Brooklyn Spoke

Following up on Monday’s snoozefest of a ride across the Manhattan Bridge with Alex Nazaryan of the Daily News, here are two videos of the second part of our bicycle journey.  After getting off the bridge, we took the Bowery detour up to Rivington Street.  By the time we crossed Canal Street it was already after 9:30, so both bicycle and automobile traffic was a tad lighter than it would have been at 8:45 or so.  The weather also played a factor.

I couldn’t take one continuous video as I did while crossing the bridge because doing so on the Bowery would have been fairly dangerous.

Here’s part one:

And here’s part two:

Alex admitted that the ride up the Bowery was pretty harrowing, and I can only imagine how he must have felt taking his inaugural ride into Manhattan up such a challenging detour.  But the point wasn’t really to scare him stiff.  As I pointed out to Alex, there are plenty of orange signs along the Bowery indicating that it’s a bicycle route during morning hours and that much of it is a no standing zone due to the detour.  I asked Alex if he’d characterize the drivers parking right underneath such signs and directly on top of bike sharrows as “illiterate, blind or merely – this is our guess – oblivious to all man-made law.”  He didn’t respond.

Perhaps the simplest and most charitable explanation is not that one class of street users is more likely to break laws than another, but that all New Yorkers, regardless of how they get around, don’t always respond immediately to new routines and tend to do what’s in their own self-interest.

Here’s how the Daily News characterized yesterday morning’s ride across the Manhattan Bridge in an editorial today titled, “The Battle of the Manhattan Bridge shows that bikes need to yield to pedestrians, always.”

Well, intrepid war correspondents that we are, we survived a return yesterday to the Manhattan Bridge battleground between bicyclists and pedestrians.

These are the conditions as they existed on the bridge yesterday.  Alex Nazaryan, the intrepid war correspondent who joined us yesterday, is the rider with the white helmet and black and red backpack.

Alex admits that the forecast may have dampened the number of pedestrians and “pedal partisans,” but he accuses the DOT of “deploying hard-hatted peacekeepers to separate the warring factions.”

Forewarned that we were mounting a reconnaissance mission, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan dispatched forces.

This Markowitzian categorization of yesterday’s ride is demonstrably false.

Regular Manhattan Bridge commuters know that contractors from Skanska/Koch can often be found standing by the bike ramp on the Brooklyn side.  They are also found on the Manhattan side during many evening rush hours.  Sometimes they direct cyclists to the detour and sometimes they’re just standing around having a smoke.  This is something I explained to Alex when I met him yesterday morning after we saw two men in reflective vests and hard hats standing by the barriers on the north side.  Teresa Toro, the community liaison for the bridge project, mentioned that perhaps DOT should send more people than just the two we saw there yesterday morning since human interaction is more effective than signs and plastic barriers in getting people to comply with rules.

Our mission that morning also involved a short walk about one quarter of the way up the temporary pedestrian walkway on the northern side of the bridge.  We saw few pedestrians and only one person on a bicycle during our excursion, although there were workers at one of the construction sheds on the path.  Ben asked Alex if he wanted to speak to some of them to see what their experience was like or if they noticed some of the conflicts the Daily News described in its editorial.  If Alex had wanted to find out what their perspective was on the “pedestrian perdition” on the bridge this would have been his opportunity.  He declined, saying, “I think I’ve seen enough.”

Did Alex Nazaryan lie on the pages of the Daily News today or did someone else twist his words into a conspiratorial accusation against the DOT?  I emailed Alex to offer him a chance to explain but have so far not received a response.  I’ll update this post when I do.

Up next, I’ll post a video related to Nazaryan’s admonition to bikers that “they must yield to walkers and jaywalkers, joggers and jayjoggers, as surely as do the drivers of multi-ton Mack trucks.”

I’ll have an update on today’s ride across the Manhattan Bridge with Alex Nazaryan of the New York Daily News editorial board a little later, but for now I wanted to post two videos I shot while on my way to meet up with everyone this morning at nine.

Here’s the quick trip down Jay Street.  The threat of rain and the time of day meant there were few cyclists, peds, and even drivers out, so it was relatively quiet, but you’ll still see a car parked in the bike lane, a bus stopped in the bike lane due to an idling garbage truck, and a livery cab driver making a dangerous U-Turn.

And here’s the intersection of Jay Street and Sands.  This is also far from as bad as it gets here – I only had time to shoot one light cycle — but if the NYPD stationed a team of officers here, they could easily ticket one or two drivers every thirty seconds.  (I shot this while standing with Alex, Ben, and a few other people who joined us this morning.)

Our ride across the bridge?  Totally pleasant.  Video to come.

Riding around Grand Central is perhaps my favorite part of Summer Streets.  When else can you get this close to Hercules, Mercury, and Minerva?  (Seeing them from a taxi doesn’t count.)  Plus, the ride through the Helmsley Building is pretty fantastic, especially if you use the occasion to ring your bell.  If you go next week, I suggest trying it.  I promise you a chorus of bells will ring out and echo through the cavernous cut-through in response.

My sister, who jogged Park Avenue, asked me during a stop at 24th Street, “Why doesn’t this happen every weekend all summer or even all year?”  I think anyone who experiences Summer Streets probably wonders the same thing.

To the Editors:

As you know, you have a puzzling “open letter” to Janette Sadik-Khan on your editorial page today, in which you take on the subject of the pedestrian/cyclist swap on the Manhattan Bridge.  It’s so incoherent, the only reason for publishing it I can think of is that you are behind on your anti-JSK quota for the summer and wanted to bury something on a day most of your readers are headed to the beach.

