A terrifying avenue, a new mayor - and how leaders should be handling traffic problems

It was one Saturday in November that I happened upon one of South Brooklyn’s most thoroughly dysfunctional streets. Seeking to take the Invisible Visible Boy for a trip to Brooklyn’s shorefront greenway, I naively followed the cycle route signs pointing me down Brooklyn’s 3^rd Avenue towards the waterfront bike path. But, after a little while, as I rode southward with the boy behind me on his trailer bike, we found ourselves grappling with high-speed traffic heading onto and coming off the highways around us.

The sign that tricked me into cycling down
3rd Avenue. To be fair, it doesn't read
Sunset Park (via traffic dystopia).

Then, as we rode into Sunset Park – a stretch of Brooklyn along New York’s harbour front, looking across to Staten Island - 3^rd avenue plunged into the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway. The din of overhead traffic always in our ears, we found ourselves constantly buzzed by high speed vehicles or cut off by cars turning into or out of auto repair shops. The street seemed like as complete an example as one could imagine of a street designed for motor vehicles with no thought for human beings.

Look at this picture, readers. Then remember, with astonishment,
that the man who forced this road down this route died feeling
New York City was insufficiently grateful to him.

So it was a shock when I discovered that, until 1941, 3^rd avenue in Sunset Park was the heart of a thriving community. The street was famous for its restaurants and the food shops that supplied the area’s people – who were mainly immigrants from Norway, Sweden and Finland. According to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses, builder of much of modern New York, it was only in 1941 with the opening of the Gowanus Parkway - since substantially widened and turned into an expressway - that it started the decline into traffic-dominated squalor.

Moses insisted, despite pleas from the residents, on building his parkway above 3^rd Avenue when it would have done far less damage above 2^nd avenue, nearer the already industrialised waterfront. Moses dismissed the poor but proud community in Sunset Park as a slum and consequently not worth saving.

I’ve been pondering the Moses story particularly intensely recently as I've noticed how often powerful individuals shape places’ urban fabric – and particularly people’s ability to get around those places easily and safely. That’s in part because of the end of the term in power of Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York for 12 years until December 31, and the start of the term of Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, pushed strongly for the introduction of new, better bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, chipping away at some of the damage Robert Moses did by making the city so dependent on cars. Bloomberg’s successor has promised to continue making decisive changes on the city’s streets. It was part of his election platform – and critical to winning his endorsement by StreetsPac, the safer streets action group – that he promised to work towards eliminating pedestrian deaths altogether.

The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson:
the world's biggest political plaything?

In London, it’s becoming steadily clearer that the efforts of the mayor, Boris Johnson, to provide both better cycling and walking conditions and faster journeys for motor vehicles are collapsing under the weight of their internal contradictions. In Toronto, it’s one of the emblems of Toronto’s general civic tragedy that its clownish, crack-smoking mayor has ripped out some important cycle lanes. Over the past week, I’ve been watching how political operatives in New Jersey used traffic congestion to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, a small town by the George Washington Bridge, apparently for supporting the wrong candidate in the state’s gubernatorial election.

Taken together, the various cases illuminate some core principles. It’s important that leaders have a clear vision for how they want their cities’ transport systems to work and that they’re prepared to tackle forthrightly the kind of obstructionism that almost any significant change to the urban fabric creates. But it’s also vital that those plans are based in a real, solid understanding of what’s going on at street level, that they’re flexible when there are serious concerns and that the plans are carried out within the rules of the political game. Leaders need to exercise the self-discipline to put long-term policy goals ahead of the need to have concrete successes to show before the next election.

Traffic stuck bumper-to-bumper on the Gowanus Expressway
on a quiet January Sunday: true testament to the success
of Robert Moses' road-building

Moses – who wielded power over aspects of transport and planning in New York State and City in various forms from 1924 to 1968 – provides the most spectacular examples of what can go wrong. In Sunset Park, he pushed the elevated highway down 3^rd avenue because, he claimed, the existence there of structures supporting a recently-demolished elevated rail line would make construction along the avenue cheaper. But that probably wasn’t as decisive as his simple conviction that the people of Sunset Park were dispensable. It’s a principle he followed all over New York City and State when he encountered people or environments for which he didn’t care. The more one knows about Moses, the more one spots around the city problems – whether clogged, disruptive freeways, crumbling subway lines or ugly, unsuitable public housing projects – that could have been avoided if Robert Moses had been made to obey the same rules about planning and due process that others followed.

 

Cyclists pedal on a dedicated lane over Copenhagen's
Dronning Louise Bridge. Key difference between these
lanes and London's Cycle "Superhighways": those in
Copenhagen are good, effective public policy.

On a far smaller scale, Boris Johnson’s initiative in London to build “Cycle Superhighways” along main roads exhibits a Moses-like deafness to criticism. No cyclist shown plans for the “superhighways” – which are mostly simply painted blue strips along frighteningly busy roads – could have avoided concluding that riders using them would be terrifyingly vulnerable to the neighbouring traffic. The desire to have achievements to show in the mayor’s first term and a wish to devise a cycling policy distinctively different from that of Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s predecessor, seem to have trumped any urge for mature reflection, however. Livingstone had developed the London Cycle Network of quiet routes along back streets.

