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That said, I cannot get on board with all these d-bag bicycle advocates running around trying to transform the city for themselves. All of these new bike lanes and pedestrian plazas are dumb and in fact give bikers a false sense of security.
That transportation commissioner broad janette-sadik-badik-madik or whatever the hell her name is, is freakin INSUFFERABLE. I cringe any time I see her on the news standing behind Doomberg and smiling her little smile talking about her precious little bike lanes.
As I said, I love biking. But it's dangerous (obviously in manhattan in particular). You've gotta watch your ass constantly, assuming that a car doesn't see you at all times, no matter what. Riding in some painted green lane doesn't give you free roam of the street. It is not your street. It belongs to the cars and particularly the trucks that make this city run. YOU have to watch out for THEM just as much as you think they need to watch out for you. Actually, much much more. You have to follow the traffic rules and be aware of pedestrians.
Too many bikers fly around the city, obnoxiously yelling at cars, taxis, and pedestrians when they are flying through red lights and whatnot.
So yeah, ride til your hearts desire. It's good exercise, it often gets you where you need to go quicker than anything else, and it's fun. But do it at your own risk. I do. No bike lane is going to protect you in any way. This city needs it's streets open for trucks in particular....
America is changing, the world is changing. We are currently experiencing peak oil. New Urbanism is on the forefront. Eventually there will be a commuter tax into NYC, at the same time prices for gasoline will rise, more residents (traffic), and my guess has it higher prices on the meters (along with less spots). Walkability, public transportation, and biking will be vital in the future of NYC.
Here is a good article on the anti-bike mentality in the USA.
Bicyclists and transit riders are losers - right? Or are they elitist, sneering yuppies? Brian Ladd says that people's attitudes and transportation choices are shaped by deep-seated feelings about respectability, and it planners should pay attention.
Non-motorists often wonder why drivers seem so oblivious to their needs and even their safety. Todd Litman's recent Planetizen post on "The Selfish Automobile" argues persuasively that motorists' sense of entitlement has grown out of plans and hidden subsidies that stack the deck in their favor, while appearing to do the opposite. Automobile dependence, as he describes it, has structural causes and psychological effects. Attitudes, though, can carry their own power. Auto-centered planning and auto-centered lives have made it hard for American motorists even to imagine alternative transportation. The idea of getting around without a car has been just too frighteningly gauche to contemplate. But that may be changing.
Most Americans know one thing about the bicyclists they see on the roads: they are losers, and you thank God you're not one of them. Who, after all, rides bikes (at least for transportation, not recreation) in the United States? Mostly kids who aren't old enough to drive—and not even so many of them anymore. Adult cyclists are seen as people too poor to own a car, or too dysfunctional to have a license: grizzled misfits and dark-skinned immigrants you see wobbling along the side of your suburban highway as you zoom past their elbows. Hollywood, as Tom Vanderbilt has shown in a recent Slate article, powerfully reinforces this contempt for the carless.
The reality of biking and bikers is, of course, more complicated. But even the fantasy is more complicated. In American cities with newly thriving bike cultures, cyclists have acquired an entirely different image: as arrogant yuppies. Just look at the letters column or the comments thread any time a daily newspaper publishes a story about bike lanes or shared streets. One motorist after another rages against the privileged spandex crowd that interferes with ordinary working stiffs trying to drive to work: They should be banned from the roads! The police need to crack down on them! Why do we have to get licenses and pay taxes, while they don't? Life is so unfair for us motorists! The venom is often shocking, but the sentiments are heartfelt--even if a cyclist, just home from her daily brush with death, can only shake her head in disbelief.
But wait: weren't motorists the superior ones? Who's sneering at whom here? Could it be that motorists are sitting a little uneasily in their driver's seats? It’s harder to dismiss cyclists as beneath contempt when you suspect that they might just be contemptuous of you. What's a poor motorist to think? They've always known that bicyclists are scum, but now they aren't quite sure why.
The same confusion applies to transit users. Here the dichotomy is older and clearer: buses versus trains. On the one hand, you have the image of the typical bus rider (outside of Manhattan and perhaps a few other exclusive locales): the definitive loser. According to a saying that circulates in England, and is often falsely attributed to Margaret Thatcher, a man who has reached the age of thirty and still rides the bus can count himself a failure in life. American bus riders, probably even more than their British counterparts, are painfully aware of what passing motorists think of them. After all, they learned it in high school, where the world divides between kids with cars and those condemned to ride to school in the yellow "loser cruiser."
