Parking Purgatory

I live in Astoria, which is about as close as you can get to Manhattan without being in it.  Here, there are people who own private houses but not cars.  That arrangement may be unique, at least in New York City (if not the United States) to Astoria and, perhaps, parts of neighboring Long Island City and Sunnyside.

Some of those homeowners rent their driveways to Manhattanites.  Some condo and co-op owners do likewise with their parking spaces. Some Manhattan drivers pay more per month for those parking spots than I paid for my first apartment in New York!

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised:  After all, real estate of any sort is in short supply, and therefore expensive, in the Big Apple.  And New York drivers have long complained about the difficulty of finding parking spots:  Indeed, I've heard some claim that in Hell or Purgatory, one is resigned to wander the streets of this city in pursuit of unavailable places to leave one's vehicle.

As a cyclist, I used to feel so fortunate to be spared from such ordeals.  Note that I said "used to."  These days, I sometimes have as much difficulty finding space on a parking meter, signpost or other immobile object--never mind a bike rack--to lock up my ride as any benighted motorist has in finding a place to leave his or her wheels.

I admit that, as someone who's had bikes stolen and damaged, I am fairly picky about where I park and lock.  If I attach my bike to a meter or post, I prefer not to use the side closer to the curb:  On more than one occasion, I've returned to my locked-up bike only to find that a motorist backed his or her rear wheels on the sidewalk and left me with a "New York Pretzel"--and I'm not talking about those snacks you can buy from a sidewalk cart!

I know that some parking lots allow bikes to park for a fee:  In fact, I've used a couple of them.  But could the day come when homeowners in my neighborhood rent out their spaces to Manhattan cyclists?  And will such spaces cost more than I now pay for my dwelling?

 

A Threepenny Atala

If you were going to turn your bike into a tribute to someone who is/was not a professional cyclist, who would he or she be?

When I rode my Colnago and Mondonico, I thought about inscribing the chainstay with "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita". But I decided against it when I realized it might have been too long for the short chainstays of those racing bikes.  Besides, saying that you're in the middle of the journey of our lives is kind of an odd thing to write--especially for a young person--on a racing bike. 

Then again, while I was racing and training I probably didn't encounter very many people who could read medieval Florentine Italian. And, if I do say so myself, I would have been riding too fast for them to read it anyway. 

I don't think I encountered very many people who were familiar with the works of Bertolt Brecht, either.  Such a consideration seems not to have deterred someone in California who turned a '70's Atala into a rolling monument to the German writer.

After painting the frame gray, its owner inscribed it with lines from Brecht's poems, plays and essays.

This section of the right (drive-side) seat stay is adorned with this gem, "When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible."

The bike is for sale, minus its wheels, handlebars and stem, on eBay.  "Will make a great fixie, single speed and art school punk chick magnet", according to the listing.

More Bike Safety Mythology

A brief article on Yahoo Finance outlines the growth of the Citibike bike share program in New York City.

What's particularly striking is that the data shows a steady, consistent growth in the number of trips taken and number of miles ridden.  I haven't taken a math or a statistics class in a long time, so if there's a term (which, I believe, there is) for the sort of curve plotted in those charts, I've forgotten it.  But, even to a decidedly un-numeric person like me, the graph and figures are remarkable.

The writer of the article did a pretty good job until the last two paragraphs.  "Wondering how all of this extra biking has impacted New York's emergency rooms?" he asks.  He attempts to answer it by the city's Department of Transportation studies that show the average risk of serious injury to a cyclist plummeted 73 percent between 2000 and 2011. 

Now, perhaps I'm reading something into his article that isn't there, but I had the impression that he was implicitly relating the decrease to the Citibike program. If he is, then there's a problem:  the bike share didn't start until May of this year.

Then he goes on to promulgate a fallacy: that the decrease in the number of injuries and fatalities is, in part, a result of the construction of bike lanes.

As I've said in earlier posts,  bike lanes don't necessarily make cycling safer, especially if they are poorly-designed or constructed.  In fact, they can put cyclists in more peril when they have to turn or exit the lane--or if it ends--and they are thrust into a traffic lane with motorists and pedestrians who do not anticipate them.

I maintain (again, as in earlier posts) that nothing does more to make cycling safer on urban streets and byways than what I call the human infrastructure of cycling.  Even more important than the best-conceived and -constructed bike lanes is cyclists',motorists' and pedestrians' cognizance of each other.  That is achieved, I think, over a generation or two of cyclists and motorists sharing the streets on more-or-less equal terms and of not thinking of each other as, essentially, different races of people.  Such a state of affairs--which I have found in much of Europe--comes about from not only sheer numbers of everyday cyclists (commuters and people who use ride their bikes to shop, go to the movies and such) but also from large numbers of motorists who are (or recently were) regular cyclists themselves.

That is the reason why I always felt safer riding even in those European cities like Paris, where there are relatively few bike lanes, than in almost any American city in which I cycled.  And, by the way, the City of Light and other European capitals didn't have bike share programs until recently.