The Cycle Superhighways look embarrassingly inadequate when compared with the bike lane that Janette Sadik-Khan championed around a mile away from the worst of 3^rd Avenue, along Prospect Park West in Park Slope. The two-way protected lane illustrates, partly, the value of clear thinking and good planning. The lane wasn’t built by pretending, as Boris Johnson has with the Cycle Superhighways, that bike facilities can be built with no effect on motor cars. It took away a lane of car traffic. Sadik-Khan, who had a strong record of listening to the community boards that provide New York neighbourhoods with a voice on planning issues, defended the decision to build the lane in the face of legal action that has now rumbled on for years but served only to highlight how well worked-out and widely supported the original policy was. Her stance puts Boris Johnson’s insistence on following incompatible goals in his roads policy to shame.

 

The George Washington Bridge's Fort Lee entrance
(albeit the bike, not car lanes). Taken last summer,
before politicians realised the scene's full potential.

Boris Johnson, however, has at least largely avoided the ultimate transport policy error – of taking steps for purely short-term political reasons. Those seem to have been the motives for the closure for four days starting last September 9 of two of the three access lanes from the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, onto the busy George Washington Bridge to New York City. An official in the office of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, seems to have ordered the closures to choke Fort Lee with traffic after the town’s Democratic mayor endorsed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Barbara Buono. The incident – which held up school buses and emergency vehicles, as well as thousands trying to get to work – was one of the most serious moral failings of transport policy practice I’ve ever come across. New Jersey appointees on the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bridge’s operators, seem entirely to have lost sight of the reason for the bridge’s existence and seen it purely as a political tool.

Bill de Blasio fortunately seems unlikely ever to lapse into such downright political cynicism. It was in a supportive spirit that I and some other people concerned about road safety turned up outside his inauguration ceremony on January 1 to remind him of his commitment to cut road deaths. There’s a clear sense of optimism abroad that Mr de Blasio and Bill Bratton, his new police commissioner, might have the courage to start tackling New York City’s appalling road safety record – at the time of writing, the city has already suffered nine traffic fatalities this year. Polly Trottenberg, Sadik-Khan’s successor, even came out ahead of the inauguration to talk to the Vision Zero activists and to hear the heart-rending stories of some of the bereaved parents who were there.

 

Inwood Hill Park: Robert Moses couldn't really understand
why anyone would think the road hadn't improved
this last patch of primeval forest in Manhattan

But, however optimistic the mood on January 1, I couldn’t help wishing I’d been able to take Mr de Blasio with me on the trip I’d taken the previous day, for a family trip to the New York Botanic Garden. To get to the garden, more than 20 miles from my Brooklyn home, I rode up by Robert Moses’ Hudson River Parkway, taking in how it had cut nearly all western Manhattan off from the city’s stunningly beautiful Hudson River waterfront.

I rode under the George Washington Bridge, glancing up to take in the traffic conditions. Then, towards Manhattan’s northernmost 

Two of the three cars that crashed in northern Manhattan
on Mike Bloomberg's last day as mayor: just another
part of the legacy handed Mayor de Blasio

tip, I encountered one of Moses’ most infamous pieces of civic vandalism – Inwood Hill Park, a stretch of primeval forest that he wrecked by needlessly driving a road right through its middle.

A scene we would have encountered on the way back would have been just as instructive. On Broadway, by the bridge leading from the Bronx – which Moses’ road was meant to free from traffic – I found a long traffic jam. At its head were three cars, crashed into each other.

This, I might have told the soon-to-be-mayor, is the legacy you’ve been handed. It’s a city still reeling from a mad effort to make it almost entirely dependent on the private car - and plagued by regular, serious car crashes as a result.

“Please remember the lessons of all the bad and weak leaders who made it like this,” I’d have begged him. “Please try to make it at least a little better.”

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

A Jersey City leaflet, an East New York death - and why police are bothering the wrong people

It was near a Path subway station in Jersey City that I encountered a ripple from a wave of sloppy thinking currently sweeping the English-speaking world. On a corner on Grove St, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, a woman wearing a high-visibility vest approached me and thrust a leaflet into my hand.

The pamphlet contained a series of safety rules for pedestrians – among them “Cross at corners and intersections” and “Before crossing look left, right,then left again”– and threats of fines for pedestrians who broke the rules. There were also instructions to drivers. But, even as motorists barged past people crossing right by her, the woman kept thrusting the leaflets solely on people walking.

