Citibikes Are Nice, But We Need More Bike Racks

In New York City, my hometown, 460,000 daily trips were made by bicycle.  That is up from 270,000 trips in 2011--a 70 percent increase.

Some of that, of course, has to do with the Citibike share program, which launched in 2013.  The operative word here is "some":  Many more cyclists are riding to work on their own bicycles.

During the past four fiscal years, the city has set up an average of 1633 new racks.  Now, what do you think the average was during the previous four years?

2808.  In other words, 42 percent fewer racks have been installed during the past four years, which have fallen squarely in Bill de Blasio's administration, than in the previous four, which were mainly under Mike Bloomberg's administration.

What that means is that the city lacks "essential infrastructure" needed if bicycling is truly to become a transportation option, according to Bike New York spokesman Jon Orcutt.  "Everybody's talking about Citibikes and scooters, but it's the humble rack that needs more attention," added Orcutt, who served as the city's Department of Transportation policy director under Bloomberg.

Citibikes are fine for commuting if there's a bike port near your home and another near your workplace--that is, if there are available bikes when you leave for work and if there's an available space in the dock when you get to your job.  

You can ride your own bike, but there might not be a dedicated bike rack or other safe facility at your destination. Or, if there is such a facility, there might not be any space available when you arrive--or it might simply be unusable for whatever reason.

So, you look for a signpost, lamppost or other seemingly immovable object--which aren't as impervious to bike thieves as they seem.  And they might be full, too. Then, you lock to fencing, scaffolding or even a waste basket.  I've even seen a bike locked to the chain that holds the cap to a fire hydrant.

Those things, of course, are easy work for a thief who has the time you spend in your workplace or classroom.  Rose Uscianowski, an organizer for Transportation Alternatives, learned that the hard way when she locked her bike to scaffolding in front of a building on John Street, in the city's financial district.  "I came out of my office and found a bar of scaffolding on the floor and my bike missing," she lamented.  "The only reason I locked up to scaffolding is that there are only a few racks on John Street, and they're always taken up."

Even scarcer are racks by subway stations or other public transportation facilities.  For people who live in areas that are a mile or more from the nearest subway or bus station--which is the case for people in the outlying areas of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, and for nearly everybody in Staten Island--truly having the option of riding to transit and feeling more or less certain that your bike will be there when you return might do as much, or more than, congestion pricing or other proposed methods to reduce traffic.

Plus, I think that making bike-parking facilities available at public transportation stations will help the public to see that cycling is a transportation alternative for people from all walks (pardon the pun) of life rather than the plaything of the young and privileged, and tourists.

For Once, I Hope The Results Are Fixed

Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.

Michael Cohen echoed something I've thought for some time.  But even if he hadn't made that the remark at the end of his testimony yesterday, the talking heads and political bloggers would have been talking about who might run against the incumbent, and whether Cohen's testimony makes it more likely that Trump will indeed lose to one of them.

So many people have already "tossed their hats into the ring" for the Democratic nomination that it's no surprise when anyone else--including someone almost no one outside of his home towns has heard of--does the same.

Until last fall, Beto O'Rourke fit that category. Then the three-term Congressman narrowly lost an election for one of Texas' two US Senate seats to Ted Cruz, who himself came in second to Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination two years earlier.

I'm still learning about O'Rourke.  He sounds pretty good to me.  I must say, though, that even though I like most of his views, there is something else about him that appeals to me:

Lest you think he is trying to appeal to the hipsters on his Surly Steamroller fixed-gear bike, here he is on an '80s Bridgestone:

Waddya think? Could he beat el Trumpo?

From The Water To The Port

Three years ago, the Canal St. Martin was drained.  The City of Paris does that about every ten or fifteen years.

In dredgings past (sounds like a series of old therapy sessions!), the "treasures" at the bottom of the Canal included home furnishings, street signs, gold coins(!), World War I shells and even a car.  But the most recent drainage served as a sort of geological record of changes in the neighborhood around the canal--mostly the 10th Arrondissement--and in the City of Light itself.

The streets around the waterway have become the sites of bars, restaurants and clubs.  (The Bataclan, site of a mass shooting during a November 2015 concert, stands literally steps from the canal.)  The area is home to "Bobos"--a term combining "bohemian" and "bourgeois".  They are probably the Parisian equivalent of hipsters. At any rate, they share many of the same tastes with their Brooklyn counterparts.  

They include a thirst for craft beers (French as well as American) and wines.  Empty bottles and cans bearing those labels littered the bottom of the canal when it was dredged. So did another passion of that evanescent group:  bicycles--specifically, those from Velib, the city's bike-share service.

As far as I know, neither of the city's two canals--the Harlem River Ship Canal and the Gowanus Canal--has ever been drained.  Interestingly, the Gowanus--one of the most toxic waterways in the United States--flows, like the St. Martin, through a hipsterizing (Think of it as the hipster equivalent of gentrifying.) neighborhood.  According to an urban legend, the Mafia used to dump their "hits" in the Gowanus because the bodies would dissolve.  

Which brings me to this question:  Could a Citibike survive a dive into a city canal?

Somehow I doubt it would be even as intact as the bike in the photo.  That Citibike, missing since September 2017, showed up in the bike-share service's port at 73rd Street and Riverside Drive, where filmmaker Ted Geoghegan found it.  Its coating of barnacles and mud indicates that it spent time in the Hudson River--which, at that point, is actually an estuary.  

No one, it seems, can explain how it got from the river (or wherever it was) to the bike dock?  Did a thief take it, dump it, feel guilty and dive into the water to fetch it?  That seems unlikely because, well, that's not what thieves usually do, but also because if the thief did indeed dump the bike in the river, he or she wouldn't have found it in the same spot, or anywhere nearby.  The more likely scenario is that some boater or fisher found it and, not knowing what else to do, quietly brought it to the bike port.

That bike is more than likely beyond repair.  Spending almost any amount of time in the water would have destroyed the bike's electronics, and the growth on the rest of the bike indicates that the brackish water has corroded the rest of the bike so that it's structurally unsound, and its moving parts are probably irreparable. 

(Interesting aside:  The Gowanus and Harlem Ship are the only two canals in New York City today. In the 17th Century, however, lower Manhattan was laced with canals. That's not surprising when you realize the area was then called Nieuw Amsterdam, and the Dutch settlers were following a model of urban planning for which their capital is famous.)