Where to begin?  The beginning.

We invite you to take a walk across the Manhattan Bridge today so you might understand why so many New Yorkers – even reasonable New Yorkers – are so dead-set against your bike lanes.

As you know, two lanes of the bridge are dedicated to people rather than to vehicles: one on the north side, one on the south side.

In July, you rerouted all bike traffic to the south, reserving the north for pedestrians. This was done to accommodate repairs. And it was done with clarity. Bright orange signs tell bikers to go one way and pedestrians another.  But you will see that bikers are illiterate, blind or merely – this is our guess – oblivious to all man-made law. They zoom along the pedestrian side of the bridge as if it were the last leg of the Tour de France. And pity the pedestrian who slows them down.

They ring their bells.

They shake their heads in disgust.

They flip the bird at the working stiff from Brooklyn who’s trying to burn off a few calories on the way home from the daily grind.

We’re so terrified of these Cannondale-mounted maniacs that we fear getting out of our cars.

With all the talk about development at the Brooklyn Navy Yard it’s very easy to forget…they once built ships there.

Tonight while riding east on Spring Street, I was nearly hit by a driver trying to make a right turn onto Broadway from the left lane.  Typically a bell has no hope of penetrating steel and glass sound chamber of a car, but I guess I was lucky.  The driver had his window open and either heard or saw me at the last second, stopping just inches from my left leg.  I froze for a moment, and then gave him one of those angry “I’m biking here!” stare-downs that New Yorkers tend to do when on the receiving end of such potentially deadly stupidity.

If the moment had been captured in a photograph it would have shown his car straddling two lanes, attempting to make his turn.  There would be no question that it was the driver, and not the cyclist in the far right side of Spring Street riding with the light, who was in the wrong.  But the moment passed, and I was in no real mood to debate the finer points of making a right turn to man trying to drive through Manhattan on a weeknight at 6 PM.  I continued across Broadway and the driver turned behind me.  As he did, he shouted through an open window, “Get off the street, asshole!”

Last week, I was riding from my apartment on 4th Avenue to run some errands on 5th Avenue and beyond.  As I rode up Baltic Street, I passed a double-parked bus on the right side of the road.  As I did, the driver of a minivan behind me started blaring her horn.  (It was an experience with which any cyclist is familiar: instead of being mad at the bus driver for double-parking and inconveniencing everyone, the driver was mad at the cyclist who reduced the time she’d spend waiting at the red light at the end of the street by four seconds.)

I passed the bus and pulled to the side to let the minivan pass.  The driver sped around me, and then veered to the right very suddenly, cutting me off and slamming on her brakes.  I stared into the angry red tail lights and backed away quickly – who knew if if the driver intended to back up and mow me down?  But she pulled away and back into the street.  As I continued down Baltic, however, she slowed down enough so that I wound up along side her.

“You’re blocking the road, faggot!” the passenger yelled at me from an open window.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, admittedly not letting my better angels win out in this encounter.

The driver leaned over her passenger and screamed, “Ain’t no bike lane on this street!”

At that point, I rode to the corner, pulled my bike up onto the sidewalk, and waited as the minivan turned left on 5th and disappeared down the street.  There was no point in explaining New York State VTL to the driver, since I’m of the opinion that it’s better to be alive than be right.

“Get off the street, asshole!”

“You’re blocking the road, faggot!”

“Ain’t no bike lane on this street!”

Those encounters bring to mind this amazing post from n8than, in which he describes similar experiences and theorizes as to the root of their causes.

As my experience shows, not every interaction a cyclist has with an angry motorist takes place on a street with a bike lane, but n8than’s point still applies.  If I can add anything to his brilliant post, it’s only to say that bike lanes are not only despised for working, but, perhaps more subconsciously, they are despised because they prove that cars never did, at least not in an urban environment.

While I agree with Bike Snob that it’s a bit ridiculous to call riding slowly a “movement,” it has been getting a bit of attention lately.  Maybe it’s the natural off shoot of the cycle chic movement, or maybe it’s just the heat, but slow riding is all the rage right now.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon:

One of the things I like about urban biking in the summer is that people go slower: no one wants to arrive at their destination a sweaty and disheveled mess. When bikes go slower, that’s safer for everybody, especially pedestrians. And it’s much more pleasant for the bicyclist, too. If you take your time, and you’re not always in a rush, stopping at red lights is no longer an annoyance: it’s an opportunity to cool down a little look around, learn about your city. I like the fact that my bike is faster than a car for most New York journeys. But that doesn’t mean I’m in a race.

The San Francisco Gate:

Slow riding means not arriving at work sweaty or worrying about wearing specific bike-riding shoes or any of the other wardrobe-related concerns that plague would-be commuters. Being a Slow Bike Rider may mean being left behind by the pack of spandex-wearing cyclists in the mornings, but it also means getting to know more about the rest of your community.

I take things slow on my ride in and even during July’s massive heat wave I would routinely arrive at work less sweaty than my coworkers who walked and took the subway.  I also have very few items in my wardrobe that one could label as “bike-specific,” and I’d say the same is true for most of the riders I see on my way into Manhattan every day.  While I’m partial to my very comfortable Swrve shorts, I only have one pair so I can’t wear them more than once a week.  Mostly, my commuting wardrobe is my work wardrobe, which is all the more incentive to ride slowly.