This document summarizes the debate around a new bike lane installed on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. Supporters see it as improving safety and encouraging cycling, but some local residents want it removed, arguing it reduces parking and traffic flow. They have formed the group "Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes" to lobby for its removal, hiring a prominent law firm to sue the city. The bike lane has become a symbol in the larger conflict between those who want to promote alternative transportation in New York and those who feel changes are being forced upon communities without proper consultation.
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Not Quite Copenhagen
Is New York too New York for bike lanes?
By Matthew Shaer Published Mar 20, 2011
The biker careers against traffic; the driver veers into the forbidden lane; the jaywalker marches, oblivious. But
only the sucker yields.
Photo-illustration by Peter Rad
On a blustery day this winter, Louise Hainline, a dean at Brooklyn College, stood on the roof deck of her
Park Slope building, ankle-deep in fresh snow, squinting intently into the sun. Below, a lone cyclist
coasted southwest along the iced edge of Prospect Park. Hainline shook her head. “And they say this bike
lane gets a lot of traffic,” she scoffed.
Hainline, who is in her early sixties, has chin-length blonde hair, rounded features, and cheeks like
burnished McIntosh apples. She and her husband, CUNY physics professor Micha Tomkiewicz, purchased
their penthouse unit on Prospect Park West in 1997, “when real estate here was a little cheaper,” she says.
There have been a lot of other changes to the landscape of Park Slope since they moved in. But in fourteen
years, Louise Hainline has never seen anything as “monstrous”—nothing as “truly offensive”—as the
Prospect Park West bike lane.
To create the path, the Department of Transportation significantly rejiggered the swooping boulevard.
Instead of three lanes of car traffic, Prospect Park West now has just two; the third has been converted
into a bright-green two-way bike lane, installed this past June, that connects Grand Army Plaza with
Bartel-Pritchard Square on the park’s southwest side. A barrier of parked cars protects bikes from passing
drivers—who now have six fewer spots to fight over—while an array of flashing lights and reflective
signage helps modulate the new traffic patterns.
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For New York cyclists, the Prospect Park West lane is the best of all possible worlds. For Hainline, it is an
eyesore and an affront, and in recent months she has been agitating to have the lane removed. Her work is
done under the auspices of Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes, an organization whose members include
some of the most powerful residents of Park Slope, including Norman Steisel, a former deputy mayor and
sanitation chief who feels the change was “jammed down our throats.” Among the group’s supporters is
Iris Weinshall, Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s first transportation commissioner and the wife of Senator Chuck
Schumer.
But it is to Hainline, a career academic—her specialty is psychology—that much of the lobbying effort has
fallen. Inside her apartment, Hainline maintains her de facto war room, a sun-soused office piled high
with accident reports and petitions bearing the signatures of hundreds of like-minded Brooklynites. In
October, she purchased an expensive spy camera; after attempts to film the lane from her own apartment
ran into technical difficulties, she moved the rig to the house of a neighbor. A shiny MacBook Pro plays
footage from the lane, and Hainline often sits in her office listening to her Pandora stations and counting
the number of cyclists passing by with a handheld clicker.
Her central contention is that the Prospect Park West lane hasn’t delivered nearly the advantages the
Department of Transportation claims and cycling supporters too readily accept. “I do know, being a
psychologist, that there’s this very strong phenomenon called confirmation bias,” she says. “When we hear
story evidence, anecdotes, or even data, what we tend to remember—and this is an unfortunate human
trait—is the stuff we already believe anyway.”
We walked next door to see the camera rig, Hainline now bundled up in a boxy barn coat. “I’m not saying
bikers are ignorant,” she said. “They’re just holy. They really think they’re doing work for the environment
if, instead of taking the car a block, they take the bike to go to the food co-op. That’s touching, and it’s in
the right direction. But it’s silly.”
