I’ve been biking in and around New York City for many years, recently doing several thousand miles a year, and this should provide many topics for the blog. Look forward to, for example, an explanation of how to best get across the Passaic River to Newark on bike. Biking in Manhattan has always been a challenge, but things have gotten exciting recently. A few years ago the city started painting lines on some of the streets, announcing that these were “bike lanes”. They’re generally filled with double-parked cars or trucks, and pedestrians hailing cabs or waiting for a break to run between the traffic. The width is carefully chosen to coincide with the width of a car door, so if you ride inside the lane you’re guaranteed to properly get “doored” by people leaving their parked cars. The act of painting the line has the added feature of making it illegal for bicyclists to ride outside of it, at a safe distance from the cars.
The latest news is that a few special, protected lanes have been created, with cars parked outside the lane. These lanes go for a few blocks, and are heavily favored by delivery people to store what they’re working with, tourists taking pictures of each other, parents changing their baby’s diapers, or basically any activity that pedestrians would complain about if it was done on the sidewalk. The new lanes have enraged some powerful New Yorkers, who are now on a “bikelash” campaign to get them removed. They’ve managed to enlist the police, who have a long history in Manhattan of fighting with bicyclists, and have started up a serious campaign of legal harassment.
I used to ride regularly in Central Park, which has a 6 mile long road winding through it, most of the time closed to traffic. A couple months ago the police started issuing $270 tickets to bicyclists for not stopping at any of the 50 or so traffic lights (it seems that when traffic is not allowed, bicyclists must obey the traffic lights anyway, runners or pedestrians no). This caused almost all bicyclists to stop riding in the park, but a few kept on anyway. The police then decided that the speed limit should be 15 mph for bicyclists, and set up a speed trap at the bottom of a hill early one morning, ticketing quite a few people. Later they changed their mind about this, and decided the law really was 25 mph. Teams of armed police were dispatched to appear at homes of the 15-25 mph ticketees in the evening and tell them a mistake was made, while continuing to make clear that if they didn’t stop at traffic lights when there was no traffic, they would still be ticketed. And if they were going faster than 25 mph at the bottom of a hill, there would be trouble. I’m sure they found this very reassuring. Personally, I’ve stopped riding in the park. It turns out though that there’s a platoon of undercover police throughout the city in unmarked cars waiting to start up sirens and go after any bicyclist who violates any rule in the hundreds of pages of regulations governing not just bicycles, but motor vehicles (their slogan: a bike is the same as a car!). Recently I ran afoul of one of these due to rolling very safely and slowly through an intersection, which got me not one, but two \$270 tickets. I’ll appear in court on these charges some day soon, and I’m sure my readers will want to hear all the details of how this works out.
Update: A commenter correctly points out that I got the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers confused, it’s the Hackensack that is difficult to cross by bike down around Newark.
Dude. I’m sure you’ve seen this already but, whatever. If you’re a bicyclist in NYC, this is _mandatory_:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nQs7u3fDXc
That aside, I’ve been focused on getting back into biking shape recently so if you’re ever in the San Francisco South Bay, drop me a line and I’ll schedule a ride. Currently I’m focusing on getting in shape enough to do “The Coast Ride” again this summer (~62 miles, ~6,200 feet vertical elevation gain). It’s more a question of perseverance than capability … 🙂 But it _is_ beautiful. And there’s the “Terminator” on Stage Road between 84 and Highway 1 …
Peter, this change of tack of your blog is only going to viewed as a surrender in view of the announcements this morning, namely that Motl has been re-appointed – this time as a full professor – to Harvard, and that Distler has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics (“for contributions in showing the world that surf bums are surf bums, and will never be anything more”).
Even foolish April cyclists are welcome in San Francisco. Peter, why don’t you move out west to our fair city of SF?
I’m tired, soooooo tired, of taking that long uphill walk to the methadome clinic. There’s got to be an easier way. Now I suggest to you it takes 5 seconds, just fiiiiiiiive seconds, to put a morphine suppository all the way inside. Yeah!
The problem with riding a bicycle anywhere is that it will make you two tired.
