Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  The Department of Transportation (DOT) has been adding bike lanes here and there over the last decade. Up till now most of them have been helpful, but many of them are far from what they need to be. In most cases the lanes consist of some white lines between the parked cars and the moving traffic, so vehicles are constantly moving in and out of the bike lanes. In addition, being next to the traffic means that every once in a while, fairly regularly in fact, drivers swerve into the bike lane to stop, unload, or park—or, without signaling, cross it as they turn a corner. One has to be constantly on the alert. I wouldn’t want my kid riding in those lanes.

  Adding more bike lanes like those I describe is somewhat perverse because it makes a show of responding to the problem but in a way that, in my opinion, is ultimately destined to fail. Sadik-Khan and others seem to be recognizing this, as the new bike lanes they’ve been adding on Ninth Avenue, Broadway, and down on Grand Street are either completely protected by a concrete curb or are next to the sidewalk, with the parked cars allotted the lane between the bike lane and the moving traffic.

  In the words of Enrique Peñalosa, who instituted bike and pedestrian streets and rapid transit in Bogotá when he was mayor, if a bike lane isn’t safe for an eight-year-old child, it isn’t really a bike lane. I tried to get my daughter to ride her bike a little in New York when she was in high school, but it didn’t take—partly for this reason and partly maybe because it wasn’t cool.

  When I head downtown on the new Ninth Avenue bike lanes, as I do fairly often, I notice the difference. I instantly feel as if a weight has been lifted. I no longer feel that I have to be quite as paranoid. I’m not afraid that a driver might swerve into “my” lane, and to some extent the usual adrenalized state I get into when negotiating the New York City streets almost dissipates, for a few blocks anyway. I move faster too—there’s no jockeying around double-parked cars, pedestrians, delivery vans, and cabs picking up or discharging fares.

  After the Town Hall event the Department of Transportation approached me about judging a contest to design new bike parking for New York City. I agreed, and suggested that though we need more individual racks here and there, it is in places where people congregate—or will congregate in the future—that the issue most urgently needs to be addressed. Movie multiplexes, music clubs, schools, greenmarkets, and parks where New Yorkers sunbathe and cruise each other need lots of bike parking, not just a couple of racks. In Williamsburg a parking spot alongside the Bedford Avenue L-train station—the main subway station funneling hipsters to and from Manhattan—was taken over by the DOT and built out to make a bike parking area the size of a car space. Quite a number of bikes can fit in here, and it’s chockablock most of the time. Trading a parking spot here and there for bike parking real estate seems practical—there’s nowhere else to put a sizable rack, unless a nearby building has a plaza.

  In Tokyo I rode to a complex that includes movie theaters, restaurants, a museum, and high-end shops. It had a room devoted to bike parking with contraptions enabling double-decker stacking. And it was free. To some extent that room was built to prevent people like me locking up to railings and posts—places that might cause pedestrian bottlenecks. So it’s not just 100 percent altruistic—it’s practical too.

  When I agreed to co-judge the rack designs I sketched out some amusing smaller bike rack ideas of my own, each for a specific New York City neighborhood, and passed them on to the DOT. They were not meant as serious proposals, but as an incentive to loosen up. To my surprise the DOT responded, “Let’s do these! If someone pays for fabrication we’ll put them up.” There is a dollar-sign-shaped rack for Wall Street, a high-heeled-shoe-shaped rack for upper Fifth Avenue, a doggie-shaped rack for the Village, an abstract shape for MoMA, etc. Because these are for specific neighborhoods they’re not made to be mass-produced—hence the DOT asking for someone else to cover fabrication costs.

  Here is my drawing of one called The Olde Times Square:

  Here is the one in front of the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman:

  Because these racks are one of a kind they really aren’t offered as a solution to the bike-parking problem. But they did draw some attention to the issue. Some months later the real winner was chosen—an elegant and practical wheel-shaped design (see following page).

  Last year Transportation Alternatives invited me to a meeting organized by the Manhattan borough president about transportation issues in New York City, which was held at Columbia University. I was not able to stay for the whole thing, but was excited to meet Enrique Peñalosa, and to hear him speak.

  Peñalosa’s innovations had the effect of relieving congestion, boosting the economy, and making Bogotá and the surrounding suburbs a better place to live. Some credit should also go to Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, a Brazilian city that made some of these changes previously and that serves as an inspirational and ongoing example for clever and inexpensive urban planning. In the ’70s Lerner proposed a bus-based rapid-transit system for that booming city, which is now used by 85 percent of the people living there. It works by treating buses as if they are trains or subways, with dedicated roads—a little like train tracks—and tube-shaped stations where passengers prepay, so boarding is rapid, the way it is at a train or a subway station.

