The Bike Wars Are Over, and the Bikes Won -- NYMag

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Never underestimate the anger directed at bicyclists. They ride too fast, terrorizing pedestrians. They ride too slow, dangerously obstructing drivers. They don’t wear helmets or reflective bike gear, jeopardizing themselves. They shouldn’t ride in streets, which are hostile, car-only zones. They shouldn’t have their own lanes because there aren’t enough of them to take away space from cars. Yet there are so many of them that they’re running down pedestrians and therefore shouldn’t ride on sidewalks.

The antipathy extends to the painted lanes that bikers ride on. . . .

I saw no reason why New York couldn’t become one of the world’s great biking cities — or why it wouldn’t want to. But the act of actually achieving it launched the bitterest public fight over transportation in this city since Jane Jacobs held the line against Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway half a century earlier. By the time the fight localized — in October 2010, when police attempted to control hundreds of dueling protesters for and against a new bike lane along Prospect Park — The Brooklyn Paper called the proposal “the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip.” . . .

We succeeded in building as many bike lanes after the bikelash as before it. The number of riders doubled from 2007 to 2013, representing a fourfold increase measured over a decade. We launched Citi Bike in the final months of our time in office. The system is in the process of doubling in size and has surpassed 25 million rides in less than three years, part of a quadrupling in bike ridership citywide since 2000. New York now has more than 1,000 miles of bike lanes, and Bicycling magazine named us the nation's best biking city for the first time ever.

None of the bike-lane opponents’ predictions has come to pass. City streets have never been safer, more economically thriving, or offered more transportation options than they do today. My successor as Transportation commissioner is greatly expanding the network of bike paths and doubling the size of the city’s bike-share system.

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The Bike Wars Are Over, and the Bikes Won -- NYMag

MoBikeFed comment: When you design cities for people rather than cars, the people like it. It makes a better place to live, and it is safer for everyone--people who walk, people who bicycle, and people who drive.

The only thing astonishing about the New York story is why the city wasn't doing this decades before. But they are doing it now, it works, and both citizens and politicians support it.

Sadik-Khan and the advocates and city leaders who supported her work and withstood the irrational backlash are truly American heroes--the people who work behind the scenes to make our communities better places to live and work.