Over the past decade, the City of New York has begun to take bike transportation seriously. Approximately 800 miles of bike lanes and paths and 5,000 bike racks have been installed within the five boroughs, and more projects are underway (DOT, 2014). This spring will mark the second year anniversary of the popular bike-share program, Citi Bike, and the one-year anniversary of Mayor De Blasio’s pedestrian safety initiative, Vision Zero. As infrastructure and safety measures for bicyclists continue to improve (NYC was claimed the most bike-friendly city in America by BICYCLING magazine 2014), at what point will NYC bicyclists start following traffic laws?
It is no secret that a number of New Yorkers on motor-less two wheels neglect to follow the rules of the road. On any given day, packs of them may stroll through red lights or ride illegally down one-way streets right in front of your eyes, not to mention those of the NYPD. The ongoing debate between officers, bicyclists, drivers, and pedestrians, however, is not so much about whether or not bike laws are being followed, but rather, why they should be if the circumstances appear safe.
A common defense of “disobedient” bicyclists is that extra police enforcement discourages people from riding altogether, and the focus for improving bicyclist behavior should instead be on infrastructure. During the NYPD’s two-week ticketing crackdown (Operation Safe Cycle) in August of 2014, bicyclists claimed to be unfairly targeted and sometimes falsely accused of breaking bike laws. There were 4,300 moving violations given out during the experiment (NYTimes, 2014), but any long-term impacts are unclear.
Vision Zero’s bike-related injury and fatality data does not include who was at fault in an accident. For example, the website’s interactive maps display bike accident locations and separately showcase hotspots of bad bicycling behavior, but the overall plan fails to address the relationship between these two issues. Furthermore, policy makers regularly group bicyclists into a general category with either drivers or pedestrians, resulting in a mishmash of inferential statistics and a general indifference to organizing NYC’s bike system with anything but lines of paint and signs. It seems that an extensive, multi-agency study that includes thorough research on biking behavior has not been performed since the City’s “Bicycle Fatalities and Serious Injuries: 1996 to 2005” – an unsettling circumstance considering how much NYC’s bike population and infrastructure have increased.
By 2017, Citi Bike will have added 6,000 more bikes and hundreds of new stations to its system. The time is now for a comprehensive plan to transform bicycling behavior, before another fatal accident occurs in Central Park and before transportation inefficiencies between drivers, pedestrians and an increasing number of bicyclists normalize any further. Relying on the idea that infrastructure will naturally create a respectful sea of bicyclists is risky. We need to keep in mind that this is New York, where the unofficial biking mascot is a reckless, miraculously coordinated messenger. The root causes of bad bicycling behavior extend beyond just feeling unsafe. Such is the case even in Copenhagen, where over 90 percent of bicyclists follow traffic laws. If initiatives on bicycling behavior are to be stepped up, to what extent should they be from the top down, if at all? Help share your thoughts on NYC’s bicycling situation by completing this survey and learn more about safe biking practices here.
This post was written by a student enrolled in the Capstone Seminar course in the undergraduate program in public policy at Hunter College. Any opinions expressed here are solely those of the student.
