They speak for the cars, for the cars have no tongues.
I wish to clarify from the outset that the recent uptick in my bicycle riding is not something that I have done for my health. People who do this sort of thing for their health, I have found, are unendurable — and not in the endearing way that I am unendurable.
You can tell the people who have gotten into bicycling for their health because they own very expensive bicycles made of materials like carbon fiber and titanium. They dress in elaborate costumes of brightly colored synthetic fabrics that are too tight. This is impractical because they cannot leave their very expensive bicycles unattended at any destination for fear that they will be stolen or that someone, seeing a person dressed so ridiculously without a bicycle, might think that they have gone out of their mind. When I was a child, my father took great pleasure in shouting as these people passed, “Kids, look! It’s Lance Armstrong!” It was not a compliment.
My bicycle riding is strictly a matter of convenience. While my old apartment was located above a subway station on the Q train (among the most civilized of the subway lines), my new one is an eight-minute walk from the train. This is enough of a walk that it draws remarks from visitors and has given me a sense of what it might be like to live in Siberia. What is more, the nearest subway line is the L, which runs deep into Brooklyn’s Gentrification Frontier and whose riders have a higher rate of T*kT*k membership than those of any other line by a wide margin.
The M23 crosstown bus runs very close by and has a dedicated bus lane. This has done little to change the fact that it takes well more than 30 minutes to make its two-mile journey, is barely competitive with a brisk walking pace under even the most favorable conditions, and could send even the Buddha himself into a homicidal rage before he even made Third Avenue. A person on a bicycle can ride the entire bus route in 16 minutes without running red lights. (I tested this on a recent Sunday evening.) The bike is the only sensible choice.
I do not own a bike. New York, like an increasing number of cities, has the benefit of an enormous bike sharing system. For an annual price around what a person with an unreasonable car might now spend on a single tank of gasoline, subscribers receive a key fob that unlocks any of some 20,000 bikes across four boroughs and Jersey City across the Hudson. Subscribers to this system, who number in the low six figures, enjoy the pleasure of bicycle use without the unpleasantness of storage, fiddling with bike locks, or having to befriend somebody with an air pump.
The idea of biking in New York is a hard sell to most people. Some mention the enormous weight of the bike share bicycles, perhaps forgetting that the manufacturer accounted for this problem by adding wheels. Most are concerned about the safety of the activity and ask questions about helmets (I wear one unfailingly). The question of safety is a fair one. People walking carelessly in bike lanes add an element of risk, as do potholes and other issues of road maintenance. Most of the danger, however, comes from cars.
There is a common assumption that biking in New York is a matter of brute strength and speed. This is not so. The speed of traffic and layout of intersections is such that it is primarily a strategic activity — like playing chess if your chess opponent is a crazed suburbanite in a BMW with New Jersey plates. Still, I find almost all streets in New York to be friendlier for bicycles than, say, the section of East Eighth Street in Holland, MI that I used to bike home from the Secretary of State after I got my driver license (I am, if nothing else, consistent).
As a white man, biking on a street network designed primarily for cars is about as close as I can get to being oppressed. I do not take it well. I am, I think, a generally mild-mannered person, though it is unlikely that tourists who have been ignorant enough to stand around in the bike lane at Battery Park or the commuters crossing 21st Street against the light would share this opinion. That is not to mention the people who park their cars in or carelessly open their car doors into bike lanes, who have (deservedly) been on the receiving end of some of my less charitable remarks and wild gesturing. (It is important that you remain on my side here and remember that bike lanes are very clearly marked in bright paint, pedestrian facilities are large and well kept, and that there is almost no reason that any person should be driving in Manhattan.)
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and I agree on the matter of cars and they — far better equipped than I — have undertaken to do something about it in the form of congestion charging. The idea of congestion charging is simple: any vehicle entering the area below Central Park on the island of Manhattan has a photograph of its license plate taken and the driver is made to pay a fee which will reportedly be between $10 and $15. (The current cash toll to get onto the island in the first place is, by way of comparison, $16. The subway is $2.75.)
The money would go back to the MTA to support the running of their programs — subways and buses among them. The MTA could use the money, especially considering the pandemic decrease in ridership and the astonishing cost of building staircases.
The policy has met opposition from the various oppressed classes of New York, such as residents of New Jersey, the police union, and, most recently, judges who would rather not pay $14 and fear riding the subway with those against whom they have issued judgments (one wonders if they have yet heard the bicycle gospel).
The Federal Department of Transportation — famously attuned to issues of environmental quality and social justice — has been the latest source of delay as they have requested the MTA to complete an environmental review process. The first part of the process involved a series of hearings in key communities which would see the effects of congestion charging in lower Manhattan, such as Stamford, CT and suburban New Jersey. Next, the DOT had the MTA complete a long questionnaire, which they finished last week.
