Bike Enthusiast Admits: We Have a Bike Problem

      I’m a bike guy:

·       I was gifted with my first two-wheeler in elementary school and immediately became a bike boy.

·       In high school I pedaled with friends all over the neighborhood and occasionally even beyond the neighborhood.

·       As an adult I often rode my bike to work and participated in a number of ride-really-far-in-a-day events.

·       As an even older adult I embarked with my wife upon a half-dozen week-long, ad-hoc, one-night-in-each-town bike trips through attractive corners of Europe.

·       And now I’m a bike old man, pedaling, a bit slower, around Manhattan, my home island, with surprising (at least to myself) frequency.

      But recently this lifelong bike guy, this guy whose identity was connected to pedaling if not hither and yon at least to the pool on 137th Street, had the sad realization I was becoming increasingly wary of bicycles. Wary with cause.

      And that was before I had a little accident.

      I’ve fallen off my bike a bunch of times. However. never had I bumped into a pedestrian while on a bicycle or been hit by a bicycle while a pedestrian . . . until a few weeks ago.

      I was the victim. Knocked down by a bike while walking across a street. In Paris.

      The walk signal, as I recall, had just turned green. I recall turning my head to the left just to check that all was okay and realizing that everything was not okay. A guy on a black bike filled my field of vision. And I went down.

      It really hurt.

      The young bicyclist who had hit me kept saying, over and over and over, “sorry” (in English).

      I picked myself up and completed a quick check of my limbs for signs of serious injury.

      “I’m okay,” I mumbled generously.

      And I thought to myself: “Yup, this bike thing has gotten out of control.”

      Paris banned cars from transiting through the city’s “core” back in October. Bicycles are encouraged. Indeed, Paris looks a lot like Amsterdam lately. And a significant percentage of the bikes in Paris are now, as they increasingly are in Amsterdam, electric. They move fast.

      Yes, there are bike lanes all over the place. But some of those lanes, painted green, occupy space on sidewalks, without a divider. The damn things are whizzing right by you and one false step, and . . . .

       Manhattan even looks a little like Amsterdam nowadays—and our electric bikes are no longer driven just by the now omnipresent delivery guys, who at least know what they are doing. And even Amsterdam has been experiencing heated debates between bike people and pedestrians.

      I had actually been involved, in recent years, in an extended debate of my own with a friend, a dedicated walker, over whether bikes ought to be required to obey traffic rules.

      I argued the negative then, noting, to begin with, that bikes are much skinnier and more maneuverable than automobiles, and they cause a lot less damage when they hit you than cars. A point for which I now can vouch.

      My friend, the walker, argued that bikes should have to obey the same rules as other moving vehicles. Red means stop. Stop sign means stop. It is not a difficult argument to make. Indeed, it is a point on the other side of the argument for which I can now vouch.

      But I countered by noting that most traffic lights on Manhattan’s almost-all-one-way streets are timed to facilitate automobile traffic. They are out of phase for bikes, even electric bikes.

      And obeying traffic signals on a bike would necessitate stopping every few blocks. In which case, riding a bike would not be much faster than walking. I also pointed out, in this debate with my friend, that pedestrians in Manhattan go through red lights all the time.

      Then I made a more technical point: a bicyclist, having carefully looked for oncoming traffic while approaching a stop sign, should not have to come to a complete stop that would necessitate coming off the seat and putting a foot on the ground. A significant inconvenience for no good reason.

      No there isn’t any simple—"they should never go through a stop sign”—solution to the problem.

      Nor is there an inexpensive solution to bike-pedestrian relations.

      We obviously need more bike-only lanes: separated, by dividers, from cars and pedestrians. And if we are going to insist that bike riders, like the one who hit me, obey all traffic signals, we are going to need a way to make those signals make sense for bikes, not just cars.

      Perhaps there ought to be another color signal on traffic lights—lavender means cars have to stop, but bikes just have to look both ways and be careful.

      Dunno. Not sure. This bike guy was certainly a lot more bike-positive before there were so many of us, of them.