It would take very little, I realised, if human beings stopped maintaining this place before deer were again leaping and snakes sunning themselves amid the ruins on this eastern side of the Hudson too.

The Gorbals, Robert Moses and the hometown blues

For years when I returned to Glasgow, the city where I lived on and off from the ages of four to 24, relatives and acquaintances would suck their teeth as I mentioned how I cycled in Edinburgh, London or Budapest, the cities where I’ve lived in the two intervening decades. Cycling would never take off in Glasgow, they explained, because of the weather. The persistent, year-round rain would make it impossible.

 

A cyclist in Glasgow: doing his best to follow my lead
from 20 years ago

It was consequently a pleasant surprise when I enjoyed a few days’ brief return home last week to discover that I’d been only 20 years or so ahead of the times when I cycled regularly in Glasgow. I saw none of the large packs of commuting cyclists that are becoming features of the London and even sometimes the New York streetscape. But there were undoubtedly far more noticeable numbers of cyclists about on the streets, competing with double-deck buses, trucks and cars for space on the roads.

Yet cyclists’ growing visibility is by no means the most important recent transport change in the city. Across the Gorbals, a notoriously rough area where I used to cycle between my parents’ home and my postgraduate journalism course, there now strides a vast motorway viaduct, opened two years ago in the name of relieving congestion on older, 1970s and 1980s motorways. The new road – an extension of the M74 motorway leading to England – was built against planners’ advice and looks set to keep the Gorbals as depressing as in the 1990s.

My clearest memory of riding in the Gorbals then is of jostling with cars while riding by a vast, wasteland lot. I knew it had, in happier times, housed elegant tenements designed by Alexander “Greek” Thomson, a 19^th century architect dedicated to turning everyday Glasgow buildings into visions of classical elegance.

The new road’s presence prompted me to notice quite how much space Glasgow devotes to the private car – and how far the priority cars receive helps to sustain their dominance. I also noticed how much priority the city’s road network gave to saving motorists time – at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists. That in turn put me in mind of how much space and time both New York – to which I’ve returned this week – and London – where I’ve lived 11 of my post-Glasgow years – lavish on users of private cars.

The FDR Drive was one of the few New York highways
not built by Robert Moses. But the neighbourng housing projects
were - and illustrate precisely how much care the
"master builder" took to create warm, vibrant neighbourhoods.

All of those cities have made admirable strides in the last decade towards enticing residents back onto the bicycles that had been abandoned as urban transport tools. But the more I thought about practical conditions for cycling in those places, the more it struck me that cyclists were often working against the grain of the cities’ current structures. Their true inclinations remained shaped by people like Robert Moses, the “master builder” who in the 1950s and 1960s sent road bridges springing across New York City’s waterways, tunnels burrowing under its harbour and expressways marching across many of its urban neighbourhoods.

Not, I should add, that I envy the task of Glasgow’s transport planners. The city, once a thriving centre for shipbuilding, maritime trade and heavy industry, has suffered from nearly every economic dislocation imaginable. Trade’s focus has shifted from Britain’s Atlantic coast towards those near sea lanes to and from Asia. Shipbuilding, undercut by Asia’s low wages and high efficiency, has all but disappeared. Other countries now make the huge freight locomotives my mother recalls seeing heading down her street on their way to haul goods across South Africa or India. The city could hardly have failed to hollow out as tens of thousands of its working class citizens lost their jobs and left homes that had been clustered around their workplaces. New York and London have undergone similar changes following deindustrialisation, but haven’t quite so comprehensively lost their senses of purpose.

 

A cyclist labours up the pedestrian/bike path near the
Riverside Museum. You've certainly got to admire
his determination when the city's so obviously telling him
to go about by car

Yet a family visit to the new Riverside Museum – part of an attempt to revive one of the areas worst hit by recent decades’ changes – revealed how far Glasgow goes out of its way to thwart anyone who abandons the car. In a short walk from Partick railway station to the museum, we had to pick our way across first a busy, two-lane road, then take a bridge across a four-lane expressway, before immediately crossing a second, five-lane road. The traffic lights’ pedestrian (and cyclist) phase took so long to come around it seemed like a calculated insult.

The area is not the only one so thoroughly given over to roads. Four thick, grey ribbons of tarmac – two carriageways of a trunk road and two motorway carriageways – wind their way across one stretch of the city’s south side that might, without them, stand some chance of revival as hip, inner-city neighbourhoods. North American readers unfamiliar with the city should picture the way Detroit’s urban freeways slice through its neighbourhoods to understand the effect.

