`bicyclewire :\INTERVIEW\`

it's about the bike people

Name: John Kaehny
Occupation: Executive director of Transportation Alternatives
Age: 36
Currently lives in: New York City
Rides: commuter = 1993 Bridgestone MB4; non-commuter = Late 80s high-end Schwinn with Campy

Cycling in the New World

Two weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Bicyclewire.COM went to talk with John Kaehny, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, New York City's bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group. They have an office in midtown not far from Penn Station. The main difference between T.A.'s space and the offices of the architects and graphic designers on the same floor is the six bikes hanging near the T.A. reception desk.

While the office was nice, John wasn't there for our appointment. He had been running in and out of meetings around town ever since Mayor Giuliani announced that no cars with single occupants would be allowed in midtown between 6 am and 12 noon on weekdays.

John was kind enough to reschedule the discussion after hours at his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. We talked about the attack's immediate effect on transportation here, and, more generally, the age-old question of how to bring down the barriers to cycling in the great city of New York.

Jump to one of the topics listed below or read and enjoy in an old- fashioned linear manner.

CYCLING THROUGH TRAGEDY
The Restrictions on Single Occupancy Cars in Manhattan
Do Times of Crisis Equal More Cycling?
Cycling Increases After WTC Disaster
Cycling In a State of Fear
Vision Failure at City Hall
Most-Traveled Bike Path in U.S. Currently Blocked

ENCOURAGING BICYCLING
Getting More Cyclists on the Street
Number One Complaint
Why Bike Lanes Are Important
Why Bike Lanes Fail
Huge Demand For Cycling
Long-Term Repercussions of September 11

The Restrictions on Single Occupancy Cars in Manhattan
In some ways it's momentous, and had it come about because of work by Transportation Alternatives and the other transit and environmental groups in New York City as a matter of a change in philosophy, that the city was trying to reduce traffic and encouraging people to take transit or ride bikes, then I would probably be doing cartwheels in Central Park.

But it came about because of the tragedy at the World Trade Center and in particular because the police are at a state of maximum terrorist alert, and the FBI and the Police Department believe that the greatest threat to New York is a truck or a car bomb.

Because of the huge backups at the bridges and tunnels caused by the police searches, the mayor was desperate for some kind of way of reducing traffic and this is what they hit upon. So this is not a matter of a radical change in way of thinking, this is an emergency measure to buy time, for the city to come up with other things.

Do Times of Crisis Equal More Cycling?
The last time something like this was tried was in 1980, when there was an 11-day transit strike. Very similar plan. And of course once the strike was over, that ended.

This is a new time. There's never going to be an ordinary time again in New York City. Or at least for the next 20 or 30 years. It's a time where there's going to be heightened security for the foreseeable future. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the reconstruction money coming in and the rethinking of how the financial district and downtown is going to work and the fact that everyone wants more transit down there is going to change some things in New York City.

One thing we do know is that the transit strike in 1980 led to a huge increase in bicycling. That lasted for a while. Maybe five years or so.

Cycling Increases After WTC Disaster
This is an important time for New York City cycling. All East River bridges are open 24 hours a day seven days a week to bikes. And you have the Hudson River Greenway that allows a quick car-free route through Midtown, though part of that is currently blocked. Big increases in cycling activity are expected because of these changes.

Right now in New York, 100,000 people ride a bike each day. From a numbers standpoint, it's as if one in five people in San Francisco rode every day. I think it's easily possible to see cycling in New York City double in the next few years to over 200,000 cyclists a day using their bicycles for transportation.

The counts that we've done of bicycle use during this crisis have shown that there's a pretty big increase in cycling, at least in Manhattan. Somewhere on the order of 50 percent or so on the main avenues. In particular at Battery Park City and other areas south of Canal Street there's a huge increase in cycling because residents don't have transit right now, and there's no cabs down there.

Will that last? We hope. We hope it will last. Are people abandoning their cars and starting to bike? Well, at least a couple people did, just anecdotally today, on the Queensboro bridge.

