Felix Salmon

Aaron Naparstek has a masterful demolition of John Cassidy’s bizarre anti-bike-lane rant, but he somehow skips over the most wonderful bit of all:

I view the Bloomberg bike-lane policy as a classic case of regulatory capture by a small faddist minority intent on foisting its bipedalist views on a disinterested or actively reluctant populace.

Yes, you read that right: the New York populace, it seems, is basically comprised of cars, to the point at which bipeds are “a small faddist minority”.

Now it so happens that I’ve met Mr Cassidy a few times and he’s always looked perfectly bipedal to me. And for all that he enjoys parking his Jaguar XJ6 on Manhattan streets — he’s just written 1,250 words on the subject, after all — I’m quite sure that he always gets out and saunters happily among the other New York pedestrians as he makes his way to his dinner in the West Village.

It can hardly have escaped Cassidy’s notice, on his regular peregrinations from car to restaurant and back, that New York’s streets are positively bustling with bipedal life. There’s good reason for this: New York is a very dense city, in which 8 million or so bipeds — birds not included — cram themselves into a rather small area. His Jaguar XJ6 takes up about 100 square feet of street space; if everybody in Manhattan was so greedy, we’d turn the city into something more akin to Manhattan, Kansas.

And so New Yorkers turn to other modes of transportation. Primarily, we walk, taking up very little space while doing so. When we don’t walk, we cram lots of people into efficient vehicles like subways or buses. And sometimes we bike, since doing so makes a great deal of sense in a pretty flat city where space is at a premium.

Driving a car, on the other hand, is an enormously expensive thing to do, with most of the costs being borne by people other than the driver. Yet here’s Cassidy, the economics correspondent of the New Yorker:

From an economic perspective I also question whether the blanketing of the city with bike lanes—more than two hundred miles in the past three years—meets an objective cost-benefit criterion. Beyond a certain point, given the limited number of bicyclists in the city, the benefits of extra bike lanes must run into diminishing returns, and the costs to motorists (and pedestrians) of implementing the policies must increase. Have we reached that point? I would say so.

Well yes. If indeed the limited number of bicyclists in the city was a given, then Cassidy might have a point here. But it’s not. Bike lanes attract bikes no less effectively than roads attract cars and the number of cyclists in New York has been growing just as fast as the city can create new lanes for them. See if you can follow Cassidy’s logic here, because I can’t:

From San Francisco to London, local governments are introducing bike lanes, bike parks, bike-rental schemes, and other policies designed to encourage two-wheel motion. Generally speaking, I don’t have a problem with this movement: indeed, I support it. But the way it has been implemented, particularly in New York, irks me to no end…

Thanks to these four-wheel friends, I have discovered virtually every neighborhood of the city and its environs, and I would put my knowledge of New York’s geography and topography up against most native residents…

Let us have some bike lanes on heavily used and clearly defined routes to and from the city—and on popular biking routes within the city and the boroughs. But until and unless there is a referendum on the subject—or a much more expansive public debate, at least—it is time to call a halt to Sadik-Khan and her faceless road swipers.

The message here is that cars can and should be able to go anywhere in the city they like — that’s part of what makes them so great. Bikes, on the other hand, should be confined to a few “heavily used and clearly defined routes”, which would probably run parallel to existing subway lines. If you want to use a bicycle to explore the city, then you’re just going to have to take your chances in traffic, like Cassidy did in the 1980s.

In those days, there were few cyclists on the roads, and part of the thrill was avoiding cabs and other vehicles that would suddenly swing into your lane, apparently oblivious to your presence. When I got back to my apartment on East 12th Street, I was sometimes shaking.

Sorry, John, but the purpose of biking is not to “thrill” you so much that you end up shaking. And you surely know, even if you’re loathe to admit it, that traffic expands to fill the roads available: if you build more road space, you don’t reduce congestion, you just increase the number of cars. And similarly, if you reduce the amount of road space, you don’t increase congestion so much as you reduce the number of private cars. Which is a feature, not a bug.

Cassidy is convinced that the addition of bike lanes has increased the time he spends stuck in traffic, or looking for his beloved free on-street parking. (As Naparstek notes, his argument can basically be boiled down to “Street space should not be set aside for bike lanes. It should be set aside for free parking for my Jaguar XJ6″.) But the fact is that impatient motorists will always want to blame someone else for traffic, when, clearly, they themselves are the main culprit in that regard.

Cassidy has no problem with the vast number of parked cars which take up precious road space in New York because he regularly aspires to transcending his bipedal nature and becoming one of them himself. But if you replace those parked cars with a healthy, efficient and effective means of getting New Yorkers safely around town, then watch him roar. Jaguars — whether they have four wheels or four paws — are good at that.

Update: Adam Sternbergh piles on too, and Cassidy responds to us all.

M Schuler of Colorado leaves a blistering comment on my post about Martin Erzinger, the Morgan Stanley broker who bought his way out of a felony charge. It’s required reading for anybody who is inclined to believe Erzinger’s defense, that he fell asleep at the wheel, drifted off the road, and never had a clue that he’d hit anybody.

It’s also required reading for anybody who still lets Martin Erzinger or Morgan Stanley manage their money. Erzinger’s behavior is unconscionable, and Stanley’s continued employment of him is a massive blot on the firm’s reputation.

In any case, here’s the meat of the comment: 18 questions for Martin Erzinger. I very much doubt he’ll ever attempt to answer them.

1. Is it reasonable to believe that less than 10 minutes after completing a workout at your club you would fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon while driving your car?

2. Is it reasonable to believe that you would be suffering from sleep deprivation caused by sleep apnea to such an extent that this deprivation would cause this mid-afternoon narcolepsy?

3. Is it believable that this malady was not “diagnosed” until a week after the accident?

4. Is it believable that the “diagnosis” itself says “the patient “may have developed sleep apnea around the time of the accident”?

5. Is it believable that a qualified doctor would allow the patient to continue driving (thus risking his own liability and medical license) after such a serious accident?