 

A Glasgow-built Cunarder tram in the Riverside Museum:
the acme of British tram design, from a city about to take
a wholly different path

The irony is that, on reaching the museum, visitors discover how well Glasgow once provided far more human-scale types of mobility. The Riverside Museum is full of tramcars (trolleys, American readers) dating back to the days when the city’s public transport system was noted for its modernity and comfort. Exhibits are devoted to the city’s subway, opened in 1896, only the third urban underground anywhere in the world, to which my late father devoted the prime of his life. That public transport allowed the city to support large numbers of people in neighbourhoods densely-packed enough to support large numbers of shops, cinemas and other amenities. The tram tracks were ripped out and the urban motorways built in the same wave of modernisation during which Moses slashed Red Hook from Carroll Gardens with the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, severed Manhattan from its waterfront with the Henry Hudson Parkway and made suburban Long Island entirely car-dependent by building only expressways to serve new housing. There was certainly a need for some modernisation. In both Glasgow and New York, the post-war period saw the elimination of many notorious, dangerous, insanitary slums. It's simply hard looking at the end results to believe there wasn't a better way to achieve the goal.

I was particularly alive to the nature of Glasgow’s failure because during the trip I was reading 722 miles, Clifton Hood’s fine history of the building of New York’s subways. In it, he laments how after the first world war, John Hylan, the then-mayor, sponsored subway construction within then-built-up parts of the city but failed to keep extending the subways out to new, undeveloped areas. The result was that areas like Staten Island developed entirely differently from other bits of the city. As I can testify from personal experience, they remain dominated by wide roads full of fast-moving cars. It wasn’t hard to spot a similar process at work in Glasgow. Roads blight swathes of places like Partick, Kinning Park and other areas of the city that once held far higher numbers of people. The populations of those areas are now further away from the city centre in areas so thinly-spread it’s far easier for people to get about by car than by public transport or bicycle.

It occurred to me this evening as I cycled home from work that parts of New York remain as blighted by roads as parts of Glasgow. The thought came into my head as I pedalled frantically across the West Side highway – four carriageways of dense, fast-moving traffic – to reach the Hudson River Greenway before the massed ranks of cars started roaring towards me. Yet New York enjoys the enormous benefit that no politician – even the most anti-cyclist, pro-motorist – would seriously suggest building, say, a new arm of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway devastating a new bit of booming Williamsburg. No-one would suggest devastating Hoxton in London with a new motorway.

 

Gavin Dalzell rode this, the world's oldest surviving pedal
bicycle, now preserved in the Riverside Museum, in Glasgow.
With admirable consistency, the city gave him a hard time for doing so.

Glasgow, however, has more in common with struggling cities across the North of England and the US’s mid-west. There’s a desperate edge to some of the transport policy decisions, a feeling that the next city over might prove more car-friendly and attract a vital few investors that could make all the difference. The cities consequently try a bit of everything – some bike routes, some new rail lines, a hulking new urban motorway slicing five miles through a reviving urban neighbourhood. I feel enough affection for Glasgow to hope that the strategy works better than I fear. The city’s continued hollowing-out to facilitate car travel certainly isn’t preventing a revival in vibrant areas such as Hillhead.

But I’d feel far more optimistic if I could picture myself cycling from Glasgow’s south side to its city centre through the kind of bustling city streets where I’ll ride tomorrow morning than under the looming viaduct that now bisects the Gorbals.

Free speech, tweeted threats and an angry Astoria van driver

It was one of my moral philosophy lecturers – I think it was Gordon Graham – who debunked for me an old – but rather flimsy – idea about the structure of the world. Addressing the idea that humans’ bodies and souls were somehow separate entities, he held up his hand, looked the other way and asked, “How do I know where my hand is?” The strong – unarguable, I think – contention was that people didn’t get their ideas about where their hands were across some barrier between the mind and the body. They knew where they were because their minds – which decided where they would put their hands – and their bodies – the hands that were moved – were the same things.

So I’ve been surprised over the last few weeks to notice a version of the mind-body separation hypothesis getting a new life among angry people on the Internet. I’ve pointed out to several people venting their frustration on Twitter that they’re potentially making their own lives difficult when they threaten (for example) to run over the next cyclist they see riding “in the middle of the road”. If they hit a cyclist with their car in the future – even unintentionally – the act will look deliberate and the charges will be more severe. Most prefer at that point not to reply. But a few have replied indignantly that nothing could be further from their mind when writing about crushing a cyclist beneath their car’s wheels than actually doing so. Their angry opinions and their blameless on-road actions are as separate as a classical philosopher would say a grubby body and a pure mind (or, in this case, a grubby mind and pure body) should be.

Angry Twitter users should love this rider on London's
Clapham Common. He's done as they've asked and got onto
the pavement to ride.