We arrived at a house belonging to Lois Carswell, another member of Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and
the founder of an allied group, Seniors for Safety. Carswell, an owlish, spunky woman in her seventies,
met us at the door; her elderly schnauzer circled us warily. We walked up two flights of stairs and stopped
in a carpeted bedroom facing the street. For a long quiet moment, the four of us—me, Hainline, Carswell,
the dog—stood ogling the setup: the camera mounted on a tripod, a nest of wires piping the feed from the
street to a hard drive from which Hainline retrieves video to review. It looked a little like the sort of
apparatus once employed by the Stasi.
Together, the two have amassed what Hainline says is hundreds of hours of footage. That tape allegedly
proves that the Department of Transportation has vastly overstated the benefits of the Prospect Park West
bike lane by inflating its figures on how many people are using it. (The city says rider counts have nearly
tripled to a thousand per weekday.) Furthermore, Hainline argues, the department had been “fudging”
data that appeared to show a 16 percent decrease in accidents.
Bike-lane supporters have countered that Hainline’s camera is set
up on just one end of Prospect Park West and can’t possibly
account for all traffic. The matter will now have to be settled by
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attorneys. On March 7, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and
Seniors for Safety filed a lawsuit against the DOT and Weinshall’s
successor, Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, seeking to have the
Prospect Park West bike lane removed. The petition alleges that the
DOT and pro-bike activists conspired to “suppress criticism” of the
bike lane and asserts that the DOT relied on “misleading, selective,
and unsound data to support false conclusions.”
“People feel there is a larger policy, which looks good on paper, and
everyone can get behind in a general manner, but has been
implemented in such a rash way—with not just a lack of
information but misinformation being conveyed to communities,”
says Jim Walden, a partner in the New York offices of topflight law
(Photo: Jamie Chung)
firm Gibson Dunn, which has agreed to represent the anti-lane
forces pro bono.
No matter that the Prospect Park West lane was officially approved by its community, with the project
voted in first by the transportation committee of Community Board 6, which represents Park Slope, and
then by the entire board. Walden maintains that the DOT set out to mislead residents from the get-go.
“This case is about a government agency wrongfully putting its thumb on the scale by fudging the data
and colluding with lobbyists,” he says. Gibson Dunn is expected to bring its considerable resources to bear
on the case, which could drag on for months.
“It’s not just a bike lane. It’s a repudiation of Iris Weinshall’s tenure as DOT
commissioner. And it’s in her face every single day.” — Aaron Naparstek,
Streetsblog
“We’ve never seen anything like this in the realm of neighborhood-level bike advocacy,” says Aaron
Naparstek, creator of the pro-cycling site Streetsblog and co-founder of the advocacy group Park Slope
Neighbors. “It’s crazy. Gibson Dunn is the law firm that represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore in
2000. Now they’re working to get rid of a bike lane. Think about that.”
And so it has come to this: Bike lanes, not so long ago a symbol of a boldly progressive New York City,
have sparked a bitter row on the hushed and leafy streets of brownstone Brooklyn—just one part of a
biking backlash rippling across the five boroughs. Businesses citywide complain that by inconveniencing
drivers, bike lanes hurt sales. At City Hall, a young Queens council member has floated the idea of
requiring all adult cyclists to register with the city. Some Upper West Siders have jeered a new protected
bike lane on Columbus Avenue. In Brooklyn, a proposed Lafayette Avenue lane in Fort Greene has been
scrapped, perhaps indefinitely, joining a lane in South Williamsburg removed after protests from Hasidic
residents upset by (among other things) female cyclists’ revealing outfits. On Staten Island, residents
succeeded in reclaiming two lanes on Father Capodanno Boulevard, one of which has been converted into
parking spaces.
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“We have entered a period where communities and community boards are very skeptical of the DOT,” says
Robert Perris, the district manager of Community Board 2, which represents Fort Greene. “I hate to get
philosophical, but these things sort of feed themselves. There’s been lots of bad press about [bike lanes],
and when people read some of those articles, it triggers a response of ‘Yeah! I agree. Me too.’ ”
New York’s bikers have been called renegades, menaces, and high-speed killers; opponents of bike lanes
have been called troglodytes desperately clinging to an antiquated notion of city life. (“Oppose bike lanes,”
one Republican city lawmaker tells me, “and you get these people screaming that you’re not fully evolved.