6. Is it believable that you would remain asleep after hitting a cyclist, leaving the road, driving over two hundred and sixty feet through terrain rough enough to tear the bumper off your brand new car?

7. Is it believable that you were (as you testified in court) aware that the car came to rest on a steep angle and yet still be “dazed or asleep”?

8. Is it believable that upon coming to rest your body would not be hyperaware due to the over whelming amount of adrenaline coursing through your veins?

9. Is it believable that upon becoming aware that you had driven off the road over rough terrain in a brand new $100,000 plus Mercedes Benz, you would not get out of the car to inspect it for damage prior to driving out of the ditch and onto the road?

10. Is it believable that you would try to reenter the highway without looking behind you for oncoming traffic?

11. Is it believable that such a glance over your shoulder would not reveal the cars stopped across the highway at the point of your departure from the road and the body of the cyclist you hit lying in the road less than 90 yards behind you?

12. Is it believable that “an honest man” would not have any concern for damage he might have caused while “asleep” while driving”?

13. Is it believable that if you were going to call for a tow for your disabled car, that you would not call while the car was in the ditch, but would drive it out of the ditch, risking further damage, and proceed to drive over three miles to hide behind an abandoned Pizza Hut before calling for a tow?

14. Is it believable that an “honest man” would say he had called police when there is no record of such a call in the police call log nor on his cell phone records?

15. Is it believable that an “honest man” would tell Onstar not to use the email address they had on file for him (which was correct) but to use his wife’s email address?

16. Is it believable that an “honest man” would have his company’s employment attorney contact the District Attorney in order to attempt to influence the entering of a felony “due to the effect on his job”?

17. Is it believable that, knowing you had severely injured the son-in-law of a friend, you never visited the injured cyclist, never admitting hitting him? (In court you said “I’m sorry this happened to you”.)

18. Is it believable that an “honest man” would not notify the Security and Exchange Commission, as required by law, that he was charged with a felony until ordered to do so by a judge over 180 days after the accident?

Writes Schuler:

These are only a few of the questions that should have plagued the District Attorney prior to unfairly reducing a felony charge against Marty Erzinger to a couple of misdemeanors.

If you find the answers to these questions as unbelievable as I do, you must conclude that neither the District Attorney nor Mr. Erzinger could meet the reasonable standard of an honest man.

I, for one, would never want this man in charge of my money, nor any firm which happily continues to employ him.

Remember Martin Erzinger, the Morgan Stanley broker who bought his way out of a felony charge? He’s been sentenced now—a year’s probation, and 45 days of charity work. (Some people do that kind of thing voluntarily, and don’t consider it a punishment at all.) And Al Lewis has a magnificent column on the case, which uncovers an interesting twist: Erzinger’s victim, Steven Milo, is the son-in-law of Tom Marsico. Yes, that Tom Marsico, the one with $55 billion in assets under management.

Mutual fund magnate Tom Marsico was at the Vail Valley Medical Center on July 3, tending to his son-in-law, Dr. Steven Milo, who’d been hit by a black, 2010 Mercedes while bicycling…

Into the ER rolls Martin Erzinger, a wealth adviser who oversees more than $1 billion in accounts at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Denver.

Erzinger says hi to [Marsico's wife] Cydney.

“Marty and I have been acquaintances for some 20 years,” Marsico explained. “I said, ‘Geez, Marty, is there anything I can do for you? He said, ‘Oh, no, I’m just in for some preliminary tests.’”

Erzinger was in and out in 20 minutes, Marsico recounted: “He checked out just fine.” But Marsico’s mind raced. Black Mercedes? Erzinger? “I was putting two and two together and I thought, ‘Oh, God. No. This can’t be.”

The Marsico connection underlines why Milo was naturally more interested in justice than in money, and why it’s unconscionable that DA Mark Hurlbert would ever suggest—as he did, when he dropped the felony charges—that “justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”

Milo is going to suffer greatly for the rest of his life as a result of Erzinger’s actions, but Erzinger’s future income isn’t going to help him. Instead, Milo will have to life with the knowledge that his assailant, who left him to die on the side of the road, not only avoided jail, but even blamed “new-car smell” in his attempt to duck responsibility for his actions.

Erzinger should be in jail right now, rather than managing hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s money. I hope his clients drop him—and that other Morgan Stanley clients, too, move their money elsewhere. Perhaps to Marsico Capital. I can’t see how anybody would want to park their money with a firm which continues to pay Martin Erzinger millions of dollars.

How should bike-share services pay for themselves? Up until now, the main model has been sponsorship and advertising. But CityRyde has a bright idea: why not sell carbon offsets?

The idea’s pretty simple: as bike-share use rises, the amount of carbon-emitting vehicle use falls. So bike shares save carbon; CityRyde even has a methodology to determine exactly how much. (One thing I’d like to see, though: virtually all bike-share programs involve trucking bikes from the center of town back into the periphery, not to mention transporting broken bikes to be fixed. So somewhere in the methodology there should be an accounting for the amount of carbon emitted by the bike-share program itself.)

In any case, if the bike-share program sold carbon offsets to companies which want to claim to be carbon-neutral and to individuals wanting to offset their carbon emissions, that could raise some revenue: CityRyde co-founder Jason Meinzer told me his rule of thumb is that you could bring in between $25 and $100 per bike per year that way. For a scheme with 50,000 bikes in New York City, that would equate to between $1.25 million and $5 million per year: hardly chump change.

Meinzer didn’t share with me exactly how he got his numbers, though, so I ran a smell test. Let’s say each bike travels 15 miles per day, 350 days per year: that’s 5,250 miles per year. A lot of bike rides are simply for pleasure, and others—especially in a city like New York—replace walking or taking mass transport. Those are activities with negligible marginal carbon emissions.