The incidents have made me ponder whether I’m somehow a humourless prude for failing to catch the innate hilariousness of someone’s warning that she’s going to “run over” the next cyclist she sees on the road rather than the pavement (sidewalk, American readers). Should I, as one of the “run over” woman’s friends suggested, simply “get a life”?

Or are these Tweets verbal expressions of attitudes that carry over into real-life driving behaviour and lead to real deaths and injuries? Are the opinions as inseparable from the drivers’ actions as Professor Graham’s hand and his mind?

The question is all the more pressing after a fortnight in the US when the Supreme Court has moved gays and lesbians a significant step forward in their struggle for equal rights, but moved black people several steps back. There’s no doubt that the growing unacceptability of racist and homophobic language has helped to move those groups’ struggles forward. Should it remain socially acceptable to threaten to drive one’s car over someone just because he or she has chosen to use a bicycle on a public road?

None of this, of course, is to deny Twitter’s ultimate triviality. For some time, the most retweeted message was a sickly sweet farewell by Justin Bieber to a six-year-old fan who'd died of cancer. The vast bulk of what appears there can be treated much as one might the rantings of the drunk at the next table in the pub. It’s mildly irritating - but something one can and should ignore.

There is, nevertheless, a direct, graphic quality to the threats some Twitter users make towards cyclists that makes them worthy of attention. In late June, one user, Ray O’Connor, tweeted this message for the next cyclist that he regarded as being too far out in the road: “I will buckle your back wheels c**ts #IWillRunYouOver.”. Another user, @brinky91, said in a now-inaccessible message around the same time that she would “run over” the next cyclist she found riding in the middle of the road. In April, another user, @LaurenKoerber tweeted: "I f***ing hate f***ing people that ride their bikes in the middle of the road.. Like you're not a car #iwillrunyouover."

 

Bad news for angry Twitter users: these riders on
the Manhattan Bridge have bikes and look likely to use them.
Good news: they're not on a road.

These are, I think, the kinds of threats that, expressed towards many other groups, would attract at least some attention from the police, interested to see how serious the threats’ makers were about carrying them out.

The threateners, however, seem almost as indignant at the idea that the threats are serious as I am at their making the threats. “I WASN’T REALLY GOING TO HIT A CYCLIST GEESH,” shouted one typical replier - @AMILLIAMELY - after I queried her suggestion that she might “gain points” in the game of road use by hitting cyclists who rode “in the middle of the street”. Others prefer self-pity, whining that they’re getting “grief” from “cycling fanatics”, as if that were an unusual result of making death threats to strangers in a public place. @brinky91 pleaded that her threats simply reflected her “opinion” to which she had a perfect right. People should leave her alone. @AMILLIAMELY went on to tell me that she simply liked to express her opinion about things that made her “mad” and that it helped her to feel better.

Yet the more I read such declarations of innocence the more I think about the fate of John Kelly, a cyclist who was riding his bike in Astoria, part of the New York borough of Queens in mid-March.  Mr Kelly was using a bike lane when witnesses saw a van come from behind him, swerve into the bike lane and hit him. He ended up clinging by the wipers to the windshield, the driver staring at him with what Mr Kelly called an “angry look” on his face. When Kelly managed to jump off, the driver escaped. Few regular urban cyclists will have been surprised at news of the van driver’s attack. It was merely an extension of the kind of aggressive, deliberately dangerous driving to which many of us are, unfortunately, used.

 

This cyclist on Glasgow's Cathcart Road is wearing
specialist clothes, is (rightly) well out in the road
and amid some traffic. He could be a perfect storm for
cyclist-haters' rage

The van driver’s attack so closely paralleled the kind of violent assault-by-motor-vehicle that I’ve seen Twitter users say they want to carry out that I can’t accept the two are entirely separate phenomena. It’s clearly better if the people with whom I’ve debated haven’t deliberately used their cars to hit people. But I found it hard to believe the claims of one indignant threat-maker that he was always a careful driver. Is it really credible that a driver who tweets after a trip that he would like to run over cyclists will carefully pass every cyclist he sees on his next trip patiently and at a safe distance? The threat-makers are almost certainly over-represented among people killing and injuring people riding on the roads.

Which leaves the question of @brinky91’s right to voice her opinion that she’d like to crush my body with her car.

There is no doubt that a civilised society has a huge interest in protecting the right to express a wide range of opinions – including ones that gravely offend other people. Free speech provides the fuel for the great race between ideas that makes free societies superior to closed ones. It mans the feeding stations in the great, ever-running stage race between ideologies. There need to be excellent reasons – protection of a person’s right not to be unjustly defamed, for example, the prevention of direct incitement to violence and the protection of a handful of official secrets – to put serious curbs on the right.

