June 2013. Just ten days into its existence, the Citi Bike sharing program in New York City had logged more than 100,000 rides. (Frank Franklin II / AP)
If in a few years we're talking about the summer that New York tried that thing with all the blue bicycles, we'll laugh. And then sigh. And then shudder. And then laugh!
It was supposed to be simple. People will have easy access to bikes; they'll drive less, and exercise more. We'll have less pollution and fewer heart attacks. It works in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hangzhou, Stockholm, Helsinki, Milan, and Copenhagen -- it has to work here, too.
Remember, though, this is New York. When something happens simply, you're not in New York. Drop 6,000 bicycles into the heart of the most overpopulated, eccentric zip codes in the hemisphere, and what we get is an old-fashioned bicycle freak-out. It's like when you get a new wheel for your hamsters, and you're excited to see how they use it, so you run home and drop it into their cage. But you didn't realize there were some strange animal scents from the pet store that were still on the wheel, and so instead of running to play on it, the hamsters panic and start eating their young.
We fear change, and we don't like new things in our space. They are eye sores. They take up parking spaces. They're used by tourists who ride on sidewalks, don't know their way around, and are trying to take pictures and read maps and text while riding. Women don't wear enough clothing while riding. At this point someone is already writing a chapter in a health policy book about the unanticipated safety hazards of large-scale urban biking, another in a city planning book about implementing massive bike programs into traffic flows unequipped to deal with them, and another in a sociology book about the cultural-economic disparities highlighted by the program. And probably something in young adult, too. Which isn't really relevant, just inevitable because everyone everywhere is writing a YA novel.
Bikes sit at a docking station in Manhattan (Frank Franklin II / AP)
(Carol Allegri / Reuters)
When Citigroup signed on to privately fund New York's bike-share project, surely paying handsomely to put their brand on 10,000 searing-blue bikes the multinational financial services corporation probably didn't anticipate that they would become objects of derision. ("Should we pay X million dollars to put our name on a thousand moving obstacles that will clog streets and sidewalks, incurring the hatred of Manhattan's wealthy driver-car-bound elite, our most valued clients? Yes? Okay, let's do that. Now, who wants lunch? I want a panini.")
Pulitzer-Prize-winning Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz summed up the "majority of citizens'" position on the Citi bikes earlier this month, as James Fallows brought to our attention:
WSJ: Why would we want a program like this, anyway? Are we too fat? [Editor's note: Yes]
Rabinowitz: Do not ask me to enter the mind of the totalitarians running this government of the city. Look, I represent the majority of citizens. The majority of citizens of this city are appalled by what has happened. ... We now look at a city whose best neighborhoods are begrimed by these blazing blue Citi bikes. It is shocking to see how much they have snuck under the radar in the interest of the environment. ... The bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise. But even without it, the mayor's stamp on this city is permanent, unless and enterprising new mayor undertakes to re-dig all of the streets and preserve out traffic patterns.
Michael Bloomberg gets on a bicycle during a launch event May 27, 2013 (Carlo Allegri / Reuters)
Rabinowitz: The fact that a city is helpless before the driven personal and ideological passions of its leader in the interest, allegedly, of the good of the city. This can take many forms, but we have seen the most dramatic exposition of this in our city.
WSJ: With the latest example being the bike-share program.
Here's the full video of that amazing exchange:
In an interview yesterday with New York Magazine, Rabinowitz described the reaction to her comments:
Excitedly, she reached into her purse and found a greeting card a woman had sent to her. "This sums up the general attitude -- this is the biker-fanatic sensibility." She handed it to me.
"You are still a cunt," it read. I gasped.
"This is nothing," she said, laughing.
Where do the anti-bike-share Villagers want bicycles? For good number, the bicycle is most flawlessly conceived as a device with no wheels that sits in a hot windowless room next to lots of other bicycles and someone yelling at you over a microphone to pedal in a manner that "focuses on your glutes." Access to this room is exclusive.
If you're not familiar with SoulCycle, over the last six years, the New-York-based company has rebranded spinning classes as an expensive, transcendent experience ("It's mind, it's body, it's cardio"), basically by having people on spinning bikes also do upper body exercises. For example, pulling resistance bands that hang from the ceiling above them, and saying things about consciously breathing. Kelly Rippa called it "as good for your brain as it is for your body." A single 45-minute SoulCycle class costs $34, so almost a dollar per minute, to ride a stationary bike while someone physically superior to you barks about flattening your belly, sometimes by candlelight, then sells you a $44 tank-top that says "Young, Wild, Free."
Then last week comedian Fabrizio Goldstein's repurposing of the bikes in his "SoulCycle for the Homeless" video was enormously popular. Noticing that the parked Citi bikes basically work like stationary exercise bikes, without ever paying to unlock them, Goldstein staged a class:
The scene is of course problematic in all the same ways it was when that marketing agency at South by Southwest used homeless people as Wi-Fi hotspots. We could forget about the blue bikes altogether if Brooklyn could repurpose even half of its insensitive hipster comedians as a viable transportation system. Goldstein makes a good point, though: "Indoor cycling is too expensive it's not available to everybody. It's just like, I want the homeless people of New York to have the opportunity to have sick bodies." He points to his fat belly as a joke, but also the guys riding along seem to take it semi-seriously. ("My legs feel better!")
Plenty of us who can afford homes also can't or otherwise wouldn't pay for SoulCycle.
It is unfortunate that the blue bikes are the ugliest bikes imaginable, and that some people don't ride respectfully. When someone is riding near you on a sidewalk, you should be allowed to tip them over. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf noted, though, people have been complaining about sidewalk riders since the nineteenth century. Bike persist, though. Even in Paris (where their share-bikes are much nicer looking than ours), and their sidewalks no less crowded, they've made it work.
Parisian bikes look better than New York's, but you get what you pay for. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe sits on a bicycle at the 2007 launch of "Velib." (Laurent Baheux / AP)
The bottom line, though, is that one contentious month since the launch of New York's program -- with riders were as bad as they'll ever be, and the blue paint without any sun-fading, as freshly gaudy, New Yorkers still love the bikes. Numbers released yesterday from Quinnipiac University showed overwhelming approval.
If we made it through this first harried month and most people still don't hate the bikes, it's not likely they're going to start hating them once they're woven into the city's cultural identity. When London launched its bike-share program, which is probably the closest one to New York's, there were similarly vocal Hyde Park detractors. But years later, it's still alive.
A worker inspects new bicycles for hire at a storage facility in London before the launch of a public bicycle sharing program in 2010. (Suzanne Plunkett / Reuters)
With American cities like Chicago poised to launch new bike programs, too, and ongoing programs in D.C. and Minneapolis, which have yet to reject them descend into totalitarian states, it's increasingly clear the bike sharing is here to stay.
June 11, 2013. Chicago's new bike-share program, Divvy, is about to roll out with about 750 bikes at 75 solar-powered docking stations. It will expand over the next year to at least 4,000 bikes at 400 stations. Users can get a $75 annual membership or a $7 day pass. (Scott Eisen / AP)
No transport system is perfect, but for cities, bikes are the best we have. Look forward to more lessons and stories from the grand New York experiment, to inform, amuse, and challenge the rest of the country. Our own conceptual SoulCycle ("Young, wild, free"). On this eve of the Tour de France 2013, we celebrate the bicyclization of urban America.
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