That you’re part of the ‘old thinking.’ ”) The bike-lane wars have become front-page fodder, grist for the
international press—the Prospect Park West bike path, a Guardian blog recently opined, could “affect the
future of cycling worldwide”—and even a catalyst for an internecine spat between New Yorker writers
John Cassidy and Hendrik Hertzberg. (Cassidy: “If global warming disappeared tomorrow, the bike lobby
would still demand more bike lanes.” Hertzberg: “And I would be onboard with that, a hundred percent!”)
Bike lanes have even emerged as a wedge issue in mayoral politics. Congressman Anthony Weiner
reportedly told Bloomberg that if he becomes mayor, he is “going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings
tearing out your fucking bike lanes.” Weiner later tweeted that the line was a joke, but you could see how a
PG version might make for a good talking point in 2013.
As bike lanes have gone from simple strips of pavement festooned with green and white paint to sponges
for a sea of latent cultural and economic anxieties, their critics have come to include plenty of the usual
suspects: The New York Post, which never misses a chance to fan the flames of populist ire, has for
instance depicted the bike-lane rollout as an invasion of socialist-leaning, Eurocentric, limp-wristed Lycra
warriors. Meanwhile, conservative outer-borough lawmakers have accused “Chaka Khan” and her DOT
engineers of ignoring their constituents’ real needs. “In my community,” says James S. Oddo, a City
Council member from Staten Island, “bike lanes are a catchphrase for misplaced priorities.”
(Photo: Kathy Willens/AP Photo)
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In the prevailing spin, the bike-lane fight has two sides: the blue-collar New Yorkers who have to drive to
work and the coddled creative-class types who live close enough to commute on their Bianchis. But the
class dynamics are actually far more complicated, and the allegiances often defy expectations. The bike-
lane opponent, for instance, is just as likely to be a well-to-do Manhattanite, and his main gripe the
deliveryman who just pedaled the wrong way down a freshly laid bike lane, in a rush to unload a wood-
oven pizza (which, on another day, that Manhattanite himself might have ordered). Simple nimbyism
can’t entirely account for the feud in Park Slope, home to Paul Steely White, executive director of the
cycling and mass-transit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, as well as pro-bikers like Naparstek
and his Park Slope Neighbors co-founder Eric McClure. Meanwhile, Hainline, a Brown and Harvard grad
worried about global warming, considers herself a progressive. The battle lines blur until it becomes
almost impossible to guess which side someone’s going to come down on. “[The cyclists] think that we’re
a bunch of old, crotchety rich people that don’t understand that they deserve to have a bike lane on our
street,” says Hainline. “That’s not it at all.”
One thing that does seem to unite bike-lane opponents is an accrued resentment toward nine years of
Bloombergian smoking bans and nutrition-labeling and all-around overreach. The most important
common denominator, though, may be a strong preference for the city that was over the city that may be.
In his long New Yorker harangue, John Cassidy recounts the cars he has owned since moving to New
York: a Thunderbird, a Mercedes 190E, an Oldsmobile Delta 88, two Cadillac Sedan DeVilles, and a
Jaguar XJ6. It’s not for nothing that these can be considered nostalgic models, meant to signify that their
driver is of the old school.
To critics like Cassidy, bikes—the older, cheaper technology—are the privileged interlopers, and bikers are
a “small faddist minority” bent on changing New York into something it’s not meant to become (not to
mention making it harder for him to park). “We will never be Amsterdam, never be Copenhagen,” says
Hainline. “We are never going to be Portland.” The thing about how cities work is that just by saying those
kinds of things often enough, opponents have a way of making it so.
We have been through all of this before. In 1980, Mayor Ed Koch took a trip to Beijing, a city thick with
cyclists, and returned to New York “swept away by the thought of what could be.” Over the next year, his
administration spent $300,000 creating a pair of six-foot-wide bike lanes, which rolled south from the lip
of Central Park and into the heart of the Village. The timing was propitious. As one columnist noted at the
time, “the bicycle, formerly a Christmas-tree item or a Sunday diversion, has become a serious vehicle of
transport in some American cities.” An early survey conducted by transportation officials showed that
3,000 cyclists a day were utilizing the path on Sixth Avenue.