Cycling In a State of Fear
One of the key things Giuliani did for cycling is knock crime way down. So that other issues besides crime could be discussed, including transportation and bicycling. And if we live in a state of fear and terror the way Israel does, for instance, everything else becomes secondary and it's very, very hard to find the political will or interest in doing innovative things. We were suffocated by crime for decades in New York City in terms of public debate and discussion, creating new public spaces, and the last ten years have been great. We've seen the revitalization of Central Park, Bryant Park, Herald Square, all these places.

Vision Failure at City Hall
That said, there's a vision failure at city hall. One of the things that groups like ours are trying to do is add some vision into the mix, and get people talking about things like making the area around the financial centers and the stock exchange permanent pedestrian areas, like they did in the city of London. They did that in the early 80s after the IRA set off a truck bomb that caused over a billion dollars worth of damage.

We want to see improved security go hand in hand with creating beautiful public spaces and plazas. For instance Times Square, Herald Square, should be closed and turned into pedestrian streets. There's just no question about it.

Mayor Giuliani is not someone who really sees the role of transportation in how the city functions economically, socially, culturally. He's a guy who grew up in the suburbs, a guy who goes everywhere by car, and has for decades. He has windshield perspective. Which is a very odd thing for the mayor of the only city in the United States that has more people that don't have cars than do have cars.

I guess I'm most grateful to Giuliani for not identifying bicycles as one of his special menaces.

Most-Traveled Bike Path in U.S. Currently Blocked
There are some aspects of what's going on that are really disappointing. The Hudson River Greenway, which has been open from Battery Park all the way to the George Washington Bridge, now is closed between 56th Street and 40th Street because the city plopped down the victim's assistance center at Pier 94. That's no problem. The problem is they sealed off Pier 94 and put down the entrance tents and security checkpoints literally on the bike path. And they made no provision to route people around it at all.

Instead of using this unbelievably successful greenway as a way of getting people out of their cars and encouraging them to use it as bicyclists [during this time], they have blocked it.

Already the path, from the numbers we have, is the most heavily used path in the United States—and potentially the numbers could have doubled. We were seeing 400 to 600 bicyclists an hour before [the attack]. That's staggering. With this crisis, that probably could have doubled.

Getting More Cyclists on the Street
For profound changes in how many cyclists are on the street, two things need to happen. One of those is a big encouragement campaign. In Chicago, the mayor rides a bike. Mayor Daley goes to Bike Week and kicks off their celebration. He is a cheerleader for cycling. And that sends a message to people in the administration that this is serious stuff. [Other ways to promote include: TV and radio spots, bike cops heavily patrolling bike lanes during Bike Week, driver education programs, etc.]

We don't have that. For the last 11 years, Transportation Alternatives has run Bike Week here, and we have never received one dollar from the city to do that, not a dime. All our contributions have been from the companies like Patagonia and Power Bar, and the Port Authority. This is in contrast with other big cities that help fund bike promotions.

The burden of educating people about cycling has fallen on us, a non profit that's not particularly well-funded because we're considered too cutting edge or threatening to the status quo by most major foundations.

This should be government money. There's no shortage of money. There's more than $25 million dollars that the NYC Department of Transportation has unspent for pedestrian and bicycle improvement. And the only reason it's only 25 million is the feds don't want to give them more because they haven't used the money they already have. So money's not the problem. The problem is one of policy decisions about who gets street space, is it bikes, is it cars.

Number One Complaint
The second key thing is to get employers to provide secure bike parking. Because in NYC you cannot park your bike on the street.

This is a huge, huge issue, it's T.A.'s number one complaint, How do I get secure bike parking in my building. In a survey of likely cyclists done by the Department of City Planning at our request, of every member of every bike club in New York City, about 10,000 people, the number one reason for not commuting by bike was no secure place to park the bike. The number two reason, and substantially below it, was fear of getting hit by a car. The number three reason was rough street conditions.

It always astonishes me when I go to Chicago and visit my good friends at the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, whose office is in a place analogous to T.A.'s. It's in the central district, right near the train station. It's in a similar building. Except they park their bikes outside on bike racks. All the bikes. Every day. Year round.

Well, if we did that, on our block, there'd be no wheels, no brakes, you know, etcetera etcetera. There'd be no seats. The level of petty theft and vandalism of bikes that are left in one place day after day is extraordinary.