But it remains absurd for people voicing an opinion to complain that others loudly disagree. It is as if Chris Froome were to take to complaining in the coming weeks that other riders were attacking him on mountain stages of the Tour de France. There is occasionally an unpleasant whiff of bullying about the way Twitter users can round on someone indulging in unpopular speech, bombarding him or her with messages of protest. But, in cases where someone has threatened real, graphic violence as some of those I have mentioned did, it seems perfectly reasonable that he or she should understand how many of the verbal attack’s victims strongly resent that language.

Speech, after all, is valuable precisely because it is an echo-chamber, amplifying our thoughts and allowing us to try out ideas about the world before taking them from our brains to our hands. I feel constrained as I cycle around New York to behave well precisely because I have written here that everyone should do so. I can’t help thinking that motorists whose Tweets about maiming or killing cyclists have received only the sneering agreement of their friends will feel justified in driving far less carefully. If I have a choice between fending off dangerous driving with a swift brake application and evasive manoeuvring or a few strokes on a keyboard, I know which I’m going to choose.

You can follow the Invisible Visible Man - who promises never to threaten another road user's life - at @RKWInvisibleman

Hear this: what I heard on the street - and what it says about cycling's merits

It was as inconvenient a time for a work call as I can imagine. I had grabbed my ringing phone from my pocket just as the lights turned green at an intersection on the Invisible Visible Boy’s short route to school. “I can’t talk now,” I shouted before stuffing the phone back into my pocket, leaning heavily down on my pedal and getting myself, my bike, the boy and his trailer bike all safely again into forward motion.

But, once I’d said goodbye to the boy and phoned back my colleague in London, he didn’t immediately want to talk about the matter in hand. Instead, he made me realise how thoroughly I’d taken for granted one of my key sources of information about the world around me as I cycled. I’ve been noticing ever since how many sounds I hear as I ride around – and how richly they add to my experience.

“You didn’t ring off properly,” my colleague told me. “I could hear the sound of the wind – and your son’s giggling.”

I had, I suppose, assumed before my colleague mentioned it that most of the time while riding I wasn’t hearing very much. For much of my journeys both to and from work, I work my way past long lines of waiting cars. No-one’s saying a great deal. Even though it’s New York, people mostly don’t even bother with honking. They just sit there.

Clinton St, Cobble Hill: very nice for people - and even,
the Invisible Visible Man was surprised to hear,
a hit with gentrifying birds

But, the moment I started thinking about it, I recognised how much information my hearing was giving me. The wind whistles in my ears, with anything from a whisper to the full-throated, jet-engine roar of a seriously stormy day. I hear the gentle whir of my bike’s rear hub. There’s the gentle clicking as I change onto an easier gear and sometimes a slight clang as the gear cable loosens and lets the chain slip down to a smaller sprocket. It’s a good sign if I don’t hear very much. Recently, a tiny bit of water crept into one of my pedals and I’ve run out of the grease I need to make it completely quiet again. Every now and again it emits a little squeak, sending my stress levels a little bit upwards.

Much of the time, as I pedal along steadily, songs play in my head, to the rhythm of my breathing and pedalling. For a while now, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, the tune seems to have been Lyle Lovett’s Walk Through the Bottomland – an obscure choice, even to me, but one whose deliberate beat seems to fit with the way I cycle.

The bike’s interaction with the road makes its own sounds. Occasionally, I’ll hit some stray stone on the road and send it flying – thwack! – into a parked car. My mudguard (fender, American readers) gives off a tiny bit of a vibrating sound – a very miniaturised version of an arrow hitting a target – every time my front wheel jars into one of the countless imperfections in the road surface. On the Brooklyn Bridge, there’s the steady clack-clack of the wooden boards on the walkway, as the bike hits each and sets it vibrating against the metal underneath. One night recently, I went over the Queensboro Bridge and enjoyed the sensation of racing down into Queens on a surface made up of jointed concrete slabs – ka-boom-ka-boom-ka-boom-ka-boom, steadily faster as I picked up speed. It’s hard to sort out in my head which of these sounds is audible to the wider world and which is conveyed direct from the road to my skull as the bike judders against the crack in the road or the joint in the concrete.

 

The Manhattan Bridge: a perfect urban cacophony

There are sounds of place elsewhere, too. As I leave my apartment, I hear subway trains growling complainingly around the Culver Viaduct high above my head. Then, the other morning, in another part of Carroll Gardens, I heard what I thought must be a novelty doorbell or strange alarm. No, I eventually concluded, there were actually some birds living happily enough in the trees along Clinton Street that they were singing out to each other one June morning rush hour. In some places, the audio soundtrack actually provides far more of the atmosphere than what one can see. Riding over the Manhattan Bridge yesterday, I noticed how I could hear the sound of wash breaking on the shore down below in Dumbo. Then a subway train rolled out onto the bridge, its clanking echoing off the roadway that runs above the tracks and drowning out the sounds of the motor traffic. As I raced the train over the bridge and gathered speed on the ramp down into Chinatown, I ran over one of the loose inspection covers. “Clunk-clank!” it went as I too sent the sound of my own progress echoing off the roadway’s underside.