“Bikers really think they’re doing work for the environment if, instead of
taking the car a block, they take the bike to the food co-op. That’s touching.
But it’s silly.” — Louise Hainline, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes
It didn’t take long for the cracks to appear. Workers in midtown wandered bleary-eyed into oncoming
cyclists and walked away with fodder for furious letters to their congressmen. Governor Hugh Carey
jeered that Koch had a “fetish” for bikes. Trash began to accumulate in the bike lanes (as it does today).
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Business associations lobbied for their removal (as they do today). Four months later, the city announced
it would pave over the lanes. A group of protesters smeared themselves with fake blood—it was ketchup—
and attempted to lie down in front of the oncoming bulldozers; Koch went through with the demolition
anyway.
For cycling advocates, the defeat was a lesson, proof that they would have to fight harder, organize more
effectively. By the mid-aughts, a vibrant lobby of pro-bike groups was proposing additions or alterations
to city streets. Those groups, in turn, were supported by sites like Naparstek’s Streetsblog and by the
members of the Critical Mass movement, who were already notorious for jamming streets with bikes to
draw attention to cyclists’ rights. “It’s like Martin Luther King said in his letter from the Birmingham jail:
You have this creative tension that’s created where you have people working the direct-action angle, as
well as people doing the boardroom stuff,” says CUNY professor Benjamin Shepard, a longtime Critical
Mass supporter. “That’s where the real power came from.”
Others have argued that the group’s pugnacious tactics mostly helped further unhelpful stereotypes about
city cyclists. With few bike lanes to draw out everyday two-wheeled commuters, for a long time about the
only people you saw on bikes in New York were messengers, deliverymen, and extreme hobbyists. Biking
in New York was for the reckless; it was not, as it is in the rest of the country, something done by a cute
kid on a Huffy. (The activists these days eschew the tactics of yore. Pro-biking posters now pointedly
feature children and families.)
When Sadik-Khan was tapped as DOT commissioner, in 2007, cycling activists finally gained a long-
awaited ally. Unlike Koch, who backed off the bike-lane push when the fire got too hot, or her
predecessor, Iris Weinshall, Sadik-Khan relentlessly pursued a pro-bike agenda. She spoke regularly of the
importance of the “complete street”—a street, in other words, that belonged to more than just cars. “I’m
pro all modes of transportation, not one mode elevated above all others, which I think has been the case
in the past,” Sadik-Khan has said. “We’re really just trying to rebalance our system, bring some
acupuncture to what has been a sick body.”
Under Sadik-Khan’s supervision, the DOT has laid down an unprecedented 255 miles of bike lanes all over
the city, with more in the pipeline for this year. Judged purely on the goal of creating more bike riders,
the lanes have been a success. The DOT estimates that twice as many New Yorkers rode their bikes to
work in 2010 than in 2006, while the number of New Yorkers who ride their bike daily has increased by 13
percent in the past year.
But that still adds up to just 216,000 cyclists on the street on any given day, according to Transportation
Alternatives, and they remain vastly outnumbered by cars. To make significant room for bikes must thus
be seen as a prescriptive move: an attempt to wean us off our dependence on two-ton hulks of pollution-
spewing metal. An invitation to envisage a different, cleaner, healthier New York. Which of course also
makes it a political act, and it’s the politics that seem to have caught Sadik-Khan unawares.
Bike lanes are relatively easy to install. The Prospect Park West path, with all its safety paraphernalia, was
built in about a month; unprotected lanes can be created in a matter of days. Bike lanes are also
inexpensive. The Bloomberg administration estimates that over the past four years, the city has spent $11
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million installing bike lanes, with two thirds of that cash provided by the federal government. Over the
same period, the city spent $1.5 billion on street repair alone. And since streets with protected bike lanes
see 40 percent fewer accidents, according to City Hall, and traffic crashes set the city back over $4 billion
a year, bike lanes can actually save New York money. They also cut pollution, which is good for everyone.
