For Urban Cycling, Some Growing Pains

A few months ago, in July, a small Florida-based bicycle shop called Republic Bikes entered into a partnership with Urban Outfitters. The company, which launched in March of this year, offered an eye-catching deal: one off-the-shelf frame (in three sizes), one set of parts, and an endless color palette—configurable over the Internet, all for $399.

The guardians of urban cycling did not react kindly.

The new bicycle, marketed as a gesture toward Amsterdam-style biking egalitarianism, was pilloried on bike message boards for selling out a culture, and for potentially arming a legion of wannabes with a shoddy set of wheels and a style that was stolen, not earned. 

This, from Bikesnob, was illustrative: "To me, this is what the Urban Outfitters fixie-as-accessory represents--it's a collective, cathartic round of vomiting after the ‘epic’ night out that is the fixed-gear trend. Don't fight it, all you ‘OGs’ who have been riding fixed-gears since waaay back in 2005. Don't fight it, all you fixed-gear freestylers. Don't fight it, messengers. Just let it out."

The complaints, though, ought to be music to the ears of longtime cycling proselytizers—a surefire indication that something is working. After all, what veteran bikers across the country and especially in New York are reacting to is the success of concerted, long-running efforts to get more people in the cities onto bikes, creating an increasingly powerful political constituency and, not incidentally, a more lucrative demographic to market to.

It’s the sound of boom times for urban cycling.

“The number of people bicycling in New York is doubling every five years,” says Wiley Norvell, communications director of the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. “Pretty soon we’ll have half a million cyclists on the street, a big enough number to drive significant changes in the way cars, cyclists and pedestrians interact.” 

According to Norvell, on any given day 185,000 New Yorkers take to the streets for work or recreation. While the city Department of Transportation numbers are more conservative (to the tune of 30,100 in 2008), the department still estimates that the number of daily bicycle commuters alone jumped 35 percent between 2007 and 2008. 

In the '80s and '90s, New York City cyclists were regarded as a curiosity, a death-defying species hardened by their exposure to an inhospitable car climate and a lack of bike lanes. (The Department of Transportation estimates that a scant 6,000 cyclists a day took to New York streets before 1980).  

Adam Pollock, a longtime commuter who currently lives in Red Hook, says it was once a small, tight-knit community.

“When I started it was basically delivery guys, Dominicans, messengers, and a small group of regular commuters,” he said. “There was a mutual recognition, being one of the few people who biked. You said 'hi,' shared war stories, swapped information.” 

“During the Giuliani years, cycling wasn’t recognized as a serious means of transportation,” Norvell explains.

Under the auspices of environmental reform and quality-of-life improvement, Michael Bloomberg has encouraged legislation and development projects to make cycling in New York less of a curiosity and more of a reality. Not the least of these was the replacement of former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall with Janette Sadik-Khan, a relative outsider to city politics. 

“In Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg found a reformer for the future. Last year New York striped 80 miles of new bike lanes. And they’re higher-quality lanes than before. Right now, nobody has bike lanes like New York,” says Norvell.

Among the innovations he mentions are the segregated 9^th Avenue bike lane, the car-separate Grand Street lane and an emphasis on creating routes that connect different neighborhoods in a contiguous fashion. 

And even as biking has been made safer for more people, it has become more broadly fashionable. Glossy spreads featuring models on three-speed cruisers have recently appeared in the pages of magazines ranging from Vogue to Monocle. Long a staple of bike messengers, fixed-gear bikes (a single-gear bike, often ridden without brakes) have become a ubiquitous sight in the hipper neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco, Paris and Tokyo—often adorned with brightly colored components costing hundreds of dollars. And thus trend-sensitive fashion retailers including Urban Outfitters, Topshop, G-Star and Jack Spade have been quick to capitalize on cycling’s cachet. 

As a result, city cycling is fast evolving from a niche community to an everyday activity. “When you look at the growth,” Norvell explains, “it’s not the commercial cyclists but the commuters that are growing faster than anything else.” 

Inevitably, the explosive growth of cycling has led to tension. Local businesses, business alliances and residents bristle at changes to their streets. The NYPD has begun cracking down on cyclists riding on sidewalks, levying heavy fines. Pedestrians, angered by close calls with unruly riders, are increasingly speaking out at community board meetings, sometimes delaying or even scuttling the addition of new bike lanes to neighborhoods.

But some of the people with the greatest stake in the long-term well-being of biking in cities like New York are optimistic about the future. Mark Simpson, vice presiden t of the recently formed cycling-themed consulting firm BICI, is betting that the mainstreaming cycling culture is going to create new opportunities for the private sector.

“It’s now become normal to ride a bicycle,” he says, “and that means that there’s going to be a real pressure on property owners, builders, and developers to accommodate new bikers.” 

BICI’s first major opportunity comes in the form of a bill recently passed by City Council. Originally introduced by Councilman David Yassky, Intro 871 will—as of January 2010—require that commercial buildings provide on-premises bicycle access if requested. BICI plans to offer consulting services to help property owners design, make, and get city approval for the appropriate changes. “Cyclists have gained a lot of ground recently in terms of infrastructure and recognition. Now it’s the nuts-and-bolts stuff that has to be worked out,” Simpson says. 

So the question, maybe, boils down to this: As biking has gained so much ground and so many new entrants so quickly, is the cycling community ready to be a fact of life rather than an outsider advocate for change? 

Because certainly, the mainstreaming of biking is going to mean that things, inevitably, get a bit more boring. In winning the fight for its own legitimacy, bicycling is now faced with the prospect of becoming a stable political constituency—with a myriad of small policy issues to address but without the underdog’s flag to unite them. As Simpson puts it, “After the cool factor goes away, you still need facilities, education and infrastructure to continue to normalize cycling.” 

“We’ve maxed out the advocacy agenda,” he says. “So what’s next?” 

What’s next in the longer term is all but certain: more and more cyclists. What’s next in the short term, however, may be a reformation of cycling culture itself. Less running red lights, more yielding for pedestrians. Less weaving in and out of traffic, more using bike lanes. Hand signals, helmets, etiquette.

All necessary, Simpson says, “to keep the pendulum from swinging the other way.” 

Pollock agrees. “Cyclists no longer need to be the brightly colored fish,” he said. “The best thing I can do for perceptions of cycling in the city is say, ‘Look at me, I’m ordinary.’”