New York City has awakened to the potential of two-wheeled transportation. Since 2006, the city has built over 250 miles of protected bike lanes. CitiBike, the nation’s largest bike share system, was established in 2013 and now boasts 140,000 members. In the past decade, the number of people regularly cycling in the city has doubled.
Despite this progress, the city has a long way to go to make our streets safe enough to expand cycling for everyone. People on bikes in the city still tend to be young and male, a sign that riding a bike on our streets are still too dangerous to attract women, elderly, children, and less skilled-riders. By contrast, advanced European cycling countries have a 50-50 male to female cyclist ratio.
Cycling can be a crucial component to making our city’s transportation system more efficient and equitable. Bicycles can solve many of the problems New Yorkers have getting around the city. On our traffic-clogged streets, bikes often move faster than taxis for short-distance trips. Second, our streets can move far more people on bikes than in cars, simply because bikes take up far less space and require less distance between other street users to maneuver safely. Third, cycling can help New Yorkers can save a lot of money on transportation if they can get around without needed a car or take fewer taxis. Last, as transportation has now become the largest contributor to carbon emissions, expanding environmentally sustainable mobility has become a global imperative.
An affordable and reliable transportation option like cycling can be especially beneficial to working class outer borough areas such as Jackson Heights, Queens, and Morrisania, Bronx where transit options are less rich and owning a car is too expensive for most residents. Unfortunately, better bike infrastructure and bike share has yet to arrive in many outer borough neighborhoods.
The bicycle can solve another problem that has long plagued residents of these areas: getting to the subway. While everyone’s attention is fixed on the struggling subways, for many residents, getting to and back from the subway is half the battle. More than one third of New Yorkers live more than a third of a mile from the closest subway station. Few efficient options exist to help them with this “first and last mile.” Walking is slow and the buses right now are not that much faster.
The subway must be fixed, and hopefully if Albany can fund MTA Transit chief Andy Byford’s Fast Forward plan through congestion pricing and a Millionaire’s Tax, we may well be on our way. But for all New Yorkers to enjoy the full benefits of a modernized subway, better transportation to get to and from the subway must be part of the equation. The three year bus redesign is a crucial step to update bus routes so that they will go faster and where people need to go. For others, reaching the subway by bike might be the quickest and most reliable option.
To see the potential of bike-train connections, visit the Netherlands. When you step outside a train station in the Netherlands, you will encounter a sea of parked bicycles. In Amsterdam, the bike parking facilities outside and under the central train station can hold up to 10,000 bikes, and they are often full. In fact, over 50% of passengers on Dutch trains reach the station by bicycle.
The Dutch blueprint for bicycle connections to the train is simple. First, they lay down a complete network of “low-stress” bike lanes. Next, provide ample and secure bike parking outside train stations. Just as people of all ages, genders, and abilities ride the train, the Dutch set out to make their bike network for everyone. The rule is that the bike network should be designed for a 60 year-old woman carrying two grocery bags.
New York City can implement a similar bike-train scheme in the outer boroughs at subway stations that serve a high percentage of passengers who travel more than half a mile to reach it. It would take a strong political commitment to building safe, low-stress bike infrastructure in every neighborhood, expanding bike share to every neighborhood across the five boroughs, and re-purposing inefficient vehicle parking spaces next to train stations for two-wheeled vehicle parking. This investment would be minimal compared to costlier alternatives of expanding ferry service or extending subway lines. It would serve more than just the goal of making people’s commutes a little easier: it would bring about greater equity our transportation system and help ensure that economic opportunity is within reach of all New Yorkers.