Bike lanes, when framed this way, are just common sense.
“Cyclists can be anywhere, at any time. You have no peace. It is homegrown
terrorism.” — Former Bike-Store Owner Jack Brown
But from the beginning, Sadik-Khan has had a tendency to communicate her vision for a bike-friendly
New York in much grander terms, which has only made her vision easier to attack. In a profile in this
magazine in 2009, she said she often looked abroad for inspiration—“I basically go around the world
borrowing ideas from other places”—feeding charges that she was out of touch with the average New
Yorker. “Most people in New York,” says Jimmy Vacca, a Democratic council member from the Bronx,
“will never ride a bike to work. They will never ride a bike to a show. Not going to happen. Period.”
Sadik-Khan took office in May 2007, not long after the city unveiled a sweeping sustainability initiative
called PlaNYC. By June, the DOT had installed a handful of new lanes, including two in Manhattan; by
2008, the agency was reporting that cycling was up 35 percent citywide. But by then, the Post had already
fired its first shot: “Wheelie Angry Over Bike Lane; Chelsea Peddlers Take on Pedalers,” ran the headline.
In 2009, mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson made bike-lane review a component of his electoral platform.
Critical lawmakers, with further assists from the Post and indefatigable CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer,
continued to lash out at the DOT for its perceived tone-deafness throughout the next year.
Bike-lane opponents are now hoping that the Prospect Park West bike lane could be the place where
(Cassidy, again) the “unstoppable force” of Sadik-Khan meets an “immovable object.” The immovable
object in this case is Iris Weinshall. The knock on the former transportation commissioner among cycling
advocates was that her support for their cause always seemed halfhearted. Her backers would say she was
just heeding the popular will. “Clearly, if the lawsuit was to succeed, [Weinshall] could say, ‘See, I was
reasonable after all,’ ” says Andrew Vesselinovitch, who served as the New York City “bike czar” under
Weinshall before leaving the DOT in protest in 2006. To Weinshall’s critics, she is waging a personal
vendetta. “It’s not just a bike lane. It’s a repudiation of her tenure as DOT commissioner. And it’s in her
face every day,” says Naparstek.
When I approached Weinshall at a community-board meeting in January, she said only that she thought
the DOT had gone about the Prospect Park West lane the wrong way; later, I spoke with her at length over
the phone, but she ultimately declined to go on record. Finally, I received a call from Dov Hikind, a New
York State assemblyman who represents the 48th District, in Brooklyn, saying he was contacting me on
Weinshall’s behalf. “I can get to God faster than I can get to her,” he said of Sadik-Khan. “Listen, the
commissioner enjoys having the freedom she has. At night she dreams of these things, and the next day
she does them,” Hikind said. He wanted me to know that he was particularly vexed about a set of
pedestrian islands on Fort Hamilton Parkway, in Borough Park. He said he’s exploring a lawsuit against
the DOT if the pedestrian islands are not removed.
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Supporters of Weinshall have insisted that the Prospect Park West suit is not an effort by Weinshall to
take the shine off the accomplishments of her successor. They also deny that Neighbors for Better Bike
Lanes is using her political connections in its bid to get the lanes removed. But that’s done little to quell
the pro-bike forces, who have taken to pointing out that Gibson Dunn lawyer Jim Walden made the
maximum contribution to Weinshall’s husband, Chuck Schumer, in 2010. “Only the radical bike-lane folks
are using their political juice here,” Walden says. “They have had DOT in their hip pocket from day one,
and the louder they crow about one of my many political contributions, the more you know they are
desperate to drown out the voices now calling for an investigation into their misconduct with DOT.”