But let’s say that 1/3 of bike journeys would otherwise have been taken in a car of some description. That means that each bike saves 1,750 passenger-miles in cars. If one car carries the same number of people as two bikes, on average, then that’s 875 car miles saved. At 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile, that’s basically half a ton of CO2 emissions saved per bike per year. And while the market in carbon offsets is far from transparent, my feeling is that you’d be lucky to get $5 per ton, which would equate to $2.50 per bike per year. That’s a full order of magnitude lower than Meinzer’s lower estimate.

Meinzer’s methodology is a lot more sophisticated than that, and I’ll update this post if he wants to share his own math. But at $5 per ton, selling carbon offsets would gross only about $125,000 a year—which, by the time you subtract the cost of measuring the carbon saved and administering the sales, leaves you with little or nothing in net revenue. So while it’s an intriguing idea, I’m not yet convinced it’s a practical one.

Update: Meinzer says that he does account for the carbon costs of the program, in the “Project Emissions” and “Leakage” sections of his methodology; I don’t see it myself. And he explains that he gets his much higher estimate for total revenues from selling carbon offsets at a much higher price:

Our credits most certainly will be sold at a premium due to the novel co-benefits associated with their generation even outside of the carbon mitigated; e.g. health and social (and remember some credits sold for as high as $111 last year). This has been validated by the carbon brokers we’ve been working with over the years. Moreover, outside of the “price-point” per carbon a key angle we are taking to obtain an even higher premium on our credits is via creative bundling; by lumping the carbon credits w/ the sponsorship and advertising. Case in point – Blue Cross Blue Shield donated $1.5 million to have their name tied to the existing 1,000-bike Minneapolisbike share. Had they been able to purchase the offsets stemming from that program the donation would have been MUCH higher. This argument is reinforced by the fact that this donor in particular clearly has a key interest in health, and so the aforementioned co-benefits of our credits would prove even more attractive given the health-benefits of biking. Most big names companies are already offsetting their carbon emissions each year anyways for a variety of reasons, even outside of a regulatory mandate.

One of the main contributing factors to the financial crisis was the feeling of impunity and omnipotence which pervaded Wall Street. No matter how egregious their behavior, financiers knew that they would end up wealthy and comfortable. That, in turn, made it much easier to overcome their natural risk aversion.

Jon Hendry now points me to a very shocking real-world (non-financial) example of this. Martin Joel Erzinger is a star broker at Smith Barney, overseeing over $1 billion in assets for “ultra high net worth individuals, their families and foundations”. On July 3, Erzinger was driving his black Mercedes in Eagle, Colorado, and ran over a cyclist — New York physician Steven Milo — from behind:

Milo suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident.

“He will have lifetime pain,” Haddon wrote. “His ability to deal with the physical challenges of his profession — liver transplant surgery — has been seriously jeopardized.”

Erzinger immediately drove away from the scene of the crime, eventually stopping in a parking lot on the other side of town, where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service and asked that his car be towed.

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.

Yet Hurlbert, looking at Erzinger’s wealth, decided that the case really was about the money after all:

“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”

Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.

“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose.

Matt Chaban has found a new study from Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, looking at the amount of misbehavior going on in New York’s bike lanes. I’ve uploaded the study here and embedded it below; many thanks to Stringer for putting together the resources to make it happen. The study’s main finding will come as no surprise to anyone, although it’s good to have in vaguely empirical form:

The data is clear: while bike lanes bring a tremendous benefit to New York City, misuse by all parties—motorists, pedestrians and cyclists—undermines their success.

Stringer sent out observers to 11 different bike lanes on three days this week during the morning and evening rush hour. Over that time, a total of 1,781 infractions were observed. Stringer has his own pie chart, but I’ve made my own to more clearly separate out who’s at fault in each case:

All of the observation points were at bike lanes, so it shouldn’t come as much surprise that bike-lane salmon outnumber street salmon. All that says is that when there’s a bike lane to hand, the salmon will flock to it, rather than ride in the street. Also, it’s worth noting that the chart adds up only bike-related infractions. If a car ran a red light, or a pedestrian jaywalked, or anything like that, it wasn’t counted.

A few of the findings were particularly striking:

• Unmarked police vehicles love to use bike lanes to speed past traffic in non-emergency situations. The police love to flaunt their impunity.
• For one hour at Grand and Bowery, there were more bike salmon in the bike lane than there were bikers riding the right way.
• Pedestrians completely ignore the bike lane on Broadway, treating it as pedestrian space.

Stringer’s recommendations make a lot of sense. Top of the list is increased enforcement against motorists blocking bike lanes: over the course of three days of observations, there were more than 275 vehicles blocking bike lanes, which between them got just 2 tickets.

And a dedicated bike lane patrol is a great idea: mobile police who can get around quickly and nimbly, and who experience the frustration felt by cyclists at first hand. I also suspect that cyclists might be less aggrieved if they got their tickets from someone on a bike.

The main good news here, though, is that Stringer is taking this issue seriously, he’s not taking sides, and he’s helping to push the city government in the right direction. Good for him.

Respect the Lane

Rachel Brown has a fantastic little 5-minute film about biking up First Avenue to work:

I love the way that she’s caught on camera all of the annoyances which drive bike commuters mad: the cars cutting across the bike lane to make left turns; the pedestrians blithely stepping out into the lane in front of you; the trucks using the lane as a parking spot; the taxis driving up it. And, of course, the Evil Bike Salmon.

At the same time, there’s more than a hint of tension, in this film, between relatively serious bike commuters, on the one hand, and slow hobbyists, on the other. And this tension, I think, is likely to get worse rather than better, even as the other problems might alleviate themselves somewhat as the number of cyclists in New York grows.

There’s safety in numbers, when it comes to cycling, and a similar phenomenon is likely to happen with regard to pedestrians and car drivers being increasingly conscious of bicyclists in their midst. Already, the First Avenue bike lane has reportedly cut injuries to all street users by 50%. But as the number of cyclists rises, the average speed of cyclists necessarily falls. Everybody thinks of northern European cities like Copenhagen as bicycling paradises — and they are. But if you’re biking around Copenhagen, you’re going to go a lot more slowly than if you’re biking the same distance in NYC.