 

Hey, pedestrians: you can't say
New Jersey hasn't warned you

New Jersey’s safety drive is one of many currently under way on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at improving vulnerable road users’ safety by getting them to take more care. In London, a big part of the response to a spate of cyclist deaths has been to station police officers at key intersections to harass cyclists not wearing high-visibility clothing or helmets. In Park Slope, near where I live in Brooklyn, the New York Police Department’s 78^th precinct reacted to a series of recent pedestrian fatalities by posting a list of pedestrian safety tips. They included advice that pedestrians should carry flashlights (torches, British readers) at night. People shouldn’t walk in snow or rain, it added.

The implicit assumption is clear. Vulnerable road users are vulnerable not primarily because they lack protection from the behaviour of motor vehicles but through their own irrational actions. Pedestrians wander heedless, according to this analysis, into the path of cars, whose drivers can scarcely be expected to miss them. Cars hit cyclists primarily because cyclists ignore red lights. It’s a view one can find repeated online in the comments under pretty much any news article about road safety – especially if it concerns bikes.

 

Hey, be fair. The card mentions motorists.
It's just that they don't give it to them.

Yet the worry should be precisely that crashes occur despite the best efforts of vulnerable road users to behave rationally – and because motorists correctly feel themselves largely invulnerable. A study  by researchers at Melbourne University, in Australia, found that 88.9 per cent of cyclists in a study were behaving safely and legally before collisions, near-collisions or “incidents” recorded on their helmet cameras. The figures tally with those in a Transport for London study of all the recorded injuries and deaths of cyclists from collisions with cars during 2010. The London study suggests around 74 per cent were the motorist’s fault, while the Australian researchers blamed the motorists for 87 per cent of the incidents. Studies from around the world regularly seem to find motorists to blame in around 75 per cent of bike/car crashes.

For pedestrians, a study in New York found that 44 per cent of those injured by cars were hit when in a marked crosswalk while crossing with the light, while another 6 per cent were hit on the sidewalk. Given that many of the other crashes will also be a result of motorist negligence, a clear majority of crashes involving pedestrians also appear to be the fault of the motorist concerned.

Pedestrians and cyclists appear, in other words, to behave like people who have a lot at stake on the roads and to take their own safety seriously. The crash on November 25 in East New York that killed Maude Savage seems, according to these studies, to be fairly typical. A surveillance video shows Ms Savage, a 72-year-old pedestrian, waiting and looking carefully before crossing, with the lights in her favour. A van then speeds around the corner and through the crosswalk, hitting her at speed. Robert Brown, the van driver, seems, to judge by the video, to have been driving like someone who recognised that, for him, the consequences of hitting a pedestrian wouldn’t be that serious. As things stand, it probably makes more sense for a busy technician like him – he was working for a cable TV company - to prioritise speed over avoiding a crash.

Cars on a crosswalk in midtown Manhattan.
The cars realise it's vital not to impede uptown progress
on 6th Avenue. So they block the crosswalk.

As with many road safety issues, however, many politicians and police officers seem to base their reaction to vulnerable road users’ deaths mainly on gut instinct and intuition. It’s often easy to sense frustration – “Why won’t these cyclists just get in a car or ride on the subway like everyone else?” Lord James of Blackheath, a Conservative peer, took such thinking to its logical – and absurd – extreme on November 22 when he claimed in a House of Lords debate that cyclists longed to be knocked down – to get motorists into trouble.

Even among people trying to make ostensibly saner points than Lord James, there’s considerable misunderstanding about where the risks lie. Politicians and police officers regularly whine about how cyclists allegedly cause crashes by ignoring red lights – but the Transport for London study found cyclists’ failure to obey a light was a contributory factor in only 61 crashes – against 2,650 involving motorists’ failure to look properly. It wasn’t significantly more common for cyclists to cause crashes by running lights than motorists – a motorist’s failure to obey a light was a contributory factor in 36 crashes. There’s a powerful tendency for policymakers to connect behaviour they observe – “some cyclists run red lights!” – to the death toll, without any further examination.

 

This car crashed at 100mph on West St in Manhattan.
How the NYPD thinks pedestrians can protect themselves
against such risks isn't clear.

There are certainly things that cyclists and pedestrians can do to protect themselves. In the Transport for London safety study, the top cause of crashes caused by cyclists was “failed to look properly,” just as it was for cars. “Failed to judge other person’s path or speed” was the second most common cause of crashes for both cyclists and drivers, while “careless/reckless/in a hurry” was number three for both. The Melbourne study of cycle crashes found that cyclists who looked over their shoulders a lot were least likely to be involved in crashes. There is clearly a great deal to be gained for any vulnerable road user through keeping keenly alert and watching out for the negligent behaviour of others.

Most people certainly make some trade-off in their road behaviour between convenience and safety. It’s surely worthwhile for the people with most to lose through a crash to let safety rule their judgement all the time – if only because it’s clear that people protected by metal shells feel free to prioritise their own convenience over other people’s lives. Last Sunday, riding down Garfield Place in Park Slope, I heard a woman in a car behind honking at me so violently that I, unusually, pulled over into the parked cars’ door zone so that she could squeeze past. “You should be over to one side!” she screamed at me as she zipped past too close, her face contorted with rage. The mismatch of concerns was precisely the one the TfL and Melbourne studies would suggest it might be. She was anxious I might hold her up by a few seconds. I was concerned her car might crush me to death.

