Since
I last wrote about the New York bike lanes controversy, there have been some interesting developments. Arguably, the most surprising was that a
Guardian headline got a round of applause in a public meeting.
To recap quickly. Michael Bloomberg's administration has put in over 250 miles of bike lanes in New York city over the last four years, entrusting this modest but significant shift to pro-bike policy to
his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who has also made waves with a couple of high-profile pedestrianisation projects, including Times Square. Bike use in the city is estimated to have doubled in this period, with bike lanes also showing significant safety benefits for all road users (not just cyclists).
But not everyone has bought in to the programme. And one bike lane in particular, the now world-famous Prospect Park West (PPW) bike lane, has become the focus for a concerted counter-revolutionary push. A posse of Prospect Park residents have signed up a hotshot corporate lawyer, on a pro bono basis, to sue the city for having abused its authority by installing this bike lane, alleging that it connived with the pro-bike lobby to misrepresent the need for and effectiveness of the measure.
Sniffing blood, namely Sadik-Khan's, the
New York Post (a tabloid) and the
New York Times have raised the temperature. And from the PPW bike lane battle, other skirmishes have broken out all over the media – including a civil war in the hallowed corridors of the New Yorker magazine, where economics writer
John Cassidy aired his view that the city had been hijacked by the bike lobby in "a classic case of regulatory capture".
After an even more classic
takedown by Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, Cassidy tried to extricate himself from the hole he'd dug by
digging some more. And
some more. Until the New Yorker's political writer
Hendrik Hertzberg came along to bury him.
This was all good fun, and shows the depth of engagement of serious people with an issue sometimes characterised (wrongly) as trivial, but it was essentially a sideshow to the serious business of transportation policy in the city. With the lawsuit against the PPW lane under way, it was clear that a serious pushback had begun – which is what prompted me to write
my last post here.
At last, though, the backlash seemed to have provoked a
reaction from the supporters of bike lanes (who actually constitute a majority of New Yorkers,
according to the most recent poll). A
community board meeting in Brooklyn largely endorsed the PPW bike lane – which is not altogether surprising since the neighbourhood's community board had requested the bike lane from the city's transportation department in the first place, and the majority of local residents approve it.
In a typically comprehensive piece of reporting, New York magazine (not to be confused with the New Yorker) returned the focus to the PPW bike lane's larger bearing on city-wide policy – asking: "Is New York too New York for bike lanes?" This was met by a surprise move from
deputy mayor Howard Wolfson, who responded with a memo (pdf) to "interested parties" robustly defending the case for bike lanes. Since then, Wolfson has also appeared on
National Public Radio, on the Brian Lehrer Show, fighting the city's corner, putting out some necessary, absent facts and rebutting the criticisms of the PPW lawsuit attorney,
Jim Walden, who had appeared on the same NPR show the previous day.
New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, mounts the Cannondale mountain bike he purchased at Gotham Bikes in 2002. Photograph: AP Photo/Ed Bailey This now feels like a critical moment. Instead of appearing to wash his hands of his transportation commissioner, Mayor Bloomberg has clearly moved to back her, getting a senior executive like Wolfson out in front of the media to own the policy and speak up for it. As Aaron Naparstek (
@naparstek) of the influential
Streetsblog told me:
"We've never had anyone as senior in city government advocating for bikes before. It suggests City Hall is fully supportive of what Janette Sadik-Khan is doing. And that's great … Given there's now a clear message from the top of the administration, I'd expect that will cool things down in the press."
So, is that the happy ending to the saga?
Hardly. For one thing, there is the lawsuit, which will be heard in Brooklyn's Kings County supreme court. On the face of it, there is no case to answer: the department of transportation followed procedure, answered a call from the community board, conducted a survey, delivered the results; the community board voted approval and the bike lane was built. But Walden is subpoenaing everyone's email records in an effort to make his charge of collusion between bike advocates and city officials stand up. With a sympathetic press and possibly a sympathetic judge, what appears a threadbare strategy might make headway. And even if the lawsuit runs into the sand, its backers will continue to carry the fight into the realm of symbolic politics.
And then, though apparently unrelated, there is the New York Police Department (NYPD) ticketing blitz against cyclists.
I already reported the beginning of this campaign, which seems to have consisted largely of squad cars observing cyclists riding recreationally around Central Park when the roads are closed to traffic and then handing them $270 fines for going through red lights which, by custom and convention (and possibly by law), only apply when the roads are open to vehicles. But the latest phase in this bizarre approach to enforcement has been truly surreal. On Tuesday morning,
NYPD officers used a radar gun to catch cyclists "speeding" in the park, and handed out 10 tickets. Questions were bound to be raised as to whether this constituted a useful deployment of police resources and justifiable expenditure of taxpayer dollars, but the NYPD's embarrassment was complete when it turned out they'd enforced the wrong speed limit, which is 25mph for cyclists, not 15mph. Officers have now made house calls to cancel the tickets and apologise.
Yet the red light ticketing looks set to continue. I attended a public meeting in on Central Park West where
Captain Wishnia, the officer responsible for the enforcement, debated the policy with an audience of about 300 concerned residents, park users and cyclists. It was evident that he was acting on instructions from above, though it was not clear whether these came from City Hall itself, or from the upper echelons of the NYPD. For a somewhat beleaguered biking community, it would be tempting to see some connection between the bike lane backlash and the cops' "get tough" policy. But the likelihood is that the two issues have merely coincided, and are not part of a generalised persecution of cyclists.
If there is a link, it is that both affairs have a "culture wars" dimension as New York adjusts to a new idea of itself and of cycling's role in the life of the city. Naparstek says of the NYPD: "They tend to have a deep 'windshield' perspective on the city. Many now live outside the city, in the suburbs, and drive in to work. Culturally, they don't seem to get why anyone would cycle in the city." Worse, since the
bitter confrontation at the 2004 Republican national convention in New York, where hundreds of Critical Mass cyclists were arrested and manhandled, the NYPD's rank and file tends to see cyclists "as a force for disorder and chaos".
The irony of the crackdown, Naparstek observes, is that "a lot of people in the bike advocacy community would support real enforcement" on city streets, as opposed to in Central Park. The problem, he says, is that the NYPD simply doesn't know how to do it. So, instead of real enforcement that would actually encourage compliance, there is this "completely bogus ticketing blitz, where the only metric of success is the number of tickets written". And the easiest way to catch a large number of cyclists with a small number of personnel is to go to the park. Naparstek believes the best way forward is for bike advocates, like
Transportation Alternatives, to sit down with the NYPD and work on enforcement and compliance together. But that will take a culture shift on both sides.
Can it be done, or is New York really "too New York" for cycling ever to be acceptably mainstream?
That remains to be seen – and I'm optimistic – but what has become painfully obvious is that putting in place the infrastructure, the bike lanes and paint on the road, is the easy part. Changing perceptions and altering the way people think about cycling and cyclists is the uphill bit.
