Editor's Letter: A backlash against bike lanes

last updated 8 January 2015

The battle over the debt ceiling may have more lasting import, but for sheer ugliness it doesn’t compare to the struggle between urban cyclists, of whom I’m one, and virtually everyone else. After years of cultural ascendancy, people who bicycle to work are now seeing a backlash against what one critic recently termed “the jack-booted tyranny of bike lanes,” 255 miles of which have been built in the past four years in New York City alone. This week the main skirmish is at the Brooklyn Supreme Court, where a few residents of the leafy Park Slope neighborhood have engaged the law firm that represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore to argue that city officials faked statistics to justify a bike lane.

That may seem like overkill on the part of the anti-cyclist crowd, but I must admit that urban cyclists can be an obnoxious bunch. Every day we’re getting our daily exercise instead of sitting in cars, reveling in our freedom from mass-transit schedules, limiting our carbon footprint, saving the world—and there’s a strong temptation to feel superior because of it. I’ve been guilty of that myself and, like Rupert Murdoch, I’m trying to be humble. I finally got a bell to warn pedestrians, rather than screaming insults at those who amble blithely across bike lanes while yakking on cell phones. I try to stop at red lights, even as hipsters and take-out delivery guys blast through cross traffic to a welter of curses and horn-honking. I’ll even wave at cabbies. Maybe my humble stab at civility will help silence the haters. But it seems more likely that on New York’s streets, as in Washington, conflict will remain the natural order of things.