When a Los Angeles bus rider asked presidential candidate George W. Bush about transit improvements in 2000, Bush responded, "My hope is that you will be able to find good enough work so you'll be able to afford a car." Bush was undoubtedly sincere. Like many Americans—probably most—he saw a bus (like a bicycle) as a nothing more than a pathetic substitute for a car.
On the other hand, the commuter train has survived the entire auto age in several of our older cities, and its clientele has held onto its moderately exclusive image. In the long-vanished age of the "family car"—that is, when there was only one per family—the suburban housewife dropped off her suit-clad husband at the rail station, so she could have the station wagon (that's where the name comes from) for the day. Most suburban commuter lines still do, in fact, serve a fairly upscale clientele: just look at the parking lots. Meanwhile, many U.S. cities without these legacy systems are building new light-rail lines, which are clearly angling for prosperous riders who either own cars or could afford them. Even where these lines are not claiming street space from cars, they are competing for scarce transportation dollars that could be used to build roads. Understandably, some motorists are suspicious of—or simply bewildered by--what appear to be efforts to make mass transit fashionable.
It is easy for number-crunching economists and planners to ignore the power of fashion, but we do so at our peril. People's attitudes and transportation choices are shaped by deep-seated feelings about respectability. This is not to suggest that the practical advantages of cars (whether dependent on subsidies or not) don’t matter. They have made it easy for American motorists to avoid contemplating their transportation choices. If at all possible, you drive. Anything else seems inconvenient, uncomfortable--and certainly embarrassing. So the average driver, like the apocryphal Margaret Thatcher and the real George W. Bush, finds bicyclists and bus riders either pitiful or incomprehensible--and politicians cannot resist demonizing bike-friendly policies.
But if cyclists and transit users no longer seem to envy motorists, then motorists might be facing a crisis of confidence. In the short run, their insecurity may harden attitudes, as anxious drivers cling to their steering wheels and rage against the trendsetters. But change may be coming. If teenagers' desire to drive continues to weaken, if Hollywood begins to give bikes and buses a trendy aura, we will know that the tides of fashion are changing. If cars cease to be the essential token of respectability—if you can be cool without one—then the automakers may be in deeper trouble than they think.
For a long time to come, cars will remain the most practical choice for many people. But motorists' anger and defensiveness may itself be evidence of a cultural revolution in the making.
The Complexities of a Biking Transition and the New York City Backlash
Quote:
On November 22 and November 23, 2010, The New York Times gave biking in New York City significant coverage in print.
The paper wrote about the city’s plans for a cross-borough bike share system. And then a day later how the transformation of the 200 miles of city streets in the past few years to accommodate bike lanes has resulted in a heated “backlash.”
We’ve been writing about and support New York City’s successful bike initiatives and EMBARQ, the producer of this blog, released a video on the bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure spearheaded by New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The City is instituting mass transit expansion, including bus rapid transit and policies for more healthful and livable communities to bring a balance in modal usage, improve quality of life and ultimately diminish the dominance of personal vehicles on the City’s streets.
Yet, according to the Times article, business owners and drivers in Manhattan have erupted in discontent over the eliminated parking spaces and difficulty of making deliveries caused by new bike lanes on Columbus Avenue. And in Staten Island, lanes were removed on Capodanno Boulevard to “better meet Staten Island’s unique transportation issues.”
Perhaps, as Streetsblog’s Ben Fried points out, the article overstates the tension between bike lane supporters and detractors, pitting one group against the other without giving the issues their due explanation. The New York Times reporter J. David Goodman is inconsistent in his explanation of the conflict. First he states, “the opposition to the city’s agenda on bicycles has far less organization and passion than the bicycling advocates, but it is gaining increased attention.” Taking on a different tone, later in the article he says that surging bike ridership has spurred “simmering cultural conflict between competing notions of urban transportation.” Fried calls out Goodman’s poorly researched examples of “dissent” to bike lanes like an anti-bike lane rally in the Lower East Side he chose not to cover in Streetsblog because it “drew more reporters than bike lane opponents.”
Rather than pointing to conflict, Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, more accurately described the complicated issues as New York surges ahead with infrastructure changes. Stringer says it’s a lack of education and attention to safety that causes a misuse of the lanes. “We’ve got seniors who think bike lanes are walkways. We’ve got police cars using bike lanes as a quick way around town.” He continues, “We’ve got taxi cabs pulling up so close to the bike lanes that a passenger gets out and actually doors a cyclist.”
