Category Archives: Bicycles

A Bicycle Can Get You From Here to There

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That’s Good For You, Good For Everyone Else.

Wednesday, May 26, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m going to talk about bikes today. So I’m going to speak very slowly, so my colleague Dave, “I’ll get out of my car when they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel” Addis, will perhaps understand me.

It’s funny about bicycles. When I suggested a while back accommodating them more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that?

A different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth — Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping.

All that biking was good for the natives. In Copenhagen, I remember a grandmotherly women blithely pedaling by me as I, on my rented bicycle and anemic calves, struggled to keep up with her.

I think of Seattle — another wealthy, liveable city — where the buses have bike racks and people put up with the steady drizzle to ride bikes everywhere.

Bikes have about them the aura of the childish, the silly and the inconsequential. They needn’t. For trips of a few miles or less, bikes can be the perfect vehicle. They are easy, casual and convenient. Add a rack and you can carry a bag of groceries or a shopping bag.

We have the perfect terrain for bicycling. We are as flat as Holland, with better weather than Seattle or Copenhagen. But we build everything so reflexively for the car, we rule out other ways of getting around.

In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, something like a third of all trips are by bicycles. Last time I checked, Copenhagen planners were hoping to see this rise to 50 percent.

A lot of people using bicycles transforms cities. To state the obvious, it’s a lot easier to accommodate a rack of 10 bicycles in front of a store than a parking lot for 10 cars.

New Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams got this right away when I spoke to her about it. Every person that rides a bike is one not driving a car, she said. It frees up space on streets, and represents another parking space that does not have to be built. There is no reason downtown Norfolk could not have thousands of commuters, shoppers, students coming into downtown every day by bicycle. Older cities, with their densities and finer grained network of streets, are ideal for bicycles.

In Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach should be the worst place to bike and in a lot of ways is. A city built around high-speed corridors like Virginia Beach Boulevard will always have difficulty accommodating a guy on a bike. Still, the city has done a good job of including separate bike paths on some of its newer streets, like South Independence Boulevard around Green Run. It also has a wonderful route from Fort Story all the way out General Booth Boulevard in the newer suburbs.

Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread.

But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them.

A perfect example of this is at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Botetourt Street on the edge of Freemason in Norfolk. You come across the Hague on the lovely footbridge from Ghent, originally built for streetcars, and are then faced with a raging river of highspeed traffic on Brambleton Avenue. No crosswalk. No stoplight. I have seen a dad with two little children, all on bikes, trying to dart their way across this rushing stream without getting killed. I fear someone will be eventually.

In the short term, Norfolk and other planners need to add cross walks, stop lights and other devises to accommodate bikes. In the longer run, planners need to narrow traffic lanes on major highways like Brambleton or Waterside Drive. Narrower traffic lanes slow down cars, and frees up space for bike lanes and on-street parking. Planners need to think about bikes as naturally as they now think about cars.

This isn’t just being nice. The middle-class rides bikes, and if Norfolk and Portsmouth wants more of them, or to keep the ones they have, they need to make it easier for them to pedal places.

Right now, Norfolk thinks about bikes last, if at all.

Why doesn’t the MacArthur Center Mall have any bike racks in front of it? This is such a natural and obvious thing to do, when parking is both tight and charged for, you have to wonder what was on their minds.

One hopeful sign. The redesigned Church Street in Norfolk includes bike lanes, one planner told me. That’s a great start. If we start including bikes in our thinking, there’s no reason we can’t be the Copenhagen of the East Coast. Automobile Addis might never leave his well-cushioned front-seat, but the rest of us would like to now and then.


It’s Dangerous To Cycle in The City — That’s Too Bad

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How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.

But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?

I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.

New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.

I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.

Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.

There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.

‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.

How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.

But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?

I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.

New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.

I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.

Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.

There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.

‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.