Bipedaling

I rode my bicycle 100 miles on Sunday as part of Transportation Alternatives’ New York Century ride. It was a lot of fun if you take delight in sweating your entrails out for 12 hours. These long rides tend to start out as a mob scene, then the bikers clump into smaller affinity groups and bull their way through traffic, which is tons better than having to negotiate with hurtling hunks of motorized steel on your own. TA started us off at 110th Street in Harlem, and we flew down the west side of Manhattan at the crack of dawn stirring one late-night partyer to shout drunkenly from his car, ‘It’s six fucking a.m.!’ We were charmed. The first wave was hitting the Brooklyn Bridge by 6.45, which must be some sort of record. The sights were breathtaking, many in parks and along riverwalks I never knew existed. Cyclists get to see tons of cool stuff.

Mayor Bloomberg, with whom we enjoy an ongoing love/hate relationship, recently appointed a biking militant to the post of Transportation Commissioner. He’s also pushing congestion pricing, that is, charging drivers to enter Manhattan from outlying boroughs during business hours. In addition, New York is preparing several hundred more miles of bike paths and dedicated lanes both on and off city streets, and the City Council, we were just told Sunday, is looking at a law to force all buildings to accommodate bicycles indoors, a big bike commuter demand. Thank TA for that, a smooth, sophisticated, astute and fun-loving advocacy group.

In short, the city is getting serious about bike commuting and transport. I can now shoot down the Hudson River on my two-wheeler to work in exactly one hour door-to-door, including only five minutes on either end navigating street traffic. I even get to see geese and ducks.

This is all part of preparations for adding another million inhabitants to New York over the next couple of decades, pushing the five-borough population to 9 million. At least some city planners see there’s not much to recommend this if we end up with three-hour trips to the supermarket a la Bangkok or Manila.

I’ll get to the hate part of love/hate later. But this is one area of life in New York that I find unmatchable: public transport as a way of life along with gradual encroachment on automobile use. Having spent the last year getting acquainted with American cities throughout the Deep South, I can only say, Give it a chance out there. You’ll be amazed what a difference it makes to walk out your front door and see people going about their business rather than the blank facades of buildings and disembodied heads floating by in car windows.