Upon reading the introduction of this Sunday's City Room article “Idealism and New York Reality Collide in the Bike Lane” by Robert Sawyer, my first instinct was to cheer for joy. Heavily populated bike lanes? Great! Moms and dads feel safe enough to ride on two wheels in the streets...with their youngsters firmly affixed to the bike? Fantastic! Bring on the blissful yoga converts. Yes, you too, Lance-wannabes; with these numbers, we will at last be able to shovel dirt upon the seemingly-popular asinine comeback “no one uses bike lanes, so they shouldn't be there.”
It was only when I moved past the sardonic introduction that I found reason to sigh, accompanied by a frustrated pound of my fist upon the nearest hard surface, narrowly missing both my half-full coffee cup and cat.
The point that I'm sure Sawyer means to make is that at the core, New Yorkers can be self-absorbed and act narcissistically no matter what form of transportation they take, and that we must look into our hearts, examine our own behavior, put our neighbors and peers on just as high a pedestal as ourselves, and watch out for one another whether on a bike, car, or in Airwalks.
Instead, he chose to rip on bike lanes.
My ire was barely cushioned by my amusement at how his descriptions just as easily could fit motorists. Maybe change the paragraph about “delivery people” to include “cabbies.”
I'm sure if Sawyer were to interview a cyclist who actually rode in the bike lanes (as opposed to not having ridden for ten years but still making a point of owning a custom-built Atala), that cyclist would quickly inform him that the most dangerous forces they encounter on the streets are careless motorists and clueless pedestrians.
Though he attributed some responsibility to bike lane dangers to “drivers of every kind of vehicle, from careening cabs and zigzagging behemoth S.U.V.’s stopping abruptly to drop off a fare or snag a parking place, to the big rigs that block entire lanes and the 10- to 24-foot moving trucks rented to drivers with freshly minted and not always authentic licenses” (at which point he ought to have edited to classify that observation as adding “injury to insult” instead), he nonetheless yearns for the New York of “dark corners and hard surfaces.”
Sawyer's opinion, however, reeks of fetid evidence that a discouraging number of individuals not only have no clue what they want, but vehemently complain about everything they receive. If he wants a city like that, he can start by moving out of SoHo. There are still parts of every borough that abound with glass-strewn pavement and Cimmerian alleyways. I've seen more frogurt shops and second-rate pizza joints below Houston than I've seen people paying with food stamps. That New York still exists. He'll save a bundle on rent.
I'll take a wild guess and say that he stepped out in the street one day last week, most likely into a bike lane. Last week was a nice one, and a good amount of cyclists were out. Whether or not he was jaywalking is hard to deduce, and if he was than a ped in a bike lane is against the law, but for the benefit of the doubt I'll imagine he was at the crosswalk and he had the light. And then he almost got hit by a bike. Not enough to make contact, but almost. Enough to scare him so much that, after kicking a few squirrels and burning down an orphanage, he decided that no one deserved to be happy and New Yorkers were a massive stereotype and the root of all evil and would never, ever change.
He's probably had more narrow misses with cabs running lights than there are cupcakeries in the West Village, but you don't read him clamoring for congestion pricing. I'll trade him my “I almost died before breakfast” stories any day of the week. And for the record, it's no "delusion"; we do, in fact, have every right to ride through our streets.
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