Biking In New York City Is Getting Worse
The benefits of more protected bike lanes have been outpaced by other trends that make the whole experience dangerous and sad.
Hey everyone,
Instead of an update on my recent work, I wrote something on biking in New York City. But first, a request: I’m suddenly and randomly interested in the history of U.S. bankruptcy law and how it shapes corporate behavior. If you’ve ever read anything good on the subject, please let me know.
Cheers,
Aaron
I am celebrating my 10th year as a car-free urban cyclist. In 2013, I was not involved in the urbanist scene. But I lived in Washington, D.C. and knew I no longer needed my car. So I sold my 2006 Honda Accord and started biking and Metro-ing everywhere. A year later, I moved to Brooklyn.
One year after moving here, I got doored while biking home from work in the rain on Wythe Ave. An UberEats delivery worker was in a rush and threw open the door without looking. I flew over the handlebars and into the road. Somehow, both me and my bike were OK. I crawled to the sidewalk, shaking from the adrenaline. The UberEats driver stayed with me for a few minutes out of what I interpreted as genuine compassion until his phone started blowing up. The person who ordered the food was complaining about the delay. I told him to go deliver the food to the person in the luxury apartment building we were outside of, and asked him to please look before opening the door in the future. He promised he would. I stayed on the sidewalk, shaking and crying, for another 15 minutes. Then I rode home.
A few months later, I was running errands in Manhattan on my bike. I was on the Prince Street bike lane in SoHo and pulled up to a light next to a black Mercedes. While waiting for the light to turn, the driver lowered the window, and, in a calm, monotonous tone, said to me, “If you touch my mirror, I will fucking kill you.” I believed him.
For the first six or seven years of biking in NYC, these were my dominant fears. Cars. Drivers looking straight down into their laps and on their phones. Road rage. Thoughtlessness. Aggression. Anger. Box trucks. Garbage trucks. Big things with motors controlled by people who either didn’t want or couldn’t be bothered to pay attention.
I am still afraid of these things. I am no less likely to be hit or killed by a car or truck than I was when I first moved here. But now, my terror of getting taken out by, say, some racing BMWs, has been supplemented by the lower-register but ever-present hostility of mopeds and other two-wheeled motorized vehicles weaving around bike lanes.
There is a responsible way to ride these things. Few do it. I’ve had my handlebars clipped and helmet slapped. I’ve been threatened by people, but now also from behind the handlebars of a motorbike instead of the wheel of a car. The bridges have become especially hostile places, with no wiggle room in an emergency and a “if you can you should” attitude towards weaving and speeding by moped riders despite the bridge paths not wide enough for safe passing. I used to love biking over the Manhattan Bridge as a quintessential Why I Live In New York experience, the skyline and the river providing a handsome reward for a little effort to get up the incline. Now, I dread it. I don’t have the luxury of looking at the skyline lest I drift ever so slightly and get slammed into by the oncoming e-moped at 35 mph.
Even protected bike lanes are no longer the safe spaces they used to be. Instead, they’re magnets for mopeds and the jerks who ride them. The e-mopeds are the worst because you can’t hear them coming. All of a sudden, there’s a several hundred pound small motorcycle passing you within inches at twice your speed. Some of them are quite literally indistinguishable from racing motorcycles except that they’re silent. They’re not legal but that doesn’t seem to matter.
When I ride in protected bike lanes now, I feel like one of those anonymous avatars in a racing game that only exists to be either avoided or crashed into in spectacular fashion. The player respawns and the race resumes. When I played those games as a kid, I never gave much thought to the bouncing body. Now I identify with them more than the racer.
On paper, one could compare the 2014 bike map with the 2023 one and see progress. And there is some. Central and Prospect Parks no longer allow cars. There were virtually no protected bike lanes in the city 10 years ago except for off-road bike paths. Citibike is much, much more prevalent.
And yet, over the past two years, I have come to the conclusion that, for me, biking in New York is a worse experience than when I moved here. The infrastructure progress has not kept pace with other, dangerous trends. Cars are bigger, faster, and more dangerous than they used to be. The proliferation of two-wheeled motorized vehicles have made formerly pleasant bike-only spaces nerve-wracking and even dangerous. When many of us advocated for better bike infrastructure, I don’t think we envisioned fighting for these spaces just so we could be bullied off them by mopeds going faster than the legal speed limit for cars. If I had known this is what the future would look like, I wouldn’t have bothered to fight for it.
I still love biking, just as much if not more than I did a decade ago. But more and more often, I ride in places in the city I used to enjoy and hate it. The Kent Ave bike lane through Williamsburg has become a death trap. The bridges are moped raceways. The Hudson River Greenway is still a jewel when you’re not getting sideswiped by mopeds or thoughtless Citibikers aren’t stopping dead in the middle of the path for a selfie. You have to be certifiably insane to ride a bike anywhere in Queens. The “protected” bike lanes are crammed with parked cars, ambling pedestrians, tourists with suitcases, or actual bags of garbage. I find myself riding more in the rain, the bigger the downpour the better, because it scares away the mopeds.
But more and more often, I come back from a ride and find myself asking why I bother. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that, nowadays, I want to like biking around NYC much more than I actually do. I used to look forward to biking places. Now I ride to try and remember why I ride. I’m sick of friends texting me that they almost died biking home from work or the store, more and more frequently about a moped encounter than a car. Just because these encounters are less likely to result in death than a run-in with a car doesn’t make them any less scary.
The obvious solution to all this is to have multi-lane bike lanes for safer passing. Maybe fast lanes and slow lanes, too. But, in the context on how far behind we are on just having protected bike lanes to begin with, even suggesting this feels like wasted energy. By the time we get around to having a real protected bike lane network around the city, we’ll be multiple transportation innovations behind. We, as a city, are still trying to figure out putting garbage in garbage cans. Putting actual barriers between cars and bikes is edging into a multi-generational battle. There is one eight-block stretch of Hoyt Street where the lights are timed for cyclists instead of cars. It was implemented in 2019 for seemingly no reason other than to toy with cyclists about what could be done if anyone gave a shit. Politicians promise to do things then spend years waiting to do it before watering it down then not doing it at all. New York has become a city of second-hand policies implemented by third-rate politicians playing with yesterday’s ideas. Behind on everything and late to every party, New York is being governed on tape delay.
Every time I think about what it’s like to bike in NYC these days, I find myself thinking about something that happened a few years ago. I was biking up the Prospect Park hill in the dead of winter, another good time for cycling because the most obnoxious moped riders don’t bother when it’s cold. I was the only one on the path. A storm was rolling in and the winds were picking up. I was battling a heavy crosswind when all of a sudden the wind shifted and started blowing straight into me. I gasped for breath as the air seemed to reverse the flow of my lungs. I pedaled harder and faster but still kept slowing down. I downshifted to my lowest gear and spun, spun, spun to no avail. Despite being panicky and exhausted, I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining what someone looking at me from the distance would have seen: A cyclist trying to get up a hill, putting in all this work, but still going backwards.
Update: I turned them off the comments. A few people were crossing the line and I’m not going to spend time moderating comments on a free newsletter.