A slow cyclist can cope with most of the dangers and obstructions that Brown complains about much more easily than a fast cyclist — and the fast cyclists, as Brown’s film shows, are now shunning the lane entirely, moving over to the right-hand side of the street, where they’re much less likely to get cut off by a car. (Cars often turn left off First Avenue, which runs up the east side of Manhattan, but much more rarely turn right.)

It’s going to be very interesting to see how fast cyclists cope with an influx of slower cyclists in Manhattan, as bike lanes continue to get built and average bike speeds continue to decline. I love to zoom down avenues at high speed, but I also love being safe. Maybe that means I’m just going to have to start going a little slower.

If you wanted proof that New Yorkers think of bicyclists more as pedestrians than as vehicles, all you need to do is look at this graphic in the NYT, which shows how Broadway is used between 59th Street and 17th Street. The lanes are labeled with only two colors: orange and green. Orange is vehicles: dotted means parked cars, while solid means they’re moving. Green is, well, pedestrians, or that conceptual combination of pedestrians-and-bicyclists: dotted means on foot, while solid means they’re moving, ie they’re on a bicycle.

The story itself — not to mention the headline on the graphic — is very car-centric, as Aaron Naparstek has been pointing out on his Twitter feed this morning. “For the first time in New York’s modern era,” writes Michael Grynbaum, “Broadway no longer offers a continuous path from the Bronx to the Battery.” That isn’t true, of course, just as it isn’t true that Broadway is any narrower now than it was in the past. Those things are only true if you’re looking at the road from the point of view of the minority of people who navigate it by car, as opposed to the majority of people who navigate it by bike or on foot.

It’s hard to convey the overall tone of the piece with a few choice quotes; you really have to read the whole thing, with its absence of any quotes from bicyclists or pedestrians, and its framing of traffic reduction on Broadway as a war between drivers and faceless “transportation officials”. You can get a feel, though, just from the first word of the second paragraph:

It is Manhattan’s most famous thoroughfare, known around the world for its theater marquees and giant Macy’s. It has come to symbolize the outsize aspirations and swagger of New York.

But…

In Grynbaum’s world, it seems, a road with “outsize aspirations and swagger” must be full of as many cars as possible; if it’s humming with pedestrian life, that somehow diminishes it.

And it’s weird to talk about how “moving traffic is down to a trickle” on Broadway below 34th Street without pointing out that the street begins anew there: of course there’s only a trickle of traffic, because at that point it’s a local street which you can only get to by first going west on 33rd Street and then doing a very sharp left turn, almost back on yourself, onto Broadway. There’s no point in having more traffic capacity on Broadway than there is on 33rd Street, because there’s nowhere else that traffic can come from.

The graphic does a good job, though, in showing the difference between successful and unsuccessful bike lanes on Broadway. Here’s a relatively sensible style, as seen around 22nd Street:

The pedestrian zone is an extension of the sidewalk, while cyclists get their own lane alongside other vehicles.

Here, by contrast, is the unsuccessful style, as seen around 40th Street:

Here, the pedestrian zone is particularly wide and pleasant, but it’s separated from the sidewalk by a bike lane. It’s only natural for pedestrians to want to cross naturally in and out of the pedestrian zone, and they’re obviously not going to do so across the road. Instead, they’ll wander across and along the bike lane, most likely without checking for oncoming bikes first. In fact, given half a chance, they’ll even move chairs into the middle of the bike lane, and sit on them. Given that traffic on this part of Broadway is pretty light, bicyclists find it easier, and much safer, to ride in the roadway rather than in the bike lane provided for them.

It’s a shame that Grynbaum seems not to have spoken to any pedestrians or cyclists when reporting his story. He might have got a very different perspective on the successes and failures of the pedestrianization scheme, and might have at least mentioned the way in which the Broadway bike lane dumps cyclists out into very hard-to-navigate Union Square traffic the minute it hits 17th Street. Instead, we get this:

Many drivers remain hostile to what some say has amounted to a tacit decommissioning of Broadway as a major thoroughfare. The street is increasingly shunned by drivers. Compared with a year ago, the number of vehicles using Broadway between Columbus Circle and Times Square has gone down about 25 percent, the city says. And in the morning rush, traffic on Broadway passing 23rd Street has fallen 30 percent since 2008.

“I know they’re trying to beautify the city, but it’s killing the drivers,” said Gus Salcedo, 40, a daily car commuter from Queens who was parked on Broadway at 33rd Street the other day. “It’s frustrating. They don’t want you to drive into the city.”

Memo to the NYT: there’s more than one way that a road can be “a major thoroughfare”. And the current way is much more successful than the status quo ante. Even for Mr Salcedo, who truth be told probably finds it easier to find his parking spot now than he did when car traffic on Broadway ran painfully across Sixth Avenue, and the corner of Broadway and 33rd Street was a nightmare not only for bikes and pedestrians, but for car drivers too.

Most bikers in New York have their fair share of road rage. Commuting by bicycle in Manhattan has many things to be said for it, but it’s certainly not relaxing. And bicyclists as a group have surprisingly little public support. The question is, why? And I think I’ve worked out something approaching the Unified Theory of New York Biking:

Cyclists get no respect as road users. Instead, tragically, they’re treated like pedestrians.

Basically, people in New York — and I absolutely include the bicyclists themselves here, who are actually the worst offenders — start with the long-established interplay between pedestrians and motorists, and then layer on bicyclists as though the bike was a cool toy given to a suburban 13-year-old kid, rather than an efficient way of using the city’s streets as a way of getting from A to B.

Let’s take all the different permutations in order. To begin with, there’s the old bike-free status quo, where the possible interactions are pedestrian-pedestrian, pedestrian-motorist, or motorist-motorist. It’s worth thinking about these a bit, because they’re deeply ingrained in us, and they’re responsible for shaping the way we see everything else.