If the folks down in Washington had thought to ask me, I would have been glad to share with them for a bargain price and in record time my opinion that eliminating any number of gas-guzzling, earth-killing death machines from Manhattan would be likely to improve the quality of the environment. While they have not yet called upon me, I would be glad to speak with them at any time.
Personally, I am of the belief that the DOT has been paid off by General Motors and is stalling the process as much as they can while their scientists search for a rare aquatic creature in the Hudson that depends on carbon monoxide and brake dust to reproduce. This, they hope, might slow congestion charging and the inevitable rise of the bicycle.
They may well drag things out, but I doubt that the DOT, the suburbanites, and their ilk will stop the coming era of the bicycle. The bike sharing system continues to expand at an incredible rate. My people — the people who bike for utility wearing long pants, dress shirts, and shoulder bags — are in the ascendant. Our ranks are growing. We clump together at intersections and remark to each other about how “the cars are really on one today” and “can you believe the parking lane isn’t enough for that guy in the truck?” Under the right conditions, New York could fall properly into its Dutch roots, give in to its latent cycling instinct, and cram the streets with bicycles. It seems to me that it is only a matter of time.
For now, I quietly enjoy the chaos of it all. Righteous anger keeps life interesting. And, for the moment, the T*kT*kers and the dawdlers are better off on the subways and buses. The health nuts with their neon pants and their carbon fiber are better off circling Central Park in their loops to nowhere. Eventually, we will vanquish the cars and all share the streets together. It sounds nice on paper, but what of my sense of principled indignation? What of my ability to scream at drivers? All the fun will be out of it.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Other People’s Money by Charles V. Bagli.
Last week’s edition of the Newsletter, which concerned rent stabilization and the history of the apartment complex in which I live, led me down the path to Other People’s Money. The work of a New York Times real estate reporter, it tells the story of my complex, the largest residential real estate deal in history, and its eventual implosion along with the rest of the housing market.
Along the history of New York’s greatest moderate-income housing development and the people who call it home runs the insidious thread of the real estate speculators set on taking over at literally any cost, their boundless arrogance and greed, their Icarus-like fall from grace, and — naturally — the consequences for everyone save the people who deserved them.
Looking for something lighter than the full book? Here’s an NPR interview with the author and Robert Siegel, who grew up in the neighborhood.
“Amtrak Spent 11 Years and $450 Million to Save Acela Riders 100 Seconds” by Aaron Gordon in Vice.
When the Secretary of Transportation announced this week a program to “help countries around the world learn from our best practices and expertise in planning and modernizing transportation infrastructure,” the response on Twitter was exactly what one might expect: complete bewilderment. It was as if I had started my own program to offer advice and best practices in matters of parenting and playing cricket. It is the exact sort of staggering arrogance that led us to a shambolic, car-oriented national infrastructure in the first place.
Vice walks through one instance of this uniquely American nonsense on the rail line between Philadelphia and New York (from which I am writing at this very moment on a delayed train). Over the last 11 years, Amtrak (which would have us believe that their profitability problem is the result of dining car French toast) spent $450 million upgrading 24 miles of track to save 100 seconds for passengers on the outrageously expensive Acela. 16 miles are finished. The other eight will take several more years. France, for the record, has constructed a brand new, 210-mile high-speed line in the same time frame.
Gordon points out that the time savings are negated by the labyrinthine walk passengers must undertake to get to the billion-dollar Moynihan Train Hall in New York and, though I have often sung Moynihan’s praises in the Newsletter, I must concede that he has a fair point.
Gordon makes a reference to “flashy but anti-functional projects,” which hits the nail right on the head even well beyond Amtrak. When the New LaGuardia — the replacement for the much-maligned hellscape of an airport in northern Queens — opened about a month ago, I made the trip out on the first day to collect my visiting family. It is a beautiful airport indeed. The floors gleam as natural light pours in. The art — selected in cooperation with the Queens Museum — warranted a large spread in the Times. That no passengers were pictured in the article, however, should have been a warning sign.
The next week, I returned to the New LaGuardia for a flight of my own. “Flashy but anti-functional” describes it well. An investment of $8 billion has done little to speed along the bag check line (which the Dutch managed to automate the better part of a decade ago). The bathrooms on the opposite side of security have little more capacity than the bathrooms in my apartment. The food lines ($32 pizza, anyone?) are long enough that even Gorbachev would be ashamed.
On returning home late at 2 a.m. ($8 billion and they still can’t land planes in light rain), the line for a taxicab was 45 minutes. (LaGuardia — like all New York area airports — has no subway service.) I split a cab with two lifelong New Yorkers returning home from a trip to Florida. “It’s a very beautiful airport!” one of them remarked, “It’s a shame that it’s still so terrible.”