If I asked you to name a time when a fight boiled over between proponents and detractors of bike or bus lanes in a particular NYC neighborhood — with each side trading barbs over street safety, use of public space, and neighborhood character — you could pick a neighborhood and year out of a hat and odds are decent you’d hit on at least one such situation. New Yorkers love fighting about streets and how they’re used and who they’re allocated for, and why wouldn’t we?
Streets here aren’t like those in other cities, where some are for houses, some are for businesses and offices, and most are simple conveyances between the former and the latter. Our streets are largely all those things mixed up into one; businesses and apartments are side-by-side and most people don’t have cars, meaning their interactions with vehicles are those that bring stuff to them or that they occasionally hire to take them somewhere. Naturally, we are all hyper-aware of how we think this space should benefit most and how.
The latest flare-up is in central Brooklyn, in Community Board 9 near Crown Heights. As reported by THE CITY, residents and members of the community board in large part agreed that a spot identified by the Department of Transportation as a site for a proposed bike lane is currently dangerous, but disagreed over whether that specific approach was the right solution. The stretch, encompassing Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues between Winthrop Street and Empire Boulevard, has seen 158 traffic injuries in five years, which city officials attributed not only to the many schools in the area but the prevalence of drag racing. In a recent meeting of the board, there was support for installing speed bumps and decreasing speed limits instead, channeling a local concern over bike lanes’ potential impact on driving space and parking.
The question of biking infrastructure in the city is particularly fraught because we don’t have quite as much of a biking tradition, at least not in the way other cities do, and not in the way that public transport like subways and buses has been a staple of city life. An official Parks Department history touts how biking took off in Brooklyn in the late 19th century, with city officials promulgating rules to encourage and regulate it, followed by another renaissance around the 1930s. Still, it remained mainly a hobbyist and exercise activity, not something that people used daily to commute.
A 1997 New York Times article captures some of the changing tides, with officials who “had been reluctant to spend on bike lanes” changing their minds in part due to federal funding to promote air quality and transportation efficiency. Yet the article notes that “bicycling accounts for less than 1 percent of all trips made by vehicles in the city, according to the 1990 census,” and points to a number of remaining hurdles like the fact that “bike-only lanes across the city are constantly appropriated by delivery trucks and double-parked cars” (sound familiar?).
Part of the backlash against prioritizing biking in any way in neighborhoods around the city is the perception of cyclists as well-to-do hobbyists — what I’ve heard some people derisively call the “spandex crowd” or things like that — as opposed to New Yorkers who are riding bikes to commute or for work. There certainly are still plenty of hobbyist riders, and I still personally believe that they should have safe ways of riding around, but this isn’t really the typical NYC cyclist, especially outside of hotspots like Central and Prospect Parks and the Hudson River Greenway.
Recent estimates point to some 54,000 people commuting to work by bike, and the expanding Citi Bike network has made casual bike commuting a credible alternative to public transit even for people who don’t own their own bikes and haven’t traditionally been bike riders. Then there’s the elephant in the room of bike delivery, which has surged enormously over the past several years and become more or less ubiquitous, along with the expectation that cyclists will get you your food/groceries/whatever as quickly as possible.
The mix of a sudden omnipresence without updated rules or infrastructure and the pressure to deliver fast to preserve livelihoods has made being a deliverista the deadliest job in the city, with a city report finding a fatality rate of 36 per 100,000 between January 2021 and June 2022. A recent New York Times article noted that a page to memorialize delivery riders killed on the job has included over 40 names since it went live in late 2020. Yearly, cyclist deaths are the highest in the last quarter-century, hitting 30 last year, with injuries also increasing sharply.
Some of this is due to corollary factors like the growth of larger and more powerful e-bikes and what seems like a post-pandemic increase in bad driving, but it’s also just because more people are riding more bikes in more ways and often with less experience. We won’t be able to have a real conversation about how to make street designs work for everyone until more people can accept that bike riders aren’t some narrow demographic of outsiders or not “real” neighbors, but regular New Yorkers like them, whose lives are being endangered by an outdated approach and poor design.
In general, street safety is something that has increasingly come to the fore as people rejected the deeply-ingrained idea that cars have some kind of natural primacy on the streets. Albany legislators have given NYC the power to add hundreds of red light cameras to intersections around the city, after intense lobbying from city officials and advocates. They’ve also passed Sammy’s Law, allowing the city to lower its own speed limits to 20 miles an hour (though City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has cast some doubt on whether the city actually will).
There have been some setbacks, too, like Gov. Kathy Hochul’s indefinite pause on congestion pricing, which was intended in part to keep traffic controlled in heavily congested areas of Downtown Manhattan. But the public pressure seems to be building across the board, fed in part by acute organizing among people who have themselves been impacted by crashes and a lack of safe streets. The perception problem seems to have at long last dissipated, and things like protected biking infrastructure and limits on cars seem less like radical positions and more like common sense.
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