The pedestrian-pedestrian encounter is both chaotic and benign, just so long as you don’t work in the middle of Times Square. (Ahem.) People move slowly enough that they have lots of time to maneuver around each other as necessary, and most of the time, with the help of a little eye contact, large numbers of people are extremely good at walking with and around and across each other.

The motorist-motorist encounter, by contrast, is very highly choreographed, with lights and lanes and speed limits and indicator lights and even a dedicated corps of traffic police to enforce the rules. The rules aim to minimize car crashes, and again, as a general rule, they do a pretty good job.

Finally there’s the pedestrian-motorist encounter, which is based largely on asymmetry: motorists have nothing to fear from pedestrians, but pedestrians have everything to fear when it comes to getting hit by a car. At the same time, their respective spaces (sidewalk, roadway) are very clearly delineated, largely to minimize any need for the two to interact at all. When they do interact, pedestrians take advantage of the rules of the road: a red light, for instance, means that the cars have to stop, so pedestrians can cross against them. Pedestrians trust the motorists to follow the rules, and most of the time that’s what happens.

There are rules governing pedestrian behavior too, but they’re broadly ignored. Because they’re slow and harmless, pedestrians feel as though they have few responsibilities to others. So they’ll jaywalk, or cross in the middle of the block, or wait for the light to change while standing a couple of yards into the street, because they can. At the margin, a few motorists will be inconvenienced, but they have all the advantages of being in a car, so pedestrians feel it’s a fair trade-off.

The trouble all starts when you drop bicyclists into the mix. At that point, a whole new set of combinations comes into play, and as a city we haven’t worked out how to make them work. In other cities, especially in places like Copenhagen or Utrecht, bicycles are ubiquitous and everybody knows how to behave on and around them. But we’re not there yet.

Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules, most cyclists seem to treat the rules of the road as strictly optional. They’re still in the human-powered mindset of pedestrians, who feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.

The result is decidedly suboptimal for all concerned, but mostly for the bicyclists themselves. New York needs to make a collective quantum leap, from treating bicyclists like pedestrians to treating bicyclists like motorists. And unless and until it does, bike relations will continue to be marked by hostility and mistrust.

Consider the bicyclist-bicyclist encounter, first. Most of the time, bicyclists get on just fine with each other: we’re all riding along the street in the same direction, and if you need to do it, overtaking is pretty easy. You look behind to check for cars, you might announce a polite “on your left”, and off you go.

But all of that falls apart with the introduction of the evil bike salmon, which have reached pandemic proportions in New York, even on insanely busy avenues. If you’re riding the wrong way down the street, that’s always going to be dangerous for any bicyclists coming towards you. Sometimes, it’s downright lethal. I bike up Sixth Avenue to work, which nominally has a bike lane running up its left-hand side, but like all bike lanes this one is often filled with large opaque trucks. So I need to look behind me, merge into traffic, and skirt around the truck. All of which is no big deal, just so long as I don’t run headlong into a suicidal bike salmon coming the other way, who of course I couldn’t see in advance because the truck was in the way.

Or any other corner works much the same way: a friend of mine got some pretty nasty injuries when he turned a corner on a bike only to see a bike salmon of the delivery-boy subspecies barreling towards him. He slammed on his brakes, went over the handlebars, and the bike salmon went merrily on his way.

What justifies bike salmoning? Nothing. But what explains it is that bicyclists are in the pedestrian mindset: rules don’t apply to them. Yes, having a one-way system means you’ll sometimes have to go a couple of blocks out of your way, but cars do that automatically, and most of the time they’re going slower than the bikes. And none of this, of course, explains those delivery guys, who only bike the wrong way down the street. That’s just perverse.

Recently I saw a mother in her late 20s, riding down Avenue A with her toddler in a bike seat on the back. The mother wasn’t wearing a helmet, but she was wearing iPod headphones. And she was salmoning, which actually takes some doing on a two-way street like Avenue A: she was riding north, but on the west, southbound, side of the road. And she did this for a few blocks.

Now think of the message that mother was sending to any cars travelling south on Avenue A. It’s unambiguous: “I act like a pedestrian, I follow no rules, I don’t care about you, and you just have to navigate around me.”

Every bike salmon constitutes an utterly gratuitous confrontation and escalation in the war between bicyclists and motorists. Whenever a motorist encounters a bicyclist riding towards them on the street, that only serves to confirm in their mind that bicyclists aren’t proper road users, aren’t worthy of their respect, and certainly can’t be trusted to play by the same rules that govern cars. Bicyclists are an obstacle, an inconvenience — something which really shouldn’t be on the road at all.

As a result, drivers don’t treat cyclists as legitimate users of the road, even when they’re going in the right direction. Instead, they treat us as they would treat pedestrians. I’ve had a taxi driver scream at me for biking the right way down the street, because there wasn’t enough room for him to overtake and he wanted to get to the red light at the end of the block a few seconds faster. Once we were both stopped at the red light, he explained in a very forthright New York manner that he had every right to drive as fast as he wanted on the roads, and I had no right to be on the road at all.

I had much the same experience today — this is the one which prompted this entire blog entry. I was riding down 43rd Street to Reuters on the right-hand side of the street, passing cars waiting for the light to change at Broadway. Suddenly, a man threw open the rear door of one of those cars, right in my path; I slammed on the brakes and came to a halt, thankfully unharmed, just as he was getting out of his car. He didn’t apologize, so I smiled — I’ve learned that any sign of anger is counterproductive in these situations — and said that it’s always a good idea to look first, before opening a car door into the street.

His response was both nonsensical and illuminating: he informed me in a very haughty manner that I shouldn’t have been biking on the street in the first place. Confused, I looked around: did he mean that there was a bike lane I should have been using instead? No, there wasn’t. So I asked him what he meant, and he ignored me, rushing into 1500 Broadway.