 

This is how the bike lanes under the FDR Highway look.
But the Invisible Visible Man hears the sound of the cars
banging over the joints in the road above

My sudden noticing of the birdsong, the sounds of the road and the cacophony on the Manhattan Bridge have all made me feel far more positive about the sounds that surround me as I cycle than I used to. Then, I noticed mainly the sounds of stress. Like most cyclists, I’m constantly listening out for the tone of the engines behind me in traffic, ready to pick out the note of a driver who’s revving his engine, ready to accelerate dangerously. It’s one of the clearest warning signs one can encounter that a driver isn’t going to behave safely.

None of that is to suggest, however, that the most noticeable sounds don't cause me anxiety. The volume of honking gradually rises each morning as I ride towards the Brooklyn Bridge – especially if there’s a garbage truck blocking Clinton Street emitting the strange low-high-low hum of its hydraulic crushing mechanism. The honking reaches a pitch as I struggle my way through TriBeCa. On Friday morning, an angry motorist in a hurry slammed on her brakes when I stopped for a red light where Chambers Street crosses the West Side Highway. She gave me a long, unmistakeably intimidatory blast of her horn for having the temerity to stop her from running the light.

Those aren’t the only worry-inducing sounds. Any encounter with a large, road-hogging SUV has an extra edge when it’s blaring out rap so loud that the whole car vibrates. The motorists with most faith in honking’s efficaciousness seem least ready to move aside for emergency vehicles and I hear their drivers using their sirens to plead their way out of traffic. The mixture of short blasts, honks and steady whines they emit sounds like nothing so much as a pitiful trapped dog. Probably no motorist driving along Boerum Place in downtown Brooklyn the other night was able to hear how desperately the woman traipsing along the street at 11.30pm with a toddler son and luggage was swearing as she pleaded for help or criticised or did whatever she was doing to the person on the other end of her ‘phone call.

But the exposure to the stress is a flipside to the joy of hearing all this sound. It’s a pleasure of cycling round the city that all my senses are in immediate, unfiltered contact with the world around me, rather than being filtered through tinted windows and soundproof doors. I’m experiencing the city far more fully than I would in a car or a subway train.

That came home to me most fully late last summer, when I had not long moved to New York. As I stopped for one of the last sets of lights near my home, an old sedan drew up next to me, its windows rolled down. For a few seconds, I was treated, wholly unexpectedly, to a blast of sublime 1960s jazz, saxophones running riot over a pulsing bass line. I looked over at the driver. We both smiled, surprised to find ourselves sharing a brief transcendent moment of musical appreciation.

Red lights, stress hormones - and sympathy for Dorothy Rabinowitz

It’s the kind of scene that anyone using a busy city’s streets in the last few years will have encountered. “Hey, red light!” a pedestrian shouted at a couple riding down the Tillary Street bike lane. Unabashed, they continued through the crosswalk and on towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I, with the Invisible Visible Boy on his trailer bike, waited for the family to finish crossing. The man did so glowing with self-righteous indignation at the cyclists who had rolled slowly through the crosswalk a few yards ahead of them.

It was an inconsequential incident, in an area where I’ve encountered the aftermath of several nasty car crashes. The family in the crosswalk were not in any way seriously endangered, while the cyclists were far from completely reckless. I partly understood the cyclists’ behaviour. The crosswalk in question is lightly used – and any cyclist who waits until the lights turn green risks either a long wait to ride onto the Brooklyn Bridge or a dash across in front of traffic just as the lights there change.

But the family, I suspect, will have gone home cursing “scofflaw” cyclists. Next time one of their friends mentions the possibility of starting to cycle to work or to get the kids to school, they’ll suck at their teeth and mention how that couple totally blew through the lights by the federal court in front of them. When they’re driving, they’ll perhaps be a little less inclined to see cyclists as fellow human beings and a little more as the kindred of those people who rode in front of the family (the closeness of the encounter may by now have become considerably exaggerated).

The back of the New York City Cycling map:
an impossibly obscure place, it seems, to hide from senior
journalists what cyclists are told about the law.