Yes, you can go to a movie or a store and leave your bike out if you're properly locked. But if you leave it there day after day, you just can't park your bike outside and not expect to have it molested.

T.A. is seeking to pass legislation to require building owners and managers to classify bicycles as freight, as they would a photocopier being brought into the building, or a new desk. So that bicycles would have access to the freight elevator. We've found that it's not the employers--most businesses are fine with people bringing their bikes in. Park by your desk, throw it in this closet, whatever. It's the building's managers and owners that are the problem. We've twice lost in attempts to pass this despite some very strong support within city council.

Why Bike Lanes Are Important
One of our favorite debates at T.A., after work on Friday when the beers come out, is bike lanes.

A couple things. One, in the Western European countries that are looked at as the best places for cycling in the world, places like Holland, and Denmark and Sweden and northern Germany, there are bike lanes all over the place. And these people know what they're doing.

In the United States, and in New York City, fewer than one percent of all trips are cycling trips. And yet in Germany it's somewhere around 12 percent. In Holland it's 30 percent. And it's not just a matter of Oh, they've been riding bikes forever, it's the culture. In fact, in the 1950s and early 60s those countries were in single digits as far as total portion of trips that were done on bicycle. It's active government intervention.

The reason bike lanes are important is they tell motorists that bicycles are legitimate road users, they have a space. They're a political statement and a symbolic statement, and that's not to be underestimated. They provide a space for people that like to ride slowly.

There's a big difference between American urban cycling and the best European cycling in that people ride a lot slower in Europe. People who ride here tend to be experienced, higher speed cyclists. And the reason for that is they're the only ones who have the confidence, skills, boldness to ride in the kind of everyday conditions that exist here. Whereas when you go to those idyllic cycling places, the age spread is much greater, you see older and younger people, kids, riding. And this is in cities, I'm not talking about the country.

So bike lanes are a way of creating space for those groups of people that we really need to be appealing to the most. People who are not going to ride their bike fast, are not going to ride a high performance bike, that need every confidence builder they can possibly get. So we are big into bike lanes that are well designed.

Why Bike Lanes Fail
People say every time I ride in a bike lane, there's double parking, there's taxis stopping, there's da-dada-dada. The problem there is that the city does not have a rational transportation system. We don't have proper parking fees so that trucks can get on the curb and don't have to double park when they're unloading. You have private cars camped out there for hours and hours and hours and hours. We need to price cars off the curb and get trucks there. It' not a failure of the bike lanes it's a failure of the rules.

Huge Demand For Cycling
We know there's a huge demand for cycling, so we talk about it in terms of reducing the barriers to cycling, because we know people want to bike. Every year there's a huge number of people who try bicycling for the first time. Once people experience cycling around the city once or twice its fun, it's a really fun way to get around, especially in the outer boroughs where you have less traffic. Where we lose is keeping people on bikes.

Here's a key thing to remember. Forty percent of trips are trips of under two miles. If someone says, well I can't ride my bike I live a hundred miles away from work, it's like yeah, ok, no kidding. We don't expect you to. But lets say we can get 10 percent, one out of 10 trips under two miles to be bike trips, which is completely realistic thing to do, that would be a huge change. Two-thirds of all trips are under five miles, probably more in New York City. So the distances are not impossible, it's the infrastructure, it's the way the streets are laid out

The city needs to be allowed by the state to install speed cameras and red light cameras. The city right now has 50 red light cameras. Legislation to allow unlimited amounts, and to install speed cameras, was defeated by motorhead forces.

London has hundreds and hundreds of automated enforcement cameras. That has sharply, sharply reduced their pedestrian and cycling fatalities, and created a better environment for cyclists. Because speed is what kills cyclists and makes it scary to ride.

Long-Term Repercussions of September 11
Is it causing people already to look at changes in how things are done? Yes. In a big way. The jury's out though, because if there's another major terrorist attack then who can say. If Grand Central Station gets blown up tomorrow, God only knows what will be done in this city. I don't.

This week, some high level cops I know were genuinely worried that they had missed a truck bomb, that one had made it in. They were crusty, cynical cops, and they were scared. These are not normal times. We continue to plug away and be optimistic.

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