And then there are the cyclists who hop onto sidewalks, ride against traffic and cruise at dangerous speeds. For those riders, NYC DOT has a campaign called “Don’t be a Jerk” that it released along with a set of cycling rules.
A New York City DOT posted promoting safety in bike lanes. Photo by scottmontreal.
One commenter on TheCityFix described his concerns:
For all its candy coated political correctness & college town nostalgic dreams, cycling in Manhattan’s over-congested streets is dangerous & often out of control. Not the least of which it is unregulated, unenforced & totally uninsured . . . NYC cyclists rarely use bike lanes, ride in any direction they please, yell at pedestrians to get out of the way and basically are on power trips with no regard for anyone. There is even an ever growing, non-gender specific, macho cyclist subculture that promotes bikes without brakes & gears…
And indeed some bikers who want to ride fast even oppose the lanes. We found a video by a biker who said the new First Avenue lanes are dangerous because she wasn’t able to go fast enough.
In the wake of all this, the City Council will hold a hearing on bicycling on December 9th to address the needs of cyclists and other road users as well as how NYC DOT has worked with community boards to review large-scale road changes. And police are cracking down on biking traffic violations. (Bikers must follow the same rules, markings and traffic signals as motorists.)
Paint on pavement lanes as well as protected lanes that move the car-parking lane away from the curb have improved safety for bikers and shifted the paradigm of what a sustainable and livable city is. More people are biking than before and the City is finding more of an equilibrium between cyclists, pedestrians, mass transit riders and cars on the streets. Traffic calming measures makes streets safer and more usable for walkers and riders and clears up space for expanded surface transit. Although injuries and fatalities increased for riders in 2010 compared to 2009, daily biker ridership has increased dramatically, meaning rates of injuries are dramatically on the decline.
New York is a city of such diverse street activity that compromise is required. Even though a subset of biking culture is about breaking the rules, bike lanes and city streets must accommodate all types of mobility.
Heh. If people want to drive, let them drive. I'm not that concerned about someone else's health or their ability to move themselves. We have to make this city more bike-friendly with bike lanes and such, but that doesn't mean we have to make people ride bikes! (This feels like how my vegetarian self cringes at vegetarians/vegans who rail against meat-eaters. Let them have what they want, geez.)
And on the other hand it seems like a lot of motorists are feeling defensive and angry at anyone who doesn't feel that he/she HAS to drive a car. When my dad comes to visit I ride around in his car; I'm always amazed that he isn't rude to cyclists sharing the road because that seems to be the norm. I can't tell you how many times I've come close to being killed on my bicycle and how many times it was solely the fault of someone behind a wheel. Following the rules and looking out for your own safety doesn't mean anything when other people have this superiority complex induced by a steel/aluminum cage.
Heh. If people want to drive, let them drive. I'm not that concerned about someone else's health or their ability to move themselves. We have to make this city more bike-friendly with bike lanes and such, but that doesn't mean we have to make people ride bikes! (This feels like how my vegetarian self cringes at vegetarians/vegans who rail against meat-eaters. Let them have what they want, geez.)
And on the other hand it seems like a lot of motorists are feeling defensive and angry at anyone who doesn't feel that he/she HAS to drive a car. When my dad comes to visit I ride around in his car; I'm always amazed that he isn't rude to cyclists sharing the road because that seems to be the norm. I can't tell you how many times I've come close to being killed on my bicycle and how many times it was solely the fault of someone behind a wheel. Following the rules and looking out for your own safety doesn't mean anything when other people have this superiority complex induced by a steel/aluminum cage.
nice job on being a vegetarian. im a vegan though, you need to step your game up. as far as ths bicycle debate, im obviously not anti bicycling and I am def. pro- public tansportation because it makes sense and saves emssions. If you live in the same borough you work in, then bike there. If not, it isnt as simple. thats all
nice job on being a vegetarian. im a vegan though, you need to step your game up. as far as ths bicycle debate, im obviously not anti bicycling and I am def. pro- public tansportation because it makes sense and saves emssions. If you live in the same borough you work in, then bike there. If not, it isnt as simple. thats all
I'm very pro-public transportation too. In my opinion the United States really made a huge mistake way back when we chose the automobile over rail. But that's another story....
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