Yet the fact remains that New Jersey’s police forces, the New York Police Department and Metropolitan Police are all placing a lot of the emphasis in their road policing efforts on berating the victims rather than the perpetrators of crashes. The tactic is reminiscent of the times – sadly, not too long ago in some places – where the answer to preventing sexual assault was meant to be to stop women walking alone at night or wearing “provocative” clothing. It’s a tactic that, by the nature of what causes the crashes, can never work. It’s patronising and demeaning.

 

The true effectiveness of years of "Share the Road" efforts
is clear from this picture of a midtown Manhattan Street.
Note the Cadillac blocking the route of the cyclist
using the bike lane.

The correct solution is hiding in the plain sight of that TfL report and Melbourne University study. There simply aren’t enough incentives for motorists to care as much about vulnerable people’s safety as they care about, say, making that important ‘phone call. The driver who ran into Maude Savage appears, according to Streetsblog, the campaigning site, to face no more than a $500 fine or 30 days’ jail, for example.  He faces that only because he turned out not to have a driving licence. It will be only when drivers face a good chance of heavy fines, losing their licences or imprisonment for negligent driving that the convenience/safety trade-off will start favouring safety more often.

Yet the chances of a big change in attitude soon seem remote. Appeals for everyone to “share the road” have the advantage of seeming even-handed and fair. Pleas for vulnerable road users to look after themselves better have the advantage of addressing those with most interest in improving road safety, even if they miss those best placed to improve the position. The alternative is to start acting on the reality of the picture that the research paints. That is that private motor vehicles – the dominant form of transport in most developed countries – pose big risks to those around them, and most drivers drive as if they didn’t. That seems like the kind of truth that politicians will put off addressing for as long as they possibly can.

A futurist, an urban bike ride - and why we're slaves to yesterday's vision of tomorrow

I’ve long enjoyed pondering how living today measures up to yesterday’s vision of tomorrow – and how it falls short. I can now receive wirelessly once-unimaginable volumes of information – but poor software makes the device responsible crash. I can find out almost whatever I want at the press of a button – and I get it surrounded by links to stories about how celebrities look without makeup. I can theoretically work as easily in a 150mph train as in my office – but humans overload every system they build, so I can’t. It was always smoother and cleaner in science fiction.

Sheikh Zayed Road: Bel Geddes' vision realised
in a dusty desert dystopia

Yet, even as a connoisseur of the former future’s shortcomings, I was taken aback when I visited an exhibition on the work of Norman Bel Geddes, an early to mid-20^th century futurist. I went to the exhibition – at the fabulous Museum of the City of New York – largely to let the six-year-old Invisible Visible Boy gawp at Bel Geddes’ plans for streamlined bubble cars, vast flying boats carrying 500 passengers and a plan for a floating air terminal off the tip of southern Manhattan. But suddenly, as I looked at one of Bel Geddes’ plans for a future city, I saw a plan eerily similar to a place I know – Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road – staring back at me. The more I looked, the more I noticed how Bel Geddes’ strange, extreme visions for the future had shaped not only relatively exotic places like Dubai but the environment I could see outside the museum’s Upper East Side windows and that I’d known in other parts of the world.

The exhibition brought home to me a new version of a famous quote from John Maynard Keynes. Practical men who believed themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence were “usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” Keynes said. Town planners, it occurred to me, were normally grappling similarly with some dead thinker’s vision of the future. The continuing legacy of people like Bel Geddes – and people he influenced, like Robert Moses, builder of much of contemporary New York and influencer of planners worldwide – explains why roads in so many cities cater so poorly to the full spectrum of users. I left struck with the obligation for the present to bequeath the future something better.

 

Central Park, near where I rode: cycling here didn't fit
with Norman Bel Geddes' vision

My revenge on Bel Geddes had started even before I got to the museum, though. Bel Geddes’ vision of the US in 1960 – unveiled at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens and sponsored, tellingly, by General Motors – envisaged a country criss-crossed by highways with pretty much all transport provided by some form of motor vehicle. Bel Geddes specifically called for creation of urban motorways. “There should be no more reason for a motorist who is passing through a city to slow down than there is for an airplane which is passing over it,” Bel Geddes wrote. I scoffed at his ideas by enjoying a 12-mile cycle ride to the museum - over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the Hudson River Greenway and through Central Park.

But it was also clear once I’d visited the exhibition that I’d ridden through some concrete-and-steel expressions of Bel Geddes’ ideas. As I headed north of 59^th street, my cycle route ran under the Henry Hudson Parkway, one of many freeways that Robert Moses designed to realise a vision similar to Bel Geddes’ to cater to motor cars. When I lived in London, I would sometimes cycle under the Westway, another urban motorway intended to speed motorists through an urban landscape as if it wasn’t there. Glasgow, where I grew up, has built so many urban motorways it sometimes feels as if there’s little city left.

