One of the great misfortunes of my life is that I don’t live in Red Hook. The distance between my apartment in Bushwick (near the border of Bed-Stuy) and the Star-Revue office at the foot of Van Brunt Street is six miles.
Google Maps says the journey takes 37 minutes by bike, but I can do it in 30 if I’m motivated. Since I do most of my actual writing at home, I don’t have to come to the office every day, but I like to stop in and chat about ideas with George and Nathan, and then I also cover events in Red Hook. It’s not a bad commute, at least now that winter is over.
Before I moved to Brooklyn, I was a fairly experienced urban cyclist in San Francisco. I got pretty good at it because I was always late for work and had to become powerful and fearless in order to turn my 23-minute commute into an 18-minute commute.
SF has brutal hills but no snow or ice and not as much rain as NYC. All in all, I’d probably take the hills, especially since they come with more bike lanes per mile of blacktop, but Brooklyn isn’t too bad either.
After I got here, I traded in my touring bike with a triple crankset for a single-speed road bike. I arrived expecting everyone in Brooklyn to ride a fixie – stereotype-ridden anti-hipster polemics from the mid-2000s had informed my perception of the borough – but by now the fixie trend is basically over. I’m not sure Brooklynites have the energy to be hipsters anymore. Trump’s election probably ended the era.
Now, when I do encounter a rider on a fixed-gear bike with no brakes, it’s sort of exciting: since the posers have abandoned the fad, the only people still left on those bikes are hardcore nutcases, and if I catch one in front of me in the bike lane, I know it’ll be a great challenge to keep up without getting arrested or running anyone over. These riders seem to inhabit a never-ending action movie.
One time, on DeKalb Avenue, I got a ticket for running a red light on my bike. Bicyclists run red lights all the time – the standard practice, except at particularly dangerous crossings, is to treat them more like stop signs or yield signs and to hope that, if there are any cops in the vicinity, they’ll regard this discreet illegality as a victimless crime and choose to look the other way. In this case, I committed the infraction directly in front of a squad car, so brazenly that it must’ve looked like a deliberate act of disrespect, so I don’t blame the officer for stopping me. In a throwback to my San Francisco habits, I was running late for a work event, and my frantic energy overwhelmed my judgment. The violation cost about $200.
Drivers deeply resent cyclists who don’t strictly follow the rules of the road. We’re supposed to, but the truth is that the rules were written for cars, and bikes aren’t cars. The main difference is the effort of acceleration: if every cyclist truly had to come to a complete stop at every stop sign, hardly anyone would ever bike, and the world would be a dirtier, unhealthier place.
In part, drivers dislike cyclists because they believe that cyclists are self-righteous and feel superior on account of their greener, more active mode of transportation. The reason drivers believe this is that it’s true. Cars suck. When building a city, planners should aim primarily to create an environment where people mostly don’t need to use them.
If legislators gave cyclists their own set of rules for the road, the perception of “special treatment” would so anger the drivers as to inspire violent conflict. Instead, urban cycling (as it’s actually practiced) lives in a state of slippery legality, with mixed levels of enforcement. On the whole, the authorities recognize that even reckless cyclists don’t pose the same menace to public safety as their counterparts behind the wheel, but in communities of color, they might go as far as to arrest cyclists for riding on the sidewalk, for instance.
I don’t think many people would ride on the sidewalk if they had better options. In addition to my work in Red Hook, which offers a mostly safe passage through Downtown Brooklyn, I do freelance assignments for a newspaper in Canarsie, which means riding through Brownsville on my way to various meetings. I’m always worried that a driver will kill me on the way. Bike lanes are hard to come by in that part of Brooklyn.
I’ve had two run-ins with cars in my cycling career. The first was in San Francisco. The other was near my apartment in Bushwick, when I tried to make a left turn from Broadway onto Palmetto Street, and a car hit me from behind just after I’d finished checking for oncoming traffic. Drivers sometimes get frustrated when they’re stuck behind bikes, even when the bike is traveling at the speed of traffic, and they experience a need to pass at all costs.
At the same time that I began to make my left turn, the driver decided to pass me on the left. She braked when she realized what was happening, but it was a little too late. By that point, my bike was almost perpendicular to the car, and the impact knocked me to the ground. She seemed to think it was my fault. It’s possible that I didn’t use my arm to signal my turn ahead of time; I don’t remember.
I stood up, brushed myself off, and told the driver I was fine. With my permission, she left. In fact, I had a small bruise on my back and a broken wheel, but it was no big deal. The driver behind her stopped as he passed and rolled down the window while I got my bearings. “You should’ve stayed on the ground, called an ambulance, and sued the hell out of her,” he said.