As the bike-lane fight (and the stakes) escalates, Mayor Bloomberg continues to support Sadik-Khan, at
least publicly. “Janette is doing exactly what the mayor expects of all his commissioners: pioneering
innovative new ways of serving the public, no matter what the politics,” says Frank Barry, the director of
public affairs at City Hall. “There will always be some who resist change, but in the case of bike lanes, the
community boards have strongly supported them—and the safety numbers show they’re saving lives.” In
2008, the city says, 26 people died in bike-related accidents in New York. Last year, the number was
eighteen. The number of pedestrian injuries citywide is shrinking. In several categories, New York ranks as
one of the safest cities in the country. Plus the Bloomberg administration is not one to allow itself to be
bullied. “If you let the threat of a single lawsuit paralyze you, you’d never get anything done,” says Deputy
Mayor Howard Wolfson.
“Very little has changed on our streets in 50 years,” Sadik-Khan tells me. “They need to be updated to
reflect who uses them and how they’re used. We must balance the needs of drivers, bus riders,
pedestrians, and cyclists so all of them get around safely and efficiently.” Friends say that Sadik-Khan has
managed to keep her bearings largely because she remains convinced of the long-term necessity of a
citywide cycling infrastructure. “I know it’s difficult to take the kind of opposition that she’s facing right
now,” says Steve Hindy, the co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery and a Transportation Alternatives board
member. “But Janette is a really tough lady.”
“You can talk about the reduction in crashes, the reduction in car speeds—
but that is so disconnected from people’s panic over change.” — Caroline
Samponaro, Transportation Alternatives
Oddo, the Staten Island councilman, says that in recent weeks, the commissioner has made an effort to
meet with disgruntled council members. But he also believes the lack of outreach in the early going badly
hurt the bike-lane push. “I’m telling you, you could hand out apple pie for free all day long,” he says, “but
if you hand it out with an imperial attitude, no one is going to take it.”
In late January, I spent an hour biking around Manhattan with Caroline Samponaro, the 32-year-old
director of bicycle advocacy at Transportation Alternatives. I had asked her if she would show me a DOT
project that she viewed as a success, and she’d suggested the Ninth Avenue bike lane. The project was met
with fierce opposition when it was first implemented in 2007, but at some point, Samponaro remembers,
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tempers died down and the conversation became less of a “yes-or-no thing and more about modifications
to the lane, tailoring the path so it was better for everyone.” She says she expects something similar to
happen citywide. “You can talk about the reduction in crashes, the reduction in car speeds—but that is so
disconnected from people’s panic over change,” she says. “This is the teething period.”
The Ninth Avenue lane is protected and wide. It has one set of lights for cars and another for bikes, which
radically decreases the chance that a car can cut left across the bike lane and into a cyclist. But even these
amenities offer no perfect dam. At the next light, Samponaro and I watched as a cab barreled over the
median and fishtailed back into the flow of traffic. “Well, that just happened,” Samponaro deadpanned,
using a black Kombi mitt to brush a curl of hair out of her eye.
Still, the Ninth Avenue lane is an ideal place to experience the unfettered freedom that can come with
riding a bike in New York. As any urban rider (and I am one of them) can attest, there is something
infinitely joyful in putting foot to pedal, something intoxicating in not being bound by the whims of a bus
driver or subway conductor or thick tangles of crosstown traffic. Whipping down the street, completely
protected from the cars zooming by just a few feet away, may be the closest any New Yorker comes to
flying.
It’s a wonderful feeling, this freedom. But freedom in New York does not belong just to the cyclist. Driving
in midtown may be less than exhilarating, but we nonetheless want the freedom to drive there. Tellingly,
the death knell for the old Koch lanes was tests showing that a 29-block stretch of northbound car traffic
had been slowed by between five and ten minutes—actually a sign that the bike lane was doing its job,
since one benefit of bike lanes is a calmer street, but a damning finding in this always-in-a-hurry city.
Ditto for Prospect Park West: Traffic speeds are down, which has pleased pedestrians and cyclists and
infuriated drivers.
Drivers, of course, are used to operating within given constraints and might eventually come around to
coexisting with bike lanes. Pedestrians—who have had the most visceral reactions to bike lanes—are
another matter entirely. In New York, aggressive walking is a point of pride. We walk with lights and
against lights, but mostly we walk fast; the sidewalks, which lack the amenity of passing lanes, play host to
their own version of tailgaters and reckless mergers. When, in February, The Wall Street Journal ran an
article on the phenomenon of “sidewalk rage,” it was akin to releasing scientific proof that our buildings
are tall.