Robert Moses' Verrazano Narrows Bridge across
the entrance to New York Harbour: typically bold and
audacious - and, equally typically, part of making Staten
Island New York's most car-dependent borough

All of those roads started out offering glamorous promises for a better, freer tomorrow and are now clogged up by congestion. When everyone tries to drive a car into a city, it turns out, they often end up slowing each other down.

Those visions of future utopias had become dystopias, it occurred to me as I rode home, because of shortcomings that become obvious on closer examination. In such visions of a smoothly-running automotive future, cars are only ever shown moving, not parked. That’s not an omission that seems credible to anyone who’s ever cycled around Brooklyn on a street-cleaning day. Street after street clogs up as drivers double-park their vehicles on the other side of the street to let the cleaning machine past.

 

The cycle and walkway by Robert Moses' Shore Parkway:
People squeezed into a space full of cars

The cars also run an orderly distance from each other in past visions of the future. At the World’s Fair, Bel Geddes made it clear that he thought radio control by 1960 would be preventing cars from crashing into each other. Pedestrians seem to have been out of the equation because Bel Geddes thought they would all be on elevated walkways. Although pedestrians are segregated on walkways in some places – like Hong Kong – his vision is laughably at odds with the honking, disorderly reality of contemporary urban roads.

However, the biggest failing of the former futurists’ vision is that they fail to recognise how the future has to fit into past visions of the present. It’s seldom possible to build a city from scratch with no regard to the existing buildings and streets – although, of course, many of the attempts to realise the futurists’ visions were made in cities razed by second world war bombing. Only Robert Moses’ remarkable political power allowed him to demolish so many New York neighbourhoods to accommodate his grand road schemes.

Varick Street, lower Manhattan:
Robert Moses would have liked to clear
these pesky pedestrians away.

It was the clash between the past and the future that finally put a stop to Moses’ drive in New York. A film at the Museum of New York describes how his attempt to build an expressway across lower Manhattan foundered on the unlikely rock of Jane Jacobs, a writer and theorist who organised opposition and had the scheme stopped. Jacobs loved the architecture and streets of Greenwich Village, where she lived, and thought the area’s townhouses and tenements worth preserving. There would be similar battles fought - some won, like the battle to stop Edinburgh's Old Town from being demolished for a motorway, and some lost - right across the developed world in the decades to come.

Even the United Arab Emirates has started to realise that car-dominated cities pose severe problems. There’s now a metro line along Sheikh Zayed Road, running above the cars. Last time I visited the UAE, I was also able to visit a more Jane Jacobs-ish model of a Gulf city in Masdar, outside Abu Dhabi. While it features a rather Bel Geddes-ish underground electric car system, Masdar is designed to replicate the traditional urban patterns of middle eastern cities, with fountains, high stone walls and structures designed to produce natural breezes. Cars are banned from the heart of the town and the planners intend that cycling will be one of the ways inhabitants get about.

Masdar: a Gulf vision Bel Geddes didn't inspire

Few places, however, have the luxury of starting from scratch as the Masdar planners have done. New York and other big cities consequently live with some of the kind of old infrastructure that Jane Jacobs fought to preserve and some of the futurist infrastructure that Robert Moses promoted. The challenge is to work out how best to adapt both to fit the future.

 

The Williamsburg Bridge's bike and pedestrian lanes:
proof the future contains more bikes, but looks less neat,
than Norman Bel Geddes envisioned

The tension has struck me powerfully this week. There is some excellent, new provision for me and my bike in contemporary New York, built by city authorities who think the city in the future will need more people to get about roughly the way I do. I’ve also, however, attended this week a protest calling on the police to stop speeding drivers after the death on October 26 of Lucian Merryweather, hit by a speeding driver on a Fort Greene sidewalk. I’ve also a couple of times had to cycle down part of 2^nd Avenue in Manhattan and then onto the East River bike path.

The cars on 2^nd avenue, when not caught in a traffic jam, would buzz me at intimidating speeds. Then, as I sought to get onto the East River bike path, I had to cross an off-ramp from FDR Drive, the kind of urban expressway I’d seen staring back at me from Bel Geddes’ pictures.

The cars came roaring off the expressway into the city streets, most still running at a good 60mph. As I watched them, wondering when I would safely be able to cross, I thought of Norman Bel Geddes. Some of his vision now looks strange and much of it looks downright dangerous. But there remain many drivers who see no reason why a car should have to slow down just because it’s in a city.

The Invisible Visible Man, a low-rent PJ O'Rourke - and a day off for the higher brain centres

I've long been keen when reading history to study the people who were really, seriously wrong about things. The people who airily dismissed Charles Darwin seem almost as interesting in their pig-headedness as the great man was in his insightfulness. I'm interested in the prelates that persecuted Galileo or, on a smaller level, the Daily Mail editor who refused to believe his fashion editor the miniskirt would be a hit.