I’ve been pondering the extraordinary mismatch between the irritation over cyclist misbehaviour and the actual danger it poses over the past fortnight since the Wall St Journal published a bizarre video featuring Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of its editorial board, sharing her thoughts on New York City’s new Citibike bikeshare scheme. Among her claims were that “everyone” in New York City knew cyclists posed a greater danger than yellow cabs (a collision with a bike last killed someone in the city more than four years ago). She also complained about seeing instructions on the doors of taxis warning her not to door cyclists, claiming that cyclists were not given similar instructions on safe behaviour (a glance at a Citibike, the NYC bike map or pretty much every other piece of cycling-related literature from the NYC Department of Transportation could have swiftly debunked this claim). The videos have helped to spur plenty of discussion about the virtues or otherwise of cycling in New York City – but have started the discussions off from a profoundly unhelpful point.

I’ve felt disinclined, however, to dismiss Ms Rabinowitz’s ravings entirely since a discussion with a colleague in the wake of the video’s release. I related to this colleague – who is certainly not unreasonable or poorly inclined towards cyclists – how that morning I had seen police stopping a cyclist who was riding recklessly. She expressed relief, on the grounds that more needed to be done to stamp out bad cycling. New York’s police department, I pointed out testily, already gave cyclists more traffic tickets than their share of the traffic would suggest they should receive. The ticketing was even further out of line with the damage that cyclists did to other people. It was motorists’ law-breaking that needed to be a higher priority. When cyclists rode on the sidewalk and she was walking her dog, however, she feared they were going to harm her dog, she replied. We both grew steadily more agitated.

 

Since we're talking politeness, I could have done without
the language on this parked single speed. Thank you.

We had both, I realised afterwards, started during our conversation to recall stressful incidents we’d experienced on New York’s streets. The stress hormones that had coursed through our bodies at the time began to move again. As our adrenalin rose, we both gradually became more defensive and less amenable to reason. The conversation made me realise that, yes, some people do find interacting with cyclists inherently stressful. In fact, looking at the stream of abuse one encounters in most online fora that discuss cycling, most people – drivers or pedestrians – find it stressful in some way. Pedestrians often fail to spot even cyclists who are behaving entirely properly – and hence get a shock when one whistles by as they stride out into the street sending a text message. Motorists find it stressful to manoeuvre around vehicles that have such different shapes on the road and move in such different ways. Handling some of these situations seems to activate ancient flight-or-fight responses in the human brain, well away from the brain parts that undertake moral and intellectual reasoning.

Not, of course, that people should surrender to mere gut instincts on these issues. No matter how irritated Dorothy Rabinowitz feels if a cyclist passes her on the sidewalk, she ought – particularly given her exalted position on a quality newspaper – to recognise there’s no intellectual basis for saying cyclists pose a bigger danger than yellow taxis. Incidents involving yellow cabs are often fatal in New York City – the last one involving a cyclist was on June 6, while one last killed a pedestrian (by mounting the kerb) on February 24. Livery cars (the New York equivalent of minicabs) pose far greater dangers.

As the February 24 death suggests, even when walking on a sidewalk (or pavement, for British readers) pedestrians are in far more danger from motorists than from cyclists. I’ve mentioned before how I ride every morning past the site where a car on the sidewalk killed Martha Atwater on February 22. There have been many such incidents across the city since – including the very sad death on June 4 of Ariel Russo, a four-year-old hit by a 17-year-old involved in a chase with the police. Any pedestrian worried about his or her safety in New York City should, logically, be begging the city authorities to encourage cycling. It’s far safer for pedestrians to be around relatively light, relatively slow bicycles than to be around cars.

A cyclist and his son on the lovely Manhattan Bridge
bike lane: cyclists can't expect nice things like this,
Sarah Goodyear says, if we keep being naughty.

Nor am I making a point like the one that Sarah Goodyear made in a now mildly notorious piece on the Atlantic Cities website about how cyclists allegedly “wanted it both ways” demanding better enforcement against dangerous drivers while being reluctant to behave better themselves. Cyclists couldn’t expect better infrastructure, such as bike lanes, if they didn’t improve their behaviour, she argued. It’s quite clear that, if officials’ willingness to give a road user group infrastructure depended on the group’s behaviour, there wouldn’t be much road space devoted to cars. There’s no evidence that cyclists’ rule-breaking (archetypally, red light-jumping and sidewalk riding) is more widespread than motorists’ tendency to speed and pay insufficient attention. There’s plentiful evidence that cyclists’ misbehaviour causes less harm to others than motorists’.

A Citibike rider checks out the rules:
bet she'll be nicer to cyclists
next time she drives

I also stick to the view that many people’s views about cyclists are based on simple prejudice and irritation towards people who decide to do things differently, rather than either objective factual points or stress from near-misses with negligent cyclists. It’s one of my hopes for the Citibike scheme that, if it encourages more first-time New York cyclists to ride, it’s going to create a new group of pedestrians and motorists who have some understanding of the pressures on people who cycle.