What I think he meant, if he could articulate it — which clearly he couldn’t — was that bicyclists aren’t legitimate road users, and we shouldn’t be getting in the way of cars, or, for that matter, in the way of people exiting cars. No one worries about dooring pedestrians: for one thing, pedestrians don’t have the requisite velocity, and for another thing they’re not meant to be in the road in the first place. And bicyclists, in this guy’s mind, belong in the same category as pedestrians, not the same category as cars. (If there were enough room on the right for a car to pass by, you can be sure he’d look first before opening that door.)

You see that mindset all the time, with cars — especially when it comes to blinking. They’ll indicate for the benefit of other cars, but never for the benefit of bicyclists: if you’re switching into a new car lane, then you’ll blink, but if you’re going to turn across a bike lane, you won’t. All too often, they’ll commandeer bike lanes for themselves, turning them into de facto left-turn lanes. If it’s on the road, it’s for cars. And, of course, if they’re not using the bike lane to drive in, they’re using it to park in.

And while cars are reasonably polite, even in Manhattan, when it comes to cutting off other cars, they seem to have many fewer compunctions when it comes to bicyclists: they’re perfectly happy to zoom past me and then pull over to the curb right in front of me, forcing me to brake hard and try to maneuver around them. After all, they can do that with pedestrians, and no one minds.

Pedestrians can also navigate obstacles in the street, like those big metal plates or nasty potholes, a lot more easily than bicyclists can. We like very much to travel in a straight line when possible. But you should never assume, if you’re zooming along in a car, that the bicyclist you’re overtaking is going to remain in a perfectly straight line and that you can therefore overtake with only a few inches to spare. Any number of things can cause us to swerve unexpectedly — but drivers, at least in New York, often don’t remember that, or think that way.

If relations between motorists and bicyclists are bad, though, they’re nothing when it comes to relations between bicyclists and pedestrians. That relationship is positively poisonous, precisely because both sides are thinking of bikers as being more like pedestrians than like cars.

Why do bicyclists ride on the sidewalk? Because they think they’re pedestrians. And in doing so they infuriate the real pedestrians, who deserve the sidewalk to themselves. And while the majority of bicyclists don’t ride on the sidewalk, most of them do happily sit right in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk. There’s no culture in New York of bicyclists giving way to pedestrians, and of stopping behind the crosswalk where they’re meant to stop. Instead, when they want to cross the street they do exactly what they do when they’re walking, and go as far as they possibly can without being run over by traffic. In doing so, they can get in the way of dozens of people just trying to walk across the street — and indeed even get directly in the way of fellow bicyclists coming up a bike lane towards them. Bicyclists always seem to forget how long their bikes are: they block off a lot of space, if you’re trying to cross past them.

Armed with their pedestrian mindset, bicyclists are convinced that they can cut easily through people crossing the street, just as they could if they were walking. They’re wrong, of course, but there’s no culture of giving way to pedestrians, because they feel even more defenseless than the pedestrians when it comes to the rough streets of New York City. And potential victims find it very hard to stop and think of themselves as being too aggressive.

Meanwhile, the obliviousness on the other side is utterly exasperating for any cyclist. I was riding down 44th Street recently and saw a guy wanting to cross the street mid-block. He looked at me, we made eye contact — and then he stepped out, right into my path! The point is, he was looking for cars, not for bikes. He saw me, but he didn’t think of me as a vehicle he shouldn’t step in front of; instead, he thought of me as a pedestrian who could get past him no problem.

While pedestrians are worried about cars running them over, and tend not to step out in front of them, they have no such compunctions when it comes to bikes, or bike lanes. Bike over the Manhattan bridge at any time, day or night, and you’ll find pedestrians walking happily on the north side, which is for bikes only, rather than on the much nicer pedestrian-only south side. I like to think that they simply have no idea of how much trouble they cause cyclists: the idea that they do know, and choose to walk in the bike lane regardless, is just too demoralizing to contemplate.

And the situation in some bike lanes — especially the one running down Broadway north and south of Times Square — is much, much worse, to the point at which the bike lane is actually unusable by bicycles. It’s painted green, and it’s set off from the street by a pedestrian zone, which means there’s no car danger at all, and which also means that pedestrians feel free to wander across it at will. And they never look first to see if a bike is coming. The bike lane essentially becomes an extension of the pedestrian zone, and the bikes are forced to use the road, defeating the whole point of building a bike lane in the first place.

One part is particularly bad: bikes are meant to be able to get down Broadway between 35th St and 33rd St, even though cars can’t. But no one seems to have told the pedestrians, who happily plonk chairs down in the middle of the narrow bike path between 34th and 33rd. It’s by far the shortest way for me to get home from work, but I always go well out of my way to take 9th Avenue instead: navigating the pedestrians on Broadway is just too hard.

Again, the problem here is mindset. The pedestrians are in a pedestrian mindset, where they can wander happily wherever they like, especially when there aren’t any cars to worry about. It simply never occurs to them that they might be getting in the way of bicyclists — even when they’re standing right in the middle of a bike lane. If cars use bike lanes as left-turn lanes, pedestrians use them as staging areas, places to stand while they’re waiting for the light to change.

Pedestrians intuitively understand that bike lanes are relatively safe from cars, and therefore feel safe stepping out into them without looking first. And that can be extremely dangerous, both for themselves and for cyclists: a friend of mine died after a pedestrian stepped out in front of him when he was riding his bike.

Bicyclists aren’t like pedestrians: we’re much faster, we can’t stop quickly, we can’t navigate as adroitly, and it takes a lot of effort to slow down and speed up again, compared to the effort expended in just moving at a constant velocity. We’re a danger to pedestrians, but they’re a danger to us, too. And cars, of course, are a danger to both of us.

As New York becomes an increasingly bike-friendly city, it’s going to have to how learn to deal with these new encounters: bike-bike, bike-car, bike-ped. Other cities have managed it; we can too. But for the time being, bicyclists are being thought of in the “pedestrian” bucket. And that’s causing a great deal of harm.