I'm consequently intrigued to think how fascinating Rod Liddle of the UK's Spectator magazine will seem to future generations. He has a remarkable knack of stating with verve, passion and an absence of judgement rotten arguments that time will surely only make smell more putrid. It’s even a matter of some pride to me that this blog provided the jumping-off point for a piece by Mr Liddle – think a low-rent, less-coherent PJ O’Rourke, American readers - that I predict could face ridicule for decades or even centuries to come.

The Invisible Visible Man's helmet: of note, a lack of
pomposity and, come to that, points

My first concern, however, is to ensure than no-one mistakes Liddle’s piece on cycling in the latest Spectator – entitled “Off yer bikes! Cyclists are a menace to society — and self-righteous to boot” – for a serious, thought-out argument about cycling’s merits. As with other recent attacks on cyclists – including that by Dorothy Rabinowitz in May on the Wall Street Journal’s website - the piece’s few factual assertions crumble into nothing on any examination. The rest of the argument rests on allegations made noisily, in the apparent hope their volume will make them seem more convincing.

The nature of Liddle’s thinking is clear from his targets. There are, to be sure, the now-traditional self-contradicting attacks on people who cycle on pavements (sidewalks, American readers) as well as those who ride on roads; attacks on cyclists who are too slow and hold up traffic as well as those who “whizz” by him. But Liddle also refers to the ownership by cyclists he dislikes of “a pompous little pointy plastic hat, hilarious goggles, a fatuous water bottle”. By the time a writer is imputing motives to inanimate objects and shouting at them, I could understand why readers might be pulling me away from Liddle shouting, "Leave him! He ain't worth it!"

Yet I feel compelled to respond to at least some of Liddle’s ravings because they start off with a typically selective, misleading quote an old post on this blog (which he erroneously calls "The Invisible Cyclist") examining why some people feel such anger towards cyclists.

 

My water bottles. They're trying to be fatuous -
but just can't get animated about it.

My post begins with an account of a conversation with a driver who wanted to intimidate me off the road so that she could get to the end of a traffic jam faster. When I (inevitably) caught up with her, she moved quickly from leaning on misleading points about the financing of roads to suggesting that I, as a Scot, shouldn’t be in London. The post links (reasonably, I think) the woman’s intolerance of my ethnicity to her intolerance of my being on a bike on a road. I suggest that people’s unreasonable intolerance of people on bikes has points in common with other forms of intolerance – including homophobia and anti-gypsy prejudice in Eastern Europe. It seems to me they all reflect a general anger at anyone who’s seen to be doing something different. I go out of my way to make clear that gypsies, gays and other oppressed groups face far more wide-ranging problems than mostly well-off cyclists. But I suggest the feelings have a similar genesis.

Liddle, on the other hand, says I think I’m “special” because I ride a bike and hence a Victim, complete with sarcastic capital V. He goes on to regret that fewer cyclists are being killed annually on the UK’s roads and attributes it to the dead hand of Political Correctness. He then goes on to show a bizarre lack of insight into other people's thinking by saying that – hahahahaha – he’s only joking but humourless activist cyclists won’t realise that. He doesn't seem to realise that people know he thinks he's joking when he says hateful things. It’s just that only a seriously unpleasant, callous fool regards it as funny to joke about wanting cars and trucks to crush more people annually from a group he's decided to find annoying.

There were, as it happens, 118 cyclists killed on Great Britain’s roads in 2012, a 10 per cent increase on the number in 2011, in a period where other kinds of road user fatalities mostly fell sharply.

 

My new glasses. Are these goggles ridiculous enough
for you, Mr Liddle?

I've made unusual choices, rather than being special in the sense of being morally superior. Only between 1 and 2 per cent of trips in the UK, where I lived when I wrote the piece Liddle attacks, are by bike. Only 0.6 per cent of commuting in the US, where I’m now based, is on a bicycle. I’m interested in why I experience a level of anger when I’m riding a bike that I simply wouldn’t while walking or taking public transport. Someone, for example, threw a bottle at me as I rode home from church on Sunday evening, something I’ve experienced several times while cycling. I’m curious why some people, Liddle included, find cyclists self-evidently suitable targets for particularly intense scorn and rage.

The piece does at least make a pretense at wheeling out a few rather shop-worn facts to try to back up the simple assertions. Liddle writes, for example, that it’s more dangerous to be a pedestrian in the UK than a cyclist. An examination of crash statistics for 2012 shows that the UK suffered an average 38 fatalities for every billion miles cycled, against 37.6 fatalities for every billion miles walked. Liddle also asserts that it’s necessary to pass laws to rein in cyclists to protect pedestrians such as him. Yet of the 420 pedestrian deaths in Great Britain in 2012, only 2 – 0.48 per cent – were a result of collisions with cyclists, which accounted for 0.11 per cent of all road deaths.

Given that bikes account for, say, 2 per cent of traffic – and far more in the busy places where most pedestrians are hit – it’s obviously disproportionately safe for pedestrians to be around cyclists. There is not the slightest evidence for Liddle’s assertion that injuries to pedestrians from cyclists are rising.

