On Memorial Day, I decided to head out to view the launch of the Citibike bike-share system. Riding around on my own upright Dutch 1-speed, I felt for the first time in 30 years of biking and advocating for bikes in New York that there’s hope for the bike culture of our city. I see normal people riding these simple blue bikes in a non-aggressive way, the way citizens ought to ride bicycles.
For six years I’ve been selling similar bikes to the (few) people who’ve wanted them, fighting the tide of fixed gear track bikes and “road bikes” – a euphemism for racing bikes – which have become the norm of our urban bike culture. HUB (Hudson Urban Bicycles) has barely managed to survive as a new paradigm bike shop featuring affordable bikes for transport, as opposed to sport racing machines that range in price up to $15,000.
The truth is, most bike shops want to sell you a dangerous speed bike, even though you may just want to get around town. The shop owner looks at his bottom line and sees that’s where the money is. It’s short term thinking.
However, to see new cyclists riding to work looking like Lance Armstrong or imitating bad-assed bike messengers is to understand why cyclists are not loved: New Yorkers, generally, don’t aspire to look or behave like that.
Not even well-meaning advocacy groups like Transportation Alternatives and 5-Boro Bike Club have realized the problem with our emerging bike culture. Not even the Department of Transport or the Department of Health have weighed in on the reality that novices are being sold dangerous speed machines instead of safe, practical upright bikes. Everyone seems to think if you are wearing a helmet it will protect you, and that’s all there is to it.
So in my view, at long last, there is a challenge to this hegemony which has limited the growth and scarred the image of city cycling. There will be a new icon, a new public image of the urban adult on a bicycle. The system is noble, harmless, and I guarantee you the new riders will behave better than the current crop of scary biker-dudes who have hijacked urban cycling and made it ugly.