The New York pedestrian gets good at judging his or her foot speed against the velocity of onrushing
vehicles. But the addition of bike lanes, and the bikers they carry, has made jaywalking a more fraught
proposition. “You know about the cars. You know about that potential danger when you’re crossing the
street. You know you might end up a bag of blood and guts and bones. But that is a finite realm of
danger,” says Jack Brown, who used to own a bike shop in the East Village. “When it comes to cyclists,
that danger is infinite. Cyclists can be anywhere, at any time: on the sidewalk, riding the wrong way down
the street. And you have no peace … The anarchy that has been allowed to prevail is astonishing.
According to butterfly theory, according to chaos theory, I am sure that the level of emotional and
psychological damage wrought by the bicycle far exceeds the damage done by cars.” And then Brown goes
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there: “It is homegrown terrorism. The cumulative effect is equivalent to what happened on 9/11.”
“This is being jammed down our throats.” — Former Deputy Mayor Norman
Steisel
Four years ago, bike lanes seemed like an elegant solution to New York’s ticking population time bomb.
By 2030, the population of the city is expected to reach 9.1 million. There is absolutely no way all of those
bodies are going to fit into the overcrowded, drastically underfunded subways and buses; if more opt to
drive, the gridlock could be nightmarish. Why not give people the option to climb on their bikes? Why not
offer them protected lanes and slower streets and flashing lights and reflective signs?
And yet, as we are all becoming increasingly aware, in crowded New York, space, and convenience, is
finite. Any alteration is an exercise in redistribution—to give to Column A, you have to take away from
Column B. Because the streets and sidewalks represent 80 percent of the public space in this dense city,
they are far from mere utilitarian corridors. They are our shared front yard, turf to be guarded against any
use that comes at our expense. In certain cases, such as in Park Slope, the street is not just a street but “a
grand boulevard,” and its aesthetics are so perfect that any change can be seen as intolerable.
The hyperbolic excesses of partisans like Brown—and, to a lesser extent, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes
—are absurd, of course. But they do serve to highlight the inherent problem with bike lanes: Every time
we add a bike lane, an adjustment has to take place, the “butterfly theory” of Brown’s tirade. The DOT can
put in bike lanes by the thousands, but the more important transformation will be internal: We are going
to have to learn to accept a decrease, however minuscule, in our individual freedoms. For bike lanes to
really work, New Yorkers are going to have to learn to share.
Sharing, however, will first require a commitment by all New Yorkers—and especially bikers—to abide by
the rules of the road. “If you’re going to put more cyclists on the street, you have to make sure there’s
more enforcement,” says Nancy Gruskin, a music teacher and activist based in New Jersey. And until
recently, that hadn’t happened. “It feels very haphazard: You throw something out there and expect that
the structure is going to build itself, and what happens is that you have civil war.”
In 2009, Gruskin’s husband, Stuart, was struck and killed by a bicycle deliveryman riding the wrong way
down 43rd Street. Gruskin later settled with Call Cuisine Caterers, the company that employed the
deliveryman; a year later, she started a foundation dedicated to “developing safety awareness for
pedestrians in urban areas.”Her newest initiative, called Pedal Pledge, asks business owners to insist that
their deliverymen follow a basic set of traffic laws. So far, more than 40 have signed up, Gruskin says.
The city, for its part, has of late taken steps toward keeping order on the streets. In February, Bloomberg
signed into law a bill that mandates the collection of data on bicycle-on-pedestrian collisions. And City
Hall spokesperson Frank Barry says the NYPD is “doing more to ticket those who don’t follow the rules of
the road.” Barry adds that “at the same time, we’re expanding our public-education efforts so cyclists’
expectations change about what’s appropriate. Just as it’s become socially unacceptable to light up a
cigarette in a restaurant, we’re working to make it socially unacceptable to bike against traffic or blow
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through red lights.” He pointed specifically to the “Don’t Be a Jerk” ad campaign, which will target unruly
cyclists; where the PSAs don’t work, the city is betting that the $200 fines cops are now issuing en masse
will.