  The system proved to be very successful and became a model for other cities around the world. Though not as clean and permanent as rail, it is cheaper and can be implemented quickly. (Rail has the added advantage of stations that are fixed, so shops and businesses spring up around them knowing that these station hubs will be around for a while). Unfortunately, Curitiba is still, to me, a pretty boring town, but these changes have made it much more livable for the residents.

  Peñalosa implemented a similar plan in Bogotá, as well as creating the longest pedestrian (and bike) street in the world—twenty kilometers. He began by closing select streets on weekends, and then gradually, as businesses realized that this actually increased sales and improved the general mood, he added more days and closed more streets. It transformed the life of the city. Needless to say, it reduced the congestion as well. People came in contact with each other more often, went strolling, and enjoyed their city. Peñalosa had to fight an alternative plan that was already on the table—a $600 million highway project that would have both destroyed large parts of the city and not solved the problem, like what Robert Moses did to New York City.

  Here are more of Peñalosa’s thoughts, from a piece he wrote called “The Politics of Happiness”:One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people. . . .

  All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important—not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

  While at Columbia University I am introduced to some of the local New York political players: the head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, someone from the Department of Transportation, a rep from the borough president’s office. It’s another world for me, not really one I feel that comfortable in. Peñalosa takes the stage and shows some slides of Bogotá and talks about what he did there. Among the things he says:• Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority should not always be to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.

  • Transportation is not an end—it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life—the real goal is not [just] to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.

  • A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.

  Peñalosa tends to link equality, in all its f
orms, with democracy—a connection that is anathema to many in the United States. In his words, “In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A sidewalk is a symbol of equality. . . . If democracy is to prevail, public good must prevail over private interests.”

  He goes on to say, “Since we took these steps [in Bogotá], we’ve seen a reduction in crime and a change in attitude toward the city.” I can see why. When there are constantly people on the streets the streets are automatically safer. The late Jane Jacobs made a big point of this in her famous book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. In healthy neighborhoods people watch out for one another. Being in a car may feel safer, but when everyone drives it actually makes a city less safe.

  For New York, Peñalosa recommended first imagining what a city could be, what would one wish for, what could be achieved, in a hundred or more years. As with the great Gothic cathedrals one has to imagine something that one will not see in one’s lifetime, but something one’s children or grandchildren may experience. This also frees one from quickly dismissing an idea as too idealistic or as pragmatically improbable. Of course, like dealing with global warming, long-range planning needs political will, which is something that ebbs and flows, rises and falls. We can be guardedly optimistic, because if there is precious little of that will at times, it doesn’t mean that there will never be any.

  He asked that we imagine Broadway, the longest street in the United States, as a pedestrian street. He asked that we imagine reclaiming contact with the East River and dismantling the FDR Drive. And, as an interim measure, he suggests we might begin slowly, by turning one long street, like Broadway or Fifth Avenue, into a pedestrian street just on Sunday afternoons. (The fact that New York City businesses don’t rely much on car access and don’t have massive parking lots out front like shops in the suburbs makes this all within the realm of possibility.) Well, Sadik-Khan took his advice on that last bit, and the Park Avenue closings in the summer of 2008 were a step in this direction.

  In my opinion, Forty-second Street could easily be a pedestrian street—well, it almost is now, with all the stalled traffic, picture taking, and jaywalking. Imagine it as an elongated plaza, with theaters, restaurants, trees, and, in the middle of the street, seating and outdoor cafés . . . and free WiFi.

  Since the onslaught of the automobile in the middle of the last century, and the efforts of its enablers, like Robert Moses in New York, the accepted response to congestion has been to build more roads, especially roads that are high speed and with limited access. Eventually it became clear that building more roads doesn’t actually relieve congestion—ever. More cars simply appear to fill these new roads and more folks imagine that their errands and commutes might be accomplished more easily on these new expressways. Yeah, right. People end up driving more, so instead of the existing traffic levels remaining constant and becoming dispersed on the new ribbons of concrete, the traffic simply increases until those too are filled. That’s what New York and a lot of other cities are realizing now. The old paradigm is finally being abandoned.

  In Lyon, a bike loan system was initiated some years ago that has now been introduced in Paris. In this system, called Vélib’ (velo=bike, lib=free/freedom) a subscriber swipes a credit card at one of many stations to obtain a bike. The bike is then released, and the first half hour is free. The credit card swipe is mainly for security: if you steal it, you bought it.

  There are stations all over Paris—most are not more than three hundred meters from each other—so your bike can be deposited at or very near your destination. If you go for a longer ride, longer than thirty minutes, then you are charged, and the cost ramps up steeply, discouraging long excursions. So, if you just go on short trips—to meet a friend for dinner or lunch or go to the movies or to get some bread or milk—it’s virtually free, as the subscription fee is minimal.

