When I was very little, my parents owned a tiny blue Datsun—I remember that it was almost always in the shop.  When I was about four it died for good and after that my father began bicycling everywhere in the city.  He was a biker way before it was trendy or cool; it was his main method of transportation.  Just living in New York City in the early 1980s was a major logistical challenge; biking in it was even harder.  Every day he would leave our house and bike down Atlantic Avenue, a major automotive artery, to his workplace: an under-resourced junior high school in East New York where he taught Social Studies and English as a Second Language.  In those early days, he seemed like some sort of incredible road warrior.  One time he got mugged by guy with a sawed off shotgun.  He was chased by unleashed junkyard dogs.  He battled with cars—always barely avoiding being “doored”—a phenomenon in which a careless motorist opens his door directly in front of the biker, leading to airborne consequences.  One time he even won my mother a bike in some sort of race and managed to bike home from the race while pushing her bike in front of him. 

I was involved in the biking as well; my father attached a seat to his battered Kabuki (a Japanese brand prized by purists and bike thieves—my father had three stolen) and he took me with him.   He would bike me to school in the morning and then he would journey to work afterwards.  One time we biked all the way to the Bronx Zoo: a trip that took so long that by the time we got there, we had to return back home immediately.  Of course the result of all this was that I started biking as soon as I was able, and by 5^th grade I was also braving New York City traffic to get where I  needed to go.  I felt then and continue to feel that biking is the best way to experience a city.  On foot, you never get beyond a neighborhood or two, by car things whiz by too fast, and on a subway you poke up out of the ground like a mole and never piece the sections of the place together. Biking really allows you to see how the tree-lined streets of Fort Greene give way to Bed Stuy which in turn yields to Brownsville and so on.  My high school was in Downtown Brooklyn and when I had free periods I liked to bike back and forth over the Brooklyn Bridge, weaving around the tourists—many New Yorkers found them infuriating, but I always felt flattered that people from all over wanted to come to my home and gawk. Also, giving them directions made me feel important.

I always thought that my dedication to biking was iron-clad, and that I was deeply devoted to the chain grease stains that were always appearing on the inside of my right shin.  But after I started teaching and got a salary, I discovered that my biking habit was almost entirely due to poverty.  Now that I could afford it, I was taking the subway constantly.  I even bought a car—albeit a 1987 Oldsmobile Delta 88 that had the habit of occasionally stalling when the car was going more than 50MPH.  When it stalled, the power steering would fail and I would literally have to muscle the car into the hazard lane; these were moments when I definitely missed the simplicity of bike travel. I remember when the car died; I would open up the hood and stare at the engine.  To me, the mechanical systems of the car were as inscrutable as obelisks engraved with Sanskrit, but I always hoped that somehow I would see the problem right there—like a timing chain that flashed red before breaking and shredding the valves. “Change me quick!” it would exclaim. 

All of this leads me to my current dilemma.  New York City Transportation Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan is one of the most bike-friendly civil servants ever.  Since she has taken over her current job in April 2007, bike lanes have sprang up like Athena from the head of Zeus.  The Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge now sports a paved circular spiral leading to the roadway as well as a protected lane on the street below in which bikes have their own traffic light as well as cement walls to protect them from traffic.  A greenway is under construction that will allow bikers to cycle the length of the Brooklyn side of the East River—a veritable Hipster Highway that will go from Williamsburg to Fort Greene to DUMBO to Red Hook.  And all of it shielded from cars.  I have to say, I am feeling incredibly ambivalent about all of it.

The fact is that these protected lanes are often empty except on warm summer weekends.  I am a big supported of alternative ways to travel—indeed, alternative ways were my only ways for most of my life.  Still, walled off and protected bike lanes may be more trouble than they are worth.  Not only are they under-trafficked, they have another adverse effect: they rob bikers of their street smarts.  Biking in traffic is just something that you learn to do in New York City.  You exist in the maelstrom of traffic and you learn to thrive there.  Separating bikers from traffic also gives drivers a sense of entitlement on roads where there are no bike lanes.  They figure that those are places exclusively for cars and are correspondingly more aggressive.  Sometimes the best way to integrate bikes and pedestrians is to do nothing and let them find their own solutions. I don’t think there was a single bike lane in the city back in 1981, but my father did fine without them and they probably made him stronger as well.