But I’ve personally taken the view for a long time that there’s little point in antagonising pedestrians or motorists unnecessarily. It’s far simpler to take the position that a red light means “stop” than to engage in some complex – and inevitably error-prone – risk assessment at every traffic light-controlled junction. I don’t ever want to be in the position of being the cyclist who crashed into me near Elephant & Castle in March 2009 after going through a red light. “I didn’t see you,” he complained. “There was a red light to tell you not to go,” I replied.

I take that position not least because it’s such a distraction from the important issues if I encourage people to complain even more about cyclists. There was a chilling illustration of that on June 8, when the Wall Street Journal – encouraged, perhaps, by the website traffic from Dorothy Rabinowitz’s original rant – posted a second video featuring her views. Having considerably improved her make-up and clothes, she launched into further strange denunciations based on misunderstandings of the facts – and heaped abuse on a couple of fairly mild questions from viewers about her opinions. Around my office, I spotted headphones going on and browsers being directed to the Journal’s website as even colleagues with no interest in cycling sought to gawp at the latest episode.

Yet, just as the Journal’s editorial staff were posting the video, on 5^th Avenue, just around the corner from the Journal’s offices, the driver of a sports utility vehicle lost control, mounted the sidewalk and ploughed into a crowd of people, sending six – including a small baby – to hospital. The incident was depressingly routine – but, given the numbers of people involved, I’d have hoped to see more comment and perhaps some more information on Twitter and some of the news sites I regularly visit. Instead, most were full of arguments about the largely illusory danger that bikes pose to pedestrians such as Ms Rabinowitz.

It’s my goal, as far as I can, to cycle in such a way that I don’t cause unnecessary stress to other people that I encounter. I don’t want to encourage them to focus on the pointless ephemera that were the subject of Dorothy Rabinowitz’s complaints. I hope to leave them at least a little freer to concentrate on the hundreds of annual deaths from motor vehicle crashes in New York City and other large cities worldwide. It is, after all, those, rather than a few stray bikes on sidewalks, that represent the true roads scandal of our time.

Citibikes, drivers - and the science of moral development

When I first started cycling to work down W54th street in Manhattan, I used to find it puzzling how cars would suddenly come to a complete, but brief, halt half way between 7^th and 6^th avenues. Then, after a while, I realised what was going on. There was a stop sign intended to protect a crosswalk on the new 6½ Avenue pedestrian path half-way along the block. Cars would carefully come to a complete - but milliseconds long – halt at the sign, to fulfill the legal requirements.

But I quickly recognised a second phenomenon. When I approached the crosswalk, I would stop if I saw pedestrians waiting to cross and let them go.  Most motorists would do the brief halt and drive on regardless, forcing the pedestrians to wait until a break in traffic.

The crosswalk came to symbolise for me the way that many drivers in cities worldwide end up reacting to road rules. They follow what they understand to be the letter of certain laws – in this instance, that cars must stop fully at a stop sign in New York City. But they ignore the wider spirit – that one should not barge past pedestrians trying to cross the road at a designated crossing point. The road environment for pedestrians trying to use 6½ Avenue is little safer as a result of the drivers’ brief stop at the stop sign than if they simply blew through. The sign plays next-to-no role in reducing the horrific annual death toll on New York City’s roads.

 

Five New York Police Department cruisers on W55th Street.
A heroic guess: in none of these vehicles is an officer pondering
how to push road users towards Kohlberg's higher stages
of moral development.

The behaviour puts me in mind of the famous work on moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who classified people’s moral development from the earliest stage – when they merely sought to avoid punishment – to the highest – when they behaved according to an established set of ethical principles. The drivers’ behaviour around the stop sign demonstrates the kind of moral reasoning that, in other fields, one might associate with a toddler seeking to be naughty but get away with it.

The question is how a city – any city, but the most pressing examples for me at present come from New York – can become a place where people interact according to the most advanced stages of moral development. Cities should be striving towards roads where users treat each other out of genuine concern and insight into the other person’s interests.

 

A Citibike stand, by the Brooklyn Waterfront, complete
with neophyte cyclists. Let's hope they're as keen
when they've completed the ride as before

The subject has been particularly on my mind this week because of the launch of New York’s Citibike bike-sharing scheme. It’s clear – from my own observations and from Dmitry Gudkov’s excellent stories and pictures of riders – that many new riders are using bikes for transport for the first time in New York City. It would be a tragedy if, after such a positive start, those new cyclists were to find themselves put off by the near-misses and abuse that other cyclists all too often experience.

