Biking 'fastest growing' way to get around NYC

Despite the dangers, biking is New York City's “fastest growing mode of transportation,” says City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who herself bikes to work in lower Manhattan, about a mile from her Greenwich Village home.

The number of cyclists has jumped by 80 percent in the past decade — to 185,000 among the more than 8 million city denizens.

City officials say they've also worked to make the city more biker friendly. They note the hundreds of miles of marked bike paths created in recent years, safety awareness campaigns and handouts of free helmets to unprotected cyclists.

Over that time, bicycle accidents have fallen more than 40 percent.

“A lot of people consider it an act of bravery to get on a bike in New York City,” Sadik-Khan says. “But we've created a biking network that affords more security for bicyclists — a safer and healthier way to get around.” Still, the big city presents daunting safety problems for its thriving cycling population.

Barbara Ross remembers being “doored” in Manhattan — a car door suddenly flying open on a city street as her bicycle crashed into it.

When she commutes to work from her Lower East Side apartment to the World Financial Center, construction sometimes blocks the bike lane and forces her into traffic while cars zoom by, inches away.

“I just hold my breath,” she says.

Maura Tobias, a bookkeeper for a Quaker organization cautiously pedaling a rusting Schwinn mountain bike, says she and her boyfriend have commuted to work on bicycles every day — except in blizzards.

“But I avoid big cross-town streets like this as much as possible because of the buses and the big trucks,” she says as she heads through a busy intersection at Park Avenue and East 23rd Street.

The city is dotted with eerie reminders to beware: junker “ghost bikes” painted white and decked with flowers to memorialize cyclists at the spots where they died.

But statistics show that cycling accidents are falling steadily as the biking population rises.

Between 2000 and 2008, 177 cyclists were killed in accidents, at a steady rate of 15 to 20 a year. The city now has 420 miles of marked bike lanes and paths along the streets in all five boroughs — half of those created in the past three years.

Another 200 miles are off the street, including Central Park and other green oases like the Hudson River path.

Three specially designed street lanes are separated from moving traffic by parked cars, which Sadik-Khan calls “a wall of steel.” Two are on Manhattan's far West Side and the third snakes downtown through the city's Soho, Little Italy and Chinatown.

“They're heavenly lanes,” says Tobias, but dangerous in another way. “It's so ideal you can go into a dream state and not pay attention.”

Even on the waterfront bike path, she is alert to racing bikers suddenly hot on the trail of slower riders unless they get out of the way. “I stay all the way on the right side, like a car driver going in the slow lane.”

In general, however, a bicycle in New York is often “the fastest way to get around,” says Sadik-Khan.

The bottom line, cyclists say: Ride everywhere and keep your eyes open.

The city has spent US$1.5 million for an advertising campaign called LOOK, reminding drivers and bikers to watch out for each other. And in the past three years, 23,000 free helmets have been distributed; they're required for children, bike messengers and delivery people.

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