Bike Lanes & Backlash, NYC Style
There is an epic battle brewing in New York City over a humble bike lane along Prospect Park in Brooklyn. For a city that’s added a couple of hundred miles of bike lane in a few years, it’s curious that this new, protected bike lane (which displaced car parking off the curb, at right) would precipitate such a major brou-ha-ha. After all, Prospect Park is a post-gentrification neighborhood that is native terrain for cyclists and their ilk – locavore foodies, big-name fiction writers, ‘beard hats’ wearers (google it) and no small number of reporters for NYC-based global news outlets.
Opposition to the new bike lane is a proxy of sorts for a burgeoning frustration with Mayor Bloomberg’s sometimes imperious style. But it also touches on opposition to some of the substantive changes in the city fabric that Bloomberg and his transportation chief have implemented, such as closing a few blocks of Broadway in Times Square without a public process, for example. While these changes have garnered much acclaim, still the Mayor and his projects rankles some.
Guardian blogger and bike author Matt Seaton provides a great wrap-up of the controversy in his Bike Blog.On one hand, there is a petit bourgeoisie who want to preserve their prerogative to park the car, and have taken up legal arms against the city and its high–profile Transportation Director, Janette Sadik-Khan, to remove this lane. On the other hand, the crux of their grievance is process. Were their voices heard? The irony is that this particular project was thumbs-upped by the Community Board.
As Seaton observes, the legal fight could have lasting ramifications for city policy-making, not to mention progressive transportation principles and their chief defender in NY, Sadik-Khan.
If this sparks your interest, have a look at the tit-for-tat exchange among a few writers formerly dedicated to addressing more heady stuff: global bailouts, human rights, and the like. It started with the New Yorker magazine’s economic columnist John Cassidy’s early-November tweaking of the cycling community (with scant support from the economics literature, it must be noted). He gave a “hats off” to the bike lane opponents and their lawsuit to remove the lane. But the shrill note for cyclists was Cassidy’s glee over driving fuel-inefficient cars for years, not paying his fair share of the cost (to everyone) for that privilege, and then suggesting that it’s an American’s prerogative to park his ride conveniently on public streets. The icing on the cake was his statement that in arguing for bike lanes, cyclists operating under people-power to move about the notoriously dangerous NYC streets “want it easy.”
It was a provocative rant calculated to engender a response and it did. Aaron Naparstek, founding editor of Streetsblog, a go-to source for alternative transport news, chastised Cassidy for fanning the fire of “a whole new level of anti-bike mania” and helpfully pieces apart Cassidy’s key points – all the more convenience for those who want to take issue – including this gem:
“Every New Yorker should be able to drive his Jaguar into Greenwich Village for dinner, as is my pastime, and find convenient, free parking on a public street near the restaurant.”
Tackling the rhetorical aspect of Cassidy’s post was Adam Sternbergh of the New York Times. In a witty takedown, he highlights rhetorical tactics intended to disarm challengers (“I don’t have anything against bikes”) while Cassidy underscores his bike bona fides (“As a student, I lived in the middle of Oxford, where cycling is the predominant mode of transport, and I cycled everywhere”). Sternbergh raises the stakes by likening the tone and tenor of Cassidy’s screed to a tea party manifesto, calling it a “template for an anti-bike argument” for a car crowd itching for vengeance. “See? It’s easy,” Sternbergh quips.
Substantively the Cassidy argument also lit up the blog lines. Reuters economic writer Felix Salmon takes up Naparstek’s challenge to put Cassidy straight, prompting a Cassidy follow-up post, which brought New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg into the discussion. He piled on two days later with his own post that prominently featured Cassidy’s beloved gas-guzzling Jaguar XJ-6 (as if to put a fine point on the problem, as well as Cassidy’s retrograde, Anglophilic taste in cars).
This back-and-forth among the scribes may be entertaining, but bike advocates nationwide have a lot at stake in how this battle plays out in the court of public opinion. I’ll update the conversation linkage as new posts come in. Here’s a shortlist of the sources:
- Battle of the Bike Lanes by John Cassidy
- The New York City Bike Lane Backlash is Completely Irrational by Aaron Neparstek
- John Cassidy Vs. Bipeds by Felix Salmon
- ‘I Was A Teenage Cyclist,’ or How Anti-Bike-Lane Arguments Echo the Tea Party by Adam Sternbergh
- Bike Lanes II: The Condemned Motorist Speaks by John Cassidy
- A Card-Carrying Bipedalist Speaks Out by Hendrik Hertzberg
- Bike Lanes III: A Closing Word by John Cassidy is not likely to be the last word!