The answer, it seems to me, lies in a shift in policing thinking intended, as good parenting should, to push road users gradually towards more considerate use of the road. It is likely unfortunately to prove a long, slow process.

I encountered evidence of the scale of the challenge on my way to work on Friday, as I made my way down E55th street. A car started pulling out into the bike lane as I approached, trying to push into a traffic jam, despite my repeated shouts that he was pulling into my path. When I finally, despite his continued efforts to block me, squeezed past, he shouted after me, sanctimoniously, “Share the road!”

There’s a simple problem underlying these complex issues, however. The NYPD, like probably quite a few police forces worldwide, doesn’t seem to have much of an idea what it’s trying to achieve with its road policing. That’s self-evident looking at most precincts’ traffic ticket statistics. Ticketing focuses heavily on issues like excessively tinted windows that are easy to prove, rather than on offences such as speeding or distracted driving where the behaviour is harder to prove but creates far more danger.

Only basic laziness – and the need to meet some arbitrary monthly target for ticketing – can explain incidents such as the one in April where several policemen - from a force, remember, that claims to have too few resources to investigate crashes properly - stationed themselves late at night on part of the Hudson River Greenway and ticketed and fined cyclists “for their own safety” for the purely technical offence of being in a New York City park (rather than on the far more dangerous roads) after the parks’ official 1am closing time. This and other similar incidents – the truck policing unit that ticketed more cyclists than trucks, for example – suggests the pressure on NYPD traffic cops is to meet quotas for ticket issuing, rather than to make the streets safer.

If such an approach is at work, it would chime with the evidence that’s emerged from the civil case against the NYPD over “stop and frisk” – the NYPD’s insistence on stopping young men to search them for weapons on even the most flimsy evidence. That trial has produced evidence that officers were told to meet targets for monthly stops, rather actually arresting criminals for serious offences. The force is facing legal action because many officers seem to have assumed – and in some cases to have been explicitly told – that the goal was to harass young black and Latino men.

 

Traffic infringements abound on W54th street.
A simple contribution to the police benevolent fund,
however, and no driver need worry.

On traffic policing, meanwhile, another regular sign of attitudes is the proliferation on cars of signs showing support for one or other police organisation or benevolent organisation. The signs clearly reflect an attitude that a traffic ticket is a piece of random bad luck to be made go away, rather than a punishment for a serious offence that could kill or maim another human being. That these signs continue to be so popular suggests they are effective at deterring trouble – and that many police officers agree on road offences’ importance.

It would surely make far more sense for senior police officers’ pay or promotion prospects to depend on measures of desirable outcomes on the roads. Would a precinct commander who knew his pay depended on a 20 per cent fall in road deaths and serious injuries send officers to harass cyclists using an important cycle path simply because it was too late at night? Would he allow his officers to hand out as many or more fines for excessively tinted windows in a month as for the widespread – and deadly – offence of speeding? It’s instead far more likely, I’d suggest, that officers would start to think seriously about policing the crimes that kill and injure large numbers of people every year. It should also help to stop the nonsense that drivers effectively buy immunity from prosecution via donations to police benevolent associations.

I can’t pretend, of course, that such a change would immediately turn every city road user everywhere into a practitioner of the highest, level six stage of moral development under Kohlberg’s principles. Those who have reached level six apply universal moral principles to their interactions with others, seeking to be entirely fair. Most UK police forces concentrate more on the deadliest offences – even if I disagree with many of their attitudes – and drivers in London remain often aggressive and inconsiderate.

But a clearly-signalled change of strategy would surely indicate to drivers that the outcomes of their behaviour – the numbers of pedestrians mowed down in crosswalks, for example – matter. It would shift drivers’ thinking about road policing away from a focus on the grubby transaction – how do I get this officer to ignore my speeding? – towards something a little more positive. What happens if I speed here, hit someone and get treated as other killers would?

The Manhattan Bridge: it is physically impossible, in good
weather, to bowl down the bike lane unobstructed
without a smile on one's face

I recognise such a change remains, sadly, far off in New York, although it may be closer – or may even have arrived – elsewhere.

The scene I encountered in the early hours of Saturday as I rode home makes me wish that were not so.

I had to work late and took a convoluted route home, through Times Square, the Broadway Bike Lane and the east side bike path to the Manhattan Bridge. As I started my climb onto the bridge around 1.30am, I encountered a young couple whizzing the other way on Citibikes, wearing the broad grin that pretty much anyone who’s ever barrelled down that lane unobstructed on a warm summer’s night must have done. A week before, they probably weren’t New York City cyclists. I can only now imagine they’re warmly commending the experience to their friends. It would be sad if a nasty grouch such as E55th street man were to change their minds – and an unspeakable tragedy if something still worse were to befall them.