Brooklyn Spoke

Okay, bike lovers, you have your Summer 2012 anthem: “Ma Bicyclette” by Toronto’s Andrew Huang.  “Nobody can touch me, riding on my Dutchie” is my favorite lyric, although “Honky honky, beep beep beepy get on a bike and out that Jeepy” is brilliant in its reverse Kanye-ness.

Full lyrics and a one-dollar download of the song are available here.

Reflecting on the recent debate over mandatory helmet laws, blogger Elly Blue has this to say:

One thing that is certain is that all-ages mandatory helmet laws do more harm than good, reducing the amount of cycling and therefore its safety in any given place. [Bicycle advocate Koula] Redmond compared helmets with sharrows—an easy, cheap, way for advocates and politicians to act, even if the effect is more symbolic than useful or safe.

I think that’s being too polite, as if mandatory helmet laws and street markings such as sharrows are merely the result of sincere but misguided advocates and pro-bicycle politicians too timid to call for protected infrastructure.  In the case of sharrows, a determined group of Brooklynites vowed to continue fighting for full protection after settling for sharrows as a compromise with avid motorists on the community board.  And when it comes to mandatory helmet laws, no advocate or politician would seriously support them from a best-we-can-get-for-now point of view.

On the contrary, almost all of the pro-helmet-law rhetoric here in New York has come two men: David Greenfield, who never met a piece of pavement he didn’t want to turn into a parking space, and John Liu, a politician with zero prior history with pro-bicycle policies.  Neither of them proposed a helmet law because it’s the “easy, cheap way” to protect cyclists.  They did it because it’s an “easy, cheap way” to keep those darn bicycles off of city streets.

Via n8han, whose web presence you should be reading:

Unanswered is whether bike share, if successful, can scale up to accomodate vastly more ridership. Can it be 15 times its starting size, in order to match the number of trips taken by personal bicycles? I don’t really think that works. I think bike share fills gaps for existing cyclists (like myself) and can serve as the sole bicycle for new cyclists who over time will want to convert to bicycle owners. For that to happen, the bicycle parking arrangements need to scale up as they have done in the cities with the highest cycling participation rates. It can certainly be done. This city is full of parking spaces: they’re just reserved for the wrong vehicles.

Let’s not forget that “existing cyclists” could include people from the outer boroughs, New Jersey, Connecticut and Westchester who already own a bicycle but can’t make a direct A-to-B bike commute due to distance, hostile infrastructure, anti-bicycle policies, or geographical limitations.  With the exception of people who walk to the subway, multimodalism hasn’t really been part of how New York City views transportation.  Bike share will change that, at least a little, by creating a different category of city cyclists somewhere in between “existing cyclists” (like myself) within easy riding distance of the Manhattan CBD and “new cyclists” in the same geographic area who will eventually convert from bike share users to bicycle owners.

But unless MetroNorth and PATH change their rush hour policy on bicycles, Joe Westchester and New Jersey Jane are never going to bring their own bikes into the CBD and need a place to put them for eight hours, making the issue of bicycle parking somewhat separate from bike sharing.  While I’m excited about the number of people who will use Citi Bike as a “gateway drug” to bike ownership, bike parking in New York City is woefully inadequate with or without them.

As n8than writes, New York City certainly has the real estate to deal with this shortage.  What it lacks is the political cojones to value eight human-powered vehicles more than one that’s powered by gas.

Varick and Carmine Street, 3:15 PM today.  The man in the purple shirt isn’t jaywalking.

Who says we don’t need congestion pricing?

Fear not, New York City bicycle shop owners.  If Capital Bikeshare is any guide, Citi Bike is bound to be good for business:

Any worries that Capital Bikeshare would ruin business for neighborhood bike shops are long gone. There were similar concerns in Paris when the Vélib rental system started. However, a 2008 report in Bike Europe, a website for bike professionals, cited a 39 percent growth in sales of city bikes possibly attributed to the huge popularity of the Vélib system.

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association endorses Bikeshare’s program for that reason.

“We often hear that once Capital Bikeshare members find the joys of bicycling in the D.C., they go on to purchase a personal bike,” says Gregory Billing, the association’s outreach and advocacy coordinator. “Local bike shops have seen both an increase in sales of bikes and also repairs of old bikes. Owners and managers report seeing an increase of old bikes being pulled out of the basements or garages, brought to the shop for a tune-up and to be outfitted with a cargo rack for commuting.”

Russell Martin, 25, enjoyed bike sharing so much that he bought three bikes of his own at local bike shops. “I ended up selling my car and buying a couple more bicycles, and I haven’t looked back.”

In addition to how bike share affects bike sales, I’m curious to see what types of bicycles Citi Bike users wind up buying.  Will there be a shift from fixies and old ten-speeds to more upright Dutch-style bicycles?  Since I’m partial to the latter as a more practical means of A-to-B transportation in an urban environment, I can’t wait to find out.

Is the Dutch father in the picture above “insane” for not having his sons wear helmets and not wearing one himself, as Hunter College Professor William Milczarski told the New York Post?  Is Amsterdam, “really serious about bicycle safety,” to use NYC Comptroller John Liu’s words, if its citizens can ride on city streets without first strapping plastic and styrofoam hats to their heads?  The answer to the first question is no.  The answer to the second question is a resounding, emphatic, are-you-kidding-me yes.

The Guardian’s Matt Seaton has this to say on Liu’s recent campaign to scare the bejeezus out of everyone about bike share and helmets:

The only sure outcome of a mandatory bike helmet law is to reverse a promising trend of growing bike use. In Western Australia, one of the few places in the world to have made helmets compulsory, bike use fell of a cliff after the law came in. I’ve also never seen an adequate answer from the pro-helmet lobby for why countries with spectacularly high bike use, like Denmark and the Netherlands, also have extremely low casualty rates – despite the fact that not wearing a helmet is the cultural norm.

As Streetsblog and Felix Salmon have noted, Liu’s actual report is “far more positive about bike-share than its author’s press statements would indicate.”  But something tells me getting people to read a detailed report wasn’t Liu’s intent.

As I’ve argued before, this kind of stuff is a minor hiccup on the way to New York becoming a real cycling city.  If the people who purported to care about bicycle safety in New York actually rode a bike in it every now and then, maybe we’d get there a lot faster.

Via Bicycle Dutch:

It’s all relative, isn’t it?

Via FIPS:

At the moment there doesn’t seem to be any stick-in-the mud naysayers coming out against the new lanes. Even NBBL reps are saying that the announcement isn’t causing a stick in their craw. NBBL’er Louis Hainline told the Brooklyn Paper, “Our issue was with the specific means by which the Prospect Park West lane was created — not other bike lanes in Park Slope.”

So bike on bitches!

Via Animal New York:

James told us that the cops got pretty aggressive with him. “If you keep staring at me you’re going to have bigger problems,” said one of the cops. “Go stand on the corner and stop looking at me.” James tells us the cop threatened to arrest him multiple times for “fleeing the scene.” Biking out of a bike lane isn’t actually a law.

Neither is looking at a cop.

Citi Bike is hosting a demonstration at the Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy today from 4 to 8 pm.  It will be on the north side of Myrtle Ave at Marcy Ave.  It’s the only demo scheduled for Brooklyn through the middle of July, so don’t miss it.

DOT will also be there with free helmets for kids and adults, while supplies last.