The day after Earth Day; NYC life and politics

Alright, I'm overdue for a soapbox post, so here it is, and on something I do feel very strongly about.

As many of you no doubt know, I don't drive and very rarely take public transportation. Biking is easily the fastest way to get around the city and it simply makes more sense from a public policy standpoint as well. But day after day, millions of New Yorkers and New York commuters get into their cars, usually by themselves with very little cargo, and hit the roads at rush hour. Then they crawl through overcrowded arteries, bang on their horns and get frustrated. The next day they do it all over again. To cite the old truism, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

The main reason people don't bike is the perceived safety risk, but biking with the proper precautions -- a helmet, reflectors, a horn and at night bike lights -- is actually safer than travelling by auto. 97% of bicycle fatalities involve riders not wearing helmets. We are zero-emission transportation and take up far less space than cars. And the more bikes there are on the streets, the safer it is for everyone. Yet the typical reaction to us by drivers is purely irrational -- when I pass a car in a traffic jam it's not like the car would be moving any faster if I'd never left my apartment, yet so often the driver of said car reacts with aggression. And the collective, public policy reaction to the bike flowering that's taken place here in the last decade seems to me even more irrational.

New York's Critical Mass has been besieged by hordes of cops since the RNC 2004 ride, with the police routinely engaging in behavior exponentially more threatening to public safety than the riders. The bicyclists follow traffic regulations during this ride, so the police had to make a new set of rules to continue to harass the event - rules which will now be used to stifle many of the most effective forms of public expression and demonstration, and on all sorts of issues.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a far-ranging, practical common sense sustainability initiative, as our city grows and sea levels rise. I did not vote for my fellow Bostonian, mainly due to his development stances, but really think these policies deserve support. Today however, the local airwaves are aflame with negative reaction mainly focusing on the congestion pricing aspect of the plan. At the same time, in Brooklyn, the first demolitions were scheduled to make way for Bruce Ratner's so called "Forest" City mega-congestion development.

Also today, the city council overrode the mayor's veto of its anti-pedicab legislation. It is distressing to me, in this supposedly progressive and forward looking enclave, that after so long bikes still seem out of place to most people and worthy of suppression. Often violent suppression by spontaneous road raging drivers, and organized, premeditated violence on the part of the police department. If we can't do it in New York City, what hope is there for real changes that are needed in our wider society to avoid what so many acknowledge are catastrophic consequences?

Here are some good links to local environmental news and resources:

Transportation Alternatives
Time's Up!
New York City Streets Renaissance
Green Apple Map
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn
(The above non-profit organizations are all doing fantastic work. If you can afford to make a donation I strongly recommend all of them. Also, whether you can give or not, do go check out Time's Up!'s bike workshops on Houston St. The schedule is on their website.)

Also, if you care to read further these blogs are more exclusively devoted to the subject than I:
Bike Blog
Streets Blog
On NY Turf

Personally, I find that the choices I've made are anything but altruistic. It simply makes more sense to live this way, and as it happens it's also better for the environment -- in the long term and immediately. More and more people make similar choices every day, and come to the same conclusion.