Some advocates see true acceptance of bike lanes as arriving with “bike share”—a system, like ones
already in use in Europe, where riders can rent bicycles from automated stations citywide. Transportation
Alternatives is pushing for such a program in NYC; the DOT has solicited proposals from independent
contractors. “Once [bike share] is in play, and the bikes are everywhere, I think that’s when people really
get involved,” Samponaro says. Mark Gorton, an investment-firm executive who founded the controversial
and now shuttered file-sharing service LimeWire and has been a big donor to transportation-reform
groups, agrees that bike share would help—but says that a more comprehensive network of lanes is even
more crucial. “I hear a lot about how all these bike lanes are empty,” Gorton says. “And on some level, it’s
true: The lanes are empty because people like us ride on them, but for other people, it’s too disconnected
of an experience. It’s dangerous and hard to get from one lane to the next.”
“If you let the threat of a single lawsuit paralyze you, you’d never get
anything done.” — Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson
Even opponents such as Norman Steisel concede that the further bike-ification of New York is probably
inevitable. But smoothing that process will require some fundamental shifts on all sides. “Mayoral
agencies could do a better job with speaking with community boards, earlier and at more depth,” says
Community Board 2’s Robert Perris. “Community boards could be more open-minded and less prone to
nimby responses. And bike riders need to understand that as the New York transportation paradigm gets
changed, they need to find a graciousness about this, if only for their own self-interest.”
For now, the Park Slope lawsuit promises to keep all parties in a fighting stance. In early March, a few
hundred residents of that neighborhood crowded into the auditorium of John Jay High School, a hulking
structure on Seventh Avenue. The meeting had originally been convened by Community Board 6 to
discuss minor alterations to the fabric of the Prospect Park West lane, but news of the lawsuit had broken
earlier that week, and it quickly became clear that everyone in the auditorium, including the members of
the community board, intended to use the occasion to air their personal views on the very existence of the
path. One reporter accurately described the revised agenda as a “lane-themed open-mike night.”
In January, at another of these community meetings, I had watched a throng of women, red-faced and
nearly apoplectic, bend forward at the waist and shake their fingers at a hapless DOT engineer, like a
chorus of distaff Joe Wilsons. “You lie!” one of the women hooted. On this night the mood in the
sweltering auditorium quickly grew similarly restive. In the hallway, a small army of sweaty reporters
wrestled for a chance to get face time with the most obstreperous of the partisans; a pair of cops waited
nearby. At one point, Lois Carswell, of Seniors for Safety, was cornered by an enraged mother, who
shouted at Carswell until she turned an angry shade of lavender. Jim Walden, in clear view of the
cameras, clamped his hands solicitously on Carswell’s shoulders and asked, “Lois! Lois, are you all right?”
(She was.)
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The first speaker of the night was a child. She appeared to be wearing pajamas. Her name was June, and
she was 7 years old. June thanked the Department of Transportation for the bike lanes and then went
home to go to bed. Another child was produced and ushered to the front of the stage; he was equally
adorable. Finally the baton was passed to Louise Hainline, who mumbled something about having a hard
act to follow.
“There has been a tremendous and unfortunate amount of vitriol and name calling,” she told the crowd.
“Some of you demonized us. Some of you have called us nasty names. We are not your enemy.” A couple
of jeers bounced off the high ceilings of the auditorium. Hainline grew flushed. “We can’t keep this up,”
she said. “We’re going to get tired. You’re going to get tired. We need to take a deep breath.”
Before that night, the members of Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes had been insisting on the complete
removal of the Prospect Park West lane. But now, as the audience looked on in befuddlement, Hainline
offered a compromise. Her group, she said, would be willing to accept a single unprotected bike lane,
along with a two-way bike lane in the park. “We will move the cars back to the curb,” Hainline said. She
said something else, too, but by then the auditorium had erupted in boos and cries of “Sit down!” and her
voice was drowned out completely.
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