Blog symmetry is preserved, as I have recently decided to become a cranky physicist.
A sophomoric pot shot at Clifford Johnson? That’s pretty low.
Ed,
????
I disagree with Clifford about string theory, not about biking.
So, you’re telling me that your April 1st incursions into the world of inane bike and food related commentary were in no way spoofs of Asymptotia? My apologies then.
Ed,
Inane? Those were honestly my heart-felt opinions about bikes and food. I don’t personally think it’s a good idea to go on about them on my blog under usual circumstances, but the great thing about blogging is that everyone’s blog is different. And the virtue of blog posts you’re not interested in is that you can not read them…
Contrary to the yelps from those who find this post unphysic(s)al, it seems to me quite relevant to any enlightened theoretical mindset and interesting to all who share the joys of bike riding in NYC, given that a bicycle is second only to the wok as a peak of the engineering of a tool’s form to its use ie it is one of the simplest arrangements of simple components -basically two wheels and a frame, handlebars, pedals, chain and a saddle – to achieve maximum payoff in terms of usefulness and other benefits such as outdoors, sunlight, ability to get off and on anywhere instead of official locations, exercise of lower body muscles, etc. In other words, a physics problem (urban transport for the individual) perfectly solved.
Be that as it may, one has to admit that the riders on the recommended video are foolishly ignoring the fact that most cars weigh enough to kill them in a collision and in New York City are usually driven as if they were beds and the drivers half asleep, at least to what is happening on either side of them towards the rear, for the reason US automobiles are very hard to see from, and anyone who cuts right through the narrow passage between two buses is asking for disaster. So one doubts that they are trained in elementary physics.
But actually I came to comment mainly to make the point that the complainers are underresearched in the matter of whether blogs should stray from their primary topic. If they pick up a copy of this weeks New Yorker (April 11 2011) they will find that James Surowiecki their excellent Economics columnist quotes many studies which have shown that if you distract people from the main task they will perform better at it ie if you let them have the Internet at work they will do more and better work. The link is http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/04/11/110411ta_talk_surowiecki). So blogging actually should be alleviated by wandering from the main topic from time to time, because it will increase the quality of everybody’s attention when it gets back to it.
Anyhow biking in New York is a very great cause which should be promoted until cars are largely replaced. The fact that it has such distinguished support is important news in its own right.
Too bad this topic was just an April Fool’s diversion, because I was all set to explain that it’s not the Passaic River that’s difficult to cross on bike, it’s the Hackensack River…
jensph,
Of course you’re right, I got those confused, will fix. I’ve tried this once on Lincoln Highway (Rt. 9), once on Newark Turnpike (Rt. 7), neither of which was an experience I’d like to repeat (getting a flat in the middle of the Rt. 9 one didn’t help..). Final conclusion was that one really has to go all the way North up to around the Teterboro airport to make this crossing sensibly.
May I add that I for one am agog to hear how your $270 x 2 ticket fighting goes, though I suspect you will be let off. If it is any encouragement, a speed trap on the path crossing Central Park at 97st last autumn at 5pm ie at twilight caught me (actually it didn’t, but the cop said “Oh no, we saw you get off the bike after you rode twenty feet into the path to talk to your friend who was warning you we were here!” That was when I walked up to them and asked how many tickets they had given out so far. They immediately added me to the list!
As it turned out when I got to the court’s payment windows downtown to say I was innocent they said Don’t worry about it! the ticket had been cancelled! That was a relief, especially when I learned that it cost more to proceed with a second court date to have a hearing than it would to pay the $50 fine.
Your stories sound as if they have ratcheted up the irationality since then, however.
Peter,
I have also tried the Rt 7 and 9 crossings once. The Rt 7 bridge is particularly bad since you have to climb over the guard rail… Never again. There really is no safe crossing south of Teterboro. The only safe option is to take your bike on the PATH.
There is talk of adding a bicycle crossing to the designs for the new Portal Bridge (which is the NE Corridor train crossing) just north of Rt 7. But I haven’t heard much on that over the last year.