  The Vélib’ system was partly funded by a deal made with an outdoor display company—JCDecaux. The company paid for the right to sell display space on city structures, like public rest-rooms (which the company builds), bus stops, and newsstands, and in return they funded the Vélib’ system. This deal actually generates money for the city, as well as having revolutionized the way Parisians get around.

  Not only how they get around, but what other kinds of choices they make as city dwellers and how they feel about their city. In the past one’s activities might have been considered and limited by Métro schedules and routes, taxi availability, and other factors like parking and traffic. The bikes liberate one from all those concerns, as well as create a mood of conviviality and social comfort—as in Bogotá.

  Rumor is this system will be tested on Governors Island just off the southern tip of Manhattan—to see if the credit card technology works, I guess. Then I hear it will be tried out in a limited area like the Lower East Side or the East Village, which would seem appropriate, as a lot of people go to events and work in that area and never leave it.

  In a way, these folks who are working to reinvigorate their cities all owe a debt to Jane Jacobs, who in 1968 fought Robert Moses’s plan to run a highway through downtown New York City. It was previously thought that Moses was unstoppable. He managed to make it seem that he was the voice of inevitable progress and that wiping out neighborhoods to get closer to Le Corbusier’s or General Motors’ vision of the futuristic Radiant City was the voice of reason. Jacobs, besides elucidating what made some neighborhoods work and others not, made a case for cities being places where a good and stimulating life could be had.

  This was news to many. In those days—the late 1960s and early ’70s—a lot of people in the United States seemed to believe that cities were soon to be things of the past, that modern life could only be properly lived in a suburban house with a yard, linked to the urban workplace—a clump of high-rise office buildings—by a network of highways. One place for working, another for living. L.A. and other similar cities were the wave of the future, and New York, to survive, would be forced to emulate their example. Or so it was thought.

  As it turned out, most people are now leaning more toward Jacobs’s realization that the formula of separating living and working inevitably results in little actual life taking place in either area. The suburbs became weird quiet bedroom communities where kids are bored out of their skulls. Their parents only sleep or shop there, so for them it doesn’t matter—until junior gets into drugs or massacres his classmates.

  Jacobs famously called what happened daily on her block in Greenwich Village a “sidewalk ballet.”

  “I make my own first entrance into it a little after 8 when I put out the garbage can. . . . Soon after . . . well-dressed and even elegant men and women with briefcases emerge from doorways and side streets, and simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with either laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between.”

  She realized that mixed use was key. That when a street or park is used by different kinds of people at different times of the day it stays economically and socially healthy, and is safer. You don’t need more cops and harsh laws to make a neighborhood safe. You need to not suck the life out of it. Jacobs saw that what feeds into a park or a street affects the health of that street as much as what is actually on that street. Nothing in a city is isolated, and no part remains unaffected by the life (or the non-life) of the blocks surrounding it. All these organic structures and processes that she noticed and elucidated were, of course, not dictated from above. There was no urban planner who had designed these healthy lively neighborhoods as I somewhat implied in the Manila chapter. Instead of destroying them planners could and did learn from neighborhoods.

  Ultimately, Jacobs realized that invisible forces—laws that govern mortgage payments, house loans, and, of course, zoning—could create, enliven, preserve, or eviscerate a neighb
orhood. Black urban American neighborhoods never had a chance, as hard as their citizens worked—since home lending laws were stacked against them. These arcane laws have huge and visible effects. The Garment District—where I live now—is going through a radical transformation as a result of legal changes of this latter type. About five years ago it was forbidden to build big apartment buildings and condos around there. The point was to preserve the light-manufacturing base that makes the Garment District work as a creative and vibrant manufacturing area—at least in the daytime.

  The area developed over decades to be a home to light manufacturers, fashion designers, button and zipper wholesalers, pattern cutters, fabric wholesalers, and other small trades that feed the needs of the garment and fashion industries. If a designer needed a pattern cut or wanted to use a weird type of button, well, most likely it was made and would be available within a couple of blocks, so creative needs and impulses went hand in hand with the flourishing of these small businesses. It was all pretty efficient. In an effort to protect this synergy, laws limited who could build, own, or rent in this area. Someone realized that all these businesses worked because they existed in proximity to one another. They couldn’t exist in isolation. You can’t e-mail a button. Density is critical.

  When real estate values skyrocketed (this was before the recent mortgage/credit crisis) developers began eyeing the area. Not surprisingly it was eventually rezoned so that residential buildings could be planned, built, and rented. The inevitable result is that the small garment industries are getting pushed out. Some of the garment business had already moved to New Jersey or offshore. When the density declines to a certain level it will no longer function.