Further to yesterday’s post, cycling in this city can be frustrating, but if your expectations are low it will always exceed them:
Though pleasant weather does help, and so does a great bicycle:
By the way, I am now completely sold on singlespeed Biopace and officially declare it my latest affectation:
Sorry, if you’re using a regular round chainring on your singlespeed, or even an eccentric chainring that’s still in production, I’m afraid I can’t talk to you. Vintage Japanese chainrings from the 1980s and early 1990s that are misshapen like an old drunk’s nose are the only ones I’ll use for singlespeeding, and I will now start hoarding them accordingly:
Oh, they’re cheap now, but you can expect prices to skyrocket soon.
Just kidding [intern: insert pic of couple on boat], only Ultraromance can move markets that way. I’ve been pushing mid-reach brakes for years but nobody cared until he got into them, and now not only is he selling them but someone else has even started a whole bike company around them:
Whatever, I was into them before they were cool.
As for urban cycling and maintaining the sanity you maybe never really had in the first place otherwise why would you even live here (?), one of the biggest challenges in that regard is bicycle infrastructure. I remain in favor of bike lanes and bike share and all that stuff, and I think the idea of a modern city that doesn’t at least have decent accommodations for bicycles is silly. However, the big problem with all this stuff is that it raises your expectations–which, as I already mentioned, you must keep to an absolute minimum if you’re actually going to enjoy riding here. So it’s crucial to remind yourself that the many, many problems that plague every aspect of life in this city aren’t going to magically disappear just because you’re riding a bike on some green paint.
It’s also important to understand that the term “bicycle lane” is completely vestigial, like “dialing” a phone or “taping” an altercation between a bicyclist and a pedestrian:
Today, what we still for some reason call a “bicycle lane” is in fact a light-duty electric commercial delivery vehicle lane, and in many parts of the city the food delivery industry has completely taken over the surrounding bicycle infrastructure:
If you’ve been riding for a long time in New York and are already used to riding in traffic you might very well prefer riding in a “normal” street with cars to riding in a “bicycle lane” with food delivery people, since in Manhattan the car traffic generally doesn’t move all that quickly and you can sort of get in the flow with it, whereas the food delivery traffic does move quickly, riders will pass you on either side even if you’re all the way over and trying to give them room, and they’ll often let you know you’re in their way with their bells and electronic horns.
I don’t mean this to be a screed against food delivery people or anything like that–it’s simply the world (or at least the city) we live in–but a New York City bike lane in 2025 will make it very clear to you that the old-fashioned human-powered bicycle is getting squeezed out of the city as surely as the old-timey pushcart vendors on Orchard Street. And speaking of pushcarts…
There aren’t too many of them now, but in 5-10 years I suspect these will take over the bike lanes completely and they’ll be backed up like the Cross Bronx Expressway.
And no, while people may blather on about how they live in New York City because of how culturally enriching it is (LOL) I promise you they’re only here because they love to eat. See, when people in New York say “culture” what they mean is restaurants–which they can’t even be bothered to walk to half the time, hence all the food delivery people. (Sure, they also like cute stores, because they make the streetscape attractive, though they buy everything from Amazon just like everyone else.) And don’t worry, if there aren’t enough food delivery people in the street for you, there’s always a food cart on the sidewalk too:
Food, glorious food.
But again, none of this is a problem unless you’ve allowed the bike lanes to artificially inflate your expectations, and if you think about it it’s quite delightful that by the time New York City got around to implementing a bicycle network in a meaningful way it was completely taken over by Amazon and Uber Eats.
And the bike lanes aren’t the only thing that’s changed, either:
Now we’ve also got people juggling in the crosswalk:
I’m old enough to remember when people at the intersection just wanted to clean your windshield.
Gotta keep those balls in the air.