In a rational world, a Rod Liddle who was genuinely concerned about pedestrian safety would be calling for far more journeys to transfer from cars to bicycles, to protect people on foot. Even in the strange world of a conservative columnist's mind, it's hard to think of other areas where people rant about a group that are causing 0.11 per cent of the problems they profess worry them, while ignoring those causing 99.89 per cent.

An anonymous bike blogger,
hiding in plain sight

But Liddle’s writing sadly isn’t marked by any kind of intellectual curiosity. He remarks, for example, that this blog is “anonymous” as if that were inherently suspicious. Yet my identity is hidden only until one reaches the bottom of the page and sees who owns the copyright. I suggested in one recent post that readers follow me on Twitter – where I give my real name – and some commenters address me as “Robert”. There's a picture of me on the blogpost he quotes.

On Friday, the day after Liddle's piece appeared, a stranger cycled up to me as I waited at traffic lights during my morning commute and asked, based on the work security pass hanging from my belt, if I was author of this blog. The contrast with Liddle's failure to spot the obvious was telling.

There's a similar lack of originality. Liddle’s piece reflects nearly perfectly the advice in a “terrible journalist’s guide to writing an article about cycling” that Mark Treasure, a British blogger, wrote more than a year ago. Liddle even recycles some of his own, stale ideas. The original post that he quotes mentions a previous attack he wrote on cyclist’s “pompous plastic helmets”. He saves some time in getting the piece finished by reusing pretty much exactly the same language.

It’s pretty clear that any purported facts – indeed any real relationship to the outside world – are mere jewels encrusting an object made up of bilious ventings from Liddle’s gut. His higher brain centres – which might have over-ruled some of the absurdities – seem to have been given the day off.

Yet there’s nowhere, it seems to me, where Liddle gets it as wrong as he does when discussing cyclists’ characters.

Rod Liddle's angry cyclists sometimes don't use bike lanes.
So here's a nice picture for him of a bike lane
not being used by cyclists.

It’s true, I’ll admit, that it can bring out a certain defensiveness in cyclists to be constantly dealing with baseless rantings like Liddle’s. It doesn’t help that those rantings seem to fuel unreasonable behaviour on the street. As well as dodging the thrown bottle on Sunday, I had on the way to put up with a runner who insisted on running in front of me down the 1^st Avenue bike lane. When I called out, “Watch out in the bike lane, please!” behind him, he replied, “What the…f*** off!” 

I don't repent either of liking cycling’s environmental credentials. Liddle dismisses cyclists as people who “think they’re saving the bloody planet” and sneers at the idea. Yet it’s pretty hard to see how anyone who accepts the reality of global warming – something many Spectator readers don’t, of course – can dispute the idea that using an emissions-free means of transport has to be some help in reducing global emissions.

It's obvious I'm a roundhead to Liddle's cavalier, just as I'm a cyclist and public transport user while he, I'm imagining, is a significant customer of London taxis.

But my moral convictions wouldn't have got me riding as much as I have round the three cities I’ve most recently lived – New York, London and Budapest. I’ve done it because riding a bike lets me hear the sound of the birds in the trees where I live, appreciate the streets and the history, see remarkable sights late at night and creep up unheard on deer on a quiet country road. I ride a bike mainly because the simple pleasure of doing so fills me with a simple sense of youthful joy. Having just marked my 44^th birthday, I desperately need that.

Liddle’s rants at what he imagines to be the politically correct conspiracy of the British establishment seem weighed down with bitterness and cynicism. It's hard to imagine he couldn’t do with experiencing some of that youthful joy too.

A Fort Greene tragedy, London's missing road dead - and why New York's mayoral election matters

The Saturday before last, facing a day of boring but necessary chores, I persuaded my family that we could alleviate the tedium by going for lunch in Fort Greene, one of my favourite bits of Brooklyn. After I’d cycled there and everyone else had taken the G Train, we settled on eating in Black Iris, a middle eastern restaurant at the corner of DeKalb and Clermont Avenues. We ate looking out on the mixture of brownstone houses and fashionable businesses that makes Fort Greene such a likeable part of the city.

A bikeshare station near the site of Saturday's tragedy:
shamefully, where to position these stations has generated
far more debate in Fort Greene than the threat posed
by deadly drivers

I found myself looking at some of the same scenes again this past Saturday, in far less happy circumstances. Returning home from a bike ride with the children, I spotted on Twitter pictures of a pharmacy that I realised was diagonally opposite Black Iris. Next to it was a Ford sports utility vehicle on the sidewalk, with sheets covering a body and police tape cordoning off the scene.