Update: Some great comments below. One thing is worth clarifying: I’m certainly not saying that bikes should behave exactly like cars, which would include not overtaking cars in their own lane. In fact, under New York State law it’s illegal for bikes to behave exactly like cars: if you’re on a road without a bike lane, you have to stay to the right of the road and let cars overtake you if possible. Overtaking  within a single lane of traffic isn’t just sensible, it’s the law!

Also, Caleb Crain found some pertinent statistics in Jeff Mapes’s book Pedaling Revolution:

According to Mapes, a 1996 study by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic,” and a 2003–2004 Orlando, Florida, study found that “nearly two-thirds [of bike accidents] involved riding on the sidewalk or another unsafe choice by the cyclist.”

Update 2: After an interesting back-and-forth with Ledbury22 in the comments, he introduced himself to me as we were standing in line at the hardware store this afternoon. His problem is with “lane splitting”: when bikes create their own mini-lane between cars and the sidewalk. It’s built into New York law, which requires that bikes create just such a mini-lane on the right-hand side of the road even when there aren’t any slow or stationary cars, so that faster cars can create their own, much bigger, mini-lane, and overtake them. And it turns out that Ledbury dislikes this not from the perspective of a car driver, as I had assumed, but rather that of a pedestrian.

The problem, as it turns out, is a common one: pedestrian wants to cross a street where cars aren’t moving: they’re waiting at a light, or stuck in a jam. So walks out into the road in the middle of the block, without looking, and gets whacked by a bicyclist. Pedestrian’s fault, clearly — but when you’ve just been hit by a bicycle, you’re liable to start blaming bicycles for increasing the danger quotient on the roads even when you are the person at fault.

There’s really only one answer for this: pedestrians need to get used to the idea of looking for bikes just as they look for cars. This is one are where improved bicyclist behavior can’t help. Even increased bike lanes wouldn’t help much, since in my experience the kind of pedestrians who step out into the road without looking are even more likely to step out into a bike lane without looking.

Update 3: Bike Snob responds! And I agree with everything he says. His conclusion:

Salmon makes many excellent points, but I was dismayed to see he fell into the same trap (or, in his case, net) as most other people who try to address this issue, which is to suppose that drivers and cyclists and pedestrians are somehow “different,” or that their nature is somehow determined by their vehicle. Excluding for the moment the fact that many people are pedestrians and cyclists and drivers at various points in the day, a considerate person is a considerate person and an idiot is an idiot, and both will behave as such regardless of how they are propelling themselves at any given moment.

Copenhagen:

The morning and afternoon commute in Copenhagen is a spectacle involving tens of thousands of cyclists roaring down dedicated lanes in tight packs, past cars moving at half the speed, if at all…

Traffic lights that were once co-ordinated for car speeds were adjusted to cater to the pace of the average cyclist, allowing them to travel long distances without ever getting a red light. To increase safety, stop lines for cars are five metres behind those for bikes. Cyclists get a green light up to 12 seconds ahead of cars to help increase their visibility.

In the winter months, bike ridership drops off 20 per cent. Still, an armada of plows is ready to clear bike lanes when snow flies. They get priority over routes for cars.

How do other cities get there from here? Slowly. You don’t do everything at once, but instead just add things incrementally, until you reach the point at which cyclists outnumber car drivers. Lots of attitudes need to be changed, including those of today’s cyclists, who, in car-centered cities, tend to be highly aggressive. And attitudes change slowly. But it can — and should — be done.

(Via Florida)

In the UK, men account for 72% of bike journeys, 84% of fatalities, and 81% of recorded injuries. That makes a certain amount of sense: men tend to be more aggressive cyclists, and that means their chances of having an accident rise.

But there’s a twist when it comes to truck-cyclist collisions in particular:

This year, seven of the eight people killed by lorries in London have been women…

There are no national figures but there’s little reason to think it is any different.

In this particular case, it seems, aggression helps, and timidity can be fatal:

In 2007, an internal report for Transport for London concluded women cyclists are far more likely to be killed by lorries because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver’s blind spot.

This means that if the lorry turns left, the driver cannot see the cyclist as the vehicle cuts across the bike’s path.

The report said that male cyclists are generally quicker getting away from a red light – or, indeed, jump red lights – and so get out of the danger area…

Marian Louise Noonan, 32, from south London, is a confessed kerb-hugger, and that leaves her feeling quite vulnerable on the roads, unlike her husband.

“He cycles much more aggressively and is aware of all the traffic around him. He cycles as if someone is going to hit him and makes sure he is in a safe position,” she says.

“I’m much more nervous of my cycling ability, I’m frightened people might hit me, which means I don’t cycle in a positive manner.”

The main problem is the attitude of other drivers, she says, as they make her feel like she does not belong on the road.

She also feels reluctant to put herself at the front of the traffic at red lights, which is the safest place for cyclists to be.

My experience from cycling in New York is that men are more likely than women to run red lights, much more likely to run red lights by weaving through flowing traffic, and much more likely to “bike salmon” up the street against traffic. All of these things are, needless to say, dangerous. On the other hand, women are less likely than men to wear helmets, and they’re also more likely than men to be riding significantly slower than traffic. Those traits I think make them more likely to get hit by a truck, and more likely to be killed if that happens.

The optimal combination for bikers — which I see in the UK much more than in NYC — is to be both law-abiding and aggressive. Don’t be shy about riding in the middle of the road if it’s not safe to ride on the edges, and certainly don’t be shy about driving faster than traffic, because that’s safer than having traffic drive faster than you. But obey red lights, stop behind the line and not halfway into the street, and be conscious about not getting in the way of pedestrians. Maybe, in some utopian future, they might eventually start being conscious of not getting in the way of cyclists, especially in dedicated bike lanes.

These tables come from a study organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and they’re sobering: they show that hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are in some times twice as likely to be involved in pedestrian and bicyclist crashes as their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts.

