Skeptical About Bike Lanes

One of the new city-installed bike lanes is on the wide avenue outside my co-op building’s front door. I’ve noticed a good number of bike riders during rush hours and on weekend days with good weather. But other times, especially at night, few bicyclists, other than delivery people, can be found.
I offer this observation to point out that putting bike lanes everywhere and anywhere may not necessarily be a good idea. I’m certainly not anti-bicycle—I’ve been riding bikes since the age of 8 or so. But for me and most of my contemporaries, bicycles were for recreation. I would rather bike through a park than brave city traffic, with its trucks, buses, speeding cars, pedestrians crossing in front of you, horns honking and, worst of all, traffic lights.
I love bicycling along the shore, and am 100 percent in favor of the Brooklyn Greenway and any other Greenway in the New York metro area. Give me a bike lane in a park or within a parkway (like the bike path I used to ride on Ocean Parkway), and I’m there. But the other thing—Well, I’m not so sure about that.
There’s nothing wrong with someone commuting to work by bike or using bicycles as their main means of transportation. But that should be someone’s personal choice – and these bike lanes should be established where bike use is already heavy.
It seems to me that Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn, are approaching this with some sort of semi-religious zeal. And in this zeal, they’re not hearing the other side. When one bicycle advocate bragged about how the new bike-share program would bring “20,000 new bikes to the streets of New York,” the only thing I could think of was 20,000 bikes zipping in front of me when I’m trying to cross the street.
Yes, bikes are good for the environment, and for those who want to bike in city traffic, there should be more accommodations. But they’re not the only game in town. What about electric and hybrid cars? For years and years, you heard that Detroit “killed the electric car.” Now, however, you have the SmartCar, the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla, the Chevrolet Volt, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, and several others. Yes, Mayor Bloomberg added 70 electric cars to the city’s fleet of official vehicles, but a lot more could be done to promote them.
Then, there’s the alternative that no one seems to want to talk about: Electric streetcars, or trolleys. They were common in most cities before 1950 or so, and some, like San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston, never gave them up. In the last 20 years or so, Buffalo, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Charlotte and other cities have installed new light-rail systems, as they’re known nowadays.
Even across the Hudson River, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system carries 41,000 passengers a day. But here in New York, we’re having the same discussions we had 20 years ago about trolley service in Red Hook. Strange, isn’t it?
So, for those who want to bike through the busy streets of Downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan every day, good luck. But don’t forget—there are other forms of environmentally friendly, non-automotive transportation out there.