Some poking around revealed that, around 12.45pm, a driver had crashed his SUV through the front of Black Iris – no doubt as diners like us tucked into the grilled meats and Mediterranean pizzas that our family had enjoyed a week before. After hitting the restaurant, the driver, Anthony Byrd, reversed at speed, made a U-Turn, swerved, hit some cars on the other side of the street by the pharmacy, mounted the sidewalk and hit a mother and her two boys. The sheet was covering the body of Lucian Merryweather, a nine-year-old, crushed on the sidewalk by the pharmacy. His five-year-old brother is in hospital. Byrd also hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

 

The Invisible Visible Family's bikes visit the Brooklyn
Academy of Music on a previous Fort Greene trip

It’s the kind of incident that ought – as multiple-victim public shootings once were – to be shocking, garner exceptional media attention and be fully investigated for lessons. But it’s actually depressingly routine. A Streetsblog post from September suggests that cars mounting sidewalks have already killed at least nine pedestrians so far this year in the city. Those figures don’t include Sian Green, the British tourist whose leg was severed in August when a taxi driver mounted the sidewalk while trying to ram a cyclist. Nor do they include Michael Gomez, who died of an asthma attack a few days after he was one of several children hit in Queens when a driver mounted a sidewalk.

Much coverage of these events has focused on their individual, exceptional circumstances and the culpability or otherwise of the drivers – and sometimes even the victims – involved. The attitude of New York's police has been reminiscent of the fatalism of some Hungarians when I lived in Budapest about the country's shortcomings. “Hat, mindenhol a vilagban (Well, everywhere in the world)” they would say over problems that were objectively, verifiably much worse in Hungary than elsewhere.

The folly of that complacency was exposed on Friday from the other side of the Atlantic when Transport for London published its annual health, safety and the environment report. The report – which was given a rough reception because it suggested safety for some categories of road user was falling - showed that 134 people died on London’s roads in 2012. That’s less than half the 271 who died on New York’s streets the same year, in a city with roughly the same population and traffic flows. New York killed more pedestrians in 2012 – 135 – than died on all modes of transport on London’s streets.

 

The Invisible Visible Girl's bike with its
Vote deBlasio spoke card. If any of us had
a US vote, we'd choose him, we promise.

Although it’s tragically too late for Lucian, New York this week has a chance of making a new start on road safety issues. The day after our visit to Fort Greene, our family emerged from church to find our bikes had been festooned with spoke cards suggesting we vote in the mayoral election – this Tuesday, November 5 – for Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate. During the Democratic primary, de Blasio loudly proclaimed his support for Vision Zero, a policy that targets eliminating city road deaths entirely.

If deBlasio does go for the systematic casualty-reduction technique of Vision Zero, it should, I think, prove far easier than anyone expects to bring down New York’s deaths to levels far closer to London’s. London’s figures, after all, are achieved in a city where some vehicles still speed, where the police response to many road incidents is grossly inadequate and where the poor design of parts of the mayor’s hurriedly-introduced cycling network has led to a series of appalling deaths. On the most basic levels in London, I suspect the superiority of its road safety record is down to drivers’ reasonable expectation that a speed camera will catch them if they speed, to the calming effect on traffic of the central London congestion charge and a total ban on vehicles’ turning through crosswalks when pedestrians have a green light.

There is also, I suspect, an effect of the reduced politicisation of policy-making compared with the US. The UK’s independent civil service tradition ensures that many of the senior officials grappling with road safety issues in London are the same people who have dealt with them for many years. There is less need to make the big policy splash that mayors in big North American cities crave when introducing an initiative. That civil service’s tradition is to work by producing dull, practical reports and recommending policy solutions mainly on a practical basis, often by formal cost-benefit analyses. A small group of officials, I suspect, will have had charge of producing TfL’s health, safety and the environment report. Their job prospects, I suspect, are closely tied to the health of the city’s road culture. It’s probably no coincidence that introduction of the poorly-designed Cycle Superhighways - one of London's worst-designed policies - is among those most closely associated with an individual politician.

In New York's case, it’s hard to imagine a man capable of running a slick election campaign can’t – if he’s willing – introduce fairly quickly policies to bring the city's road safety practices closer to London’s. Ideally, he'll choose somewhere still more safe.

It's a comparison of which I know the presumed mayor is aware. I saw him one morning campaigning outside my son’s school and forcefully told him about it. “I moved in August last year from London,” I said. “It has 100 fewer road deaths annually, with around the same population.”

Me and Bill deBlasio: I hope he remembers what I said
and wasn't too busy thinking, "Why is this strange man
shouting at me and gesticulating so hard?"

A picture that another parent took shows the candidate and his staff looking a little taken aback at the vehemence of my point-making. De Blasio’s body language looks a little defensive. There have been signs – including some remarks about pedestrian plazas in a debate that suggest an only partially-digested sense of his policy’s implications. The candidate nevertheless mentioned his support for Vision Zero when I spoke to him and trumpeted his Streetspac endorsement.

I remain nervous, nevertheless. I can only hope in light of the Merryweather family's appalling grief over a young life wasted that my parting shot to the future mayor will prove prophetic.

“You can fix this,” I said, jabbing my hand towards his chest. “You can do it.”