The first table shows 1.2% of hybrids being involved in low-speed crashes with pedestrians, twice the rate of old-fashioned cars; the second table shows 0.6% of hybrids crashing with bicyclists, again twice the rate of noisier cars.

The reason, of course, is that the hybrids are so quiet: bikers and pedestrians use car noises to help them work out which cars are moving and which aren’t. That’s why hybrid manufacturers are now talking about adding vroomtones. Sounds like a good idea!

(HT: Voiland, via Weisenthal)

If Robin Goldstein went to the trouble of collecting 700 datapoints off Craigslist for a single blog entry, I thought the least I could do was turn it into a pretty scatterchart for him:

What we’re looking at here is the average price of a used car in each metro area, on the x-axis, against the average price of a used bike, on the y-axis. As Goldstein says:

Not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

The really weird thing is that the cities with the most bikes, like Portland, also have the most expensive bikes:

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35 and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well…

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend…

He had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think. It was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

I’m with Robin: this makes no sense. You can buy a really nice new bike for less than that — and new bikes cost the same no matter where in the country you buy them. They also have brand-new components, and component technology has been improving a lot of late. The only real problem with a new bike is that it’s a bit more attractive to thieves.

Still, the second-hand bike dealers are clearly on to a good thing, and there does seem to be an implicit understanding among them that they’re not going to compete on price. So this state of affairs might well last indefinitely.

The good news is that the bikes-in-buildings law passed yesterday, by 46 votes to 1, and will come into effect in 120 days’ time: Ben Fried calls this “the biggest legislative victory ever achieved by bicycle advocates in New York City”.

But does this mean my battle is won? Not necessarily. Before the building needs to open up its freight elevator to my bike, my employer — Thomson Reuters — needs to file with the landlord a formal “request for bicycle access”:

The tenant or subtenant of a building to which this article is applicable may request in writing, on a form provided by the department of transportation, that the owner, lessee, manager or other person who controls such building complete a bicycle access plan in accordance with section 28-504.3. Such request shall be sent to the owner, lessee, manager or other person who controls such building by certified mail, return receipt requested, and a copy of the request shall be filed with the department of transportation.

You can guess what happens after that — suffice to say that it’s a very bureaucratic process. But in any case I now need to work out who at Thomson Reuters is even authorized to file such a request. And then I need to work out how to get them to file it. And then I need to whom to talk to about finding an out-of-the-way corner of the 18th floor which I could use to store my bike during the day. My guess is that a best-case scenario has me happily wheeling my bike in to my office at roughly the same time that New York temperatures drop well below freezing. Ah well.

Laura Conaway asks why pedestrians walk in bike lanes, and reprints the photo above, which might well have been taken on Broadway, just south of 42nd Street. I know that stretch well — I bike down it on my way from work — and in general I stick to the road-for-cars, rather than risking life and limb on the bike-path-for-bikes.

This is a badly designed bike path, because of the location of the pedestrian zone you can see on the left hand side of the photo. There’s the sidewalk, and then the green bike path, and then the brown pedestrian zone, and then the black car lanes. When Broadway is bustling with foot traffic, it’s only natural for pedestrians to move back and forth between their two zones, especially during times when bike traffic is light.

But more generally I think it’s just that pedestrians were taught the rules of walking on streets by recourse to fear: look both ways, lest you get run over by a car. The natural corollary to such thinking is that if there’s no danger of getting run over by a car, there’s no need to look out for traffic. (If and when pedestrians do see me biking down the lane, they’re generally good enough to stay out of my way; the much bigger problem is the oblivious pedestrians, often listening to their iPods, who have no idea I’m there, and never stop to look.)

There’s also the natural impatience and pushiness of New Yorkers, who have a natural tendency to use bike lanes as a staging point in their rush to cross the street. No one in New York waits patiently on the sidewalk for the lights to change; instead, they inch forward on the road as far as they can without walking straight into the path of cars. They don’t worry about getting into the path of bikes, though, and if they see a bike coming, they generally stay put, since they couldn’t possibly step backwards. And if they’re crossing mid-block, which they often do, they generally take one step out from between parked cars before looking for traffic, since they know any car driving down the road won’t drive that close to the parked cars. (Bikes, again, they just don’t think about.)

Bicyclists, I have to say, are just as bad, if not worse: at intersections they never stop where they’re meant to, and instead stop either (a) right in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk, or (b) right in the middle of the cross-street’s bike lane. (And don’t even get me started on the “bike salmon” who ride the wrong way down the block and seem to think that all bike lanes are two-way streets.) Although bikers get very mad at motorists, the fact is that car drivers are much more law-abiding than either bicyclists or pedestrians, and tend not to feel that the rules don’t apply to them. I’ve even noticed an increasing number of car drivers who seem to know the difference between a bike lane and a left-turn lane.

In northern Europe, everybody tends to be much better behaved. I think that’s learned: as the number of cyclists in a city rises, two things happen. Firstly drivers and pedestrians become more conscious of the fact that a cyclist is likely to be on the road. And secondly there’s an increasing number of what you might call non-brave cyclists, who don’t consider biking to be some kind of urban warfare and who are more likely, at the margin, to simply follow the rules of the road which they know so well from driving cars. Eventually their good behavior rubs off onto the more reckless.

Ultimately I think it all comes down to a combination of visibility and civility. As bikes and bikers become more visible, everybody else will be more conscious of them. And as they feel more noticed and less victimized, they will start to behave more responsibly to other road users, on foot and in cars. Who will then start to reciprocate even more. The problem is this takes years; it doesn’t happen overnight. And in the meantime there will be nasty bike-pedestrian collisions, some of them unspeakably tragic. My friend Josh Phillips died in 2006 after hitting a pedestrian on his bike. The pedestrian wasn’t malicious, just oblivious. But that’s no solace to Josh’s family and friends.

Update: Walking back from lunch, I noticed this scene on 41st and Broadway. You can shout as loud as you like, this obstacle won’t get out of the way. And as a result you can see two bicyclists having to detour into the pedestrian zone.