There Will Be Bikes!

New Yorkers Abandon Transit for Two Wheels

Before Shmuli Evers rode a bike, he took the bus. His commute from Brooklyn to Queens took over an hour.

“By bike, it took me around 20 minutes,” Evers told Reclaim. “I would ride my bike past the bus that I was on initially. I could pass three of the buses that I used to take.”

Today, Evers bikes to Manhattan for work. And he rides his bike even though his new commute takes the same amount of time whether he is on his bike or the subway. For Evers, a user-experience designer for B&H Photo, biking is preferable beyond the amount of time it takes to travel from A to B.

“The subway is not really door-to-door the way biking is. And every time I go by subway, there’s always delay or some problem. Once in a blue moon, you’ll find that the train is there when you get to a station, and it runs without hiccups, but that is rare,” says Evers. “And I don’t always get a seat, which on the bike, I always do.”

Jason Woody is a bike messenger. It is a job that he never would have found if not for the failing subways.

“I used to live across the street from Pelham Bay Park and I found out from experience that it is literally faster to bike to Manhattan than take the 6 train,” Woody told Reclaim.

Woody now commutes from Bushwick to Midtown Manhattan. Without his bike, it is a commute that would stretch over 45 minutes, starting on the L train, which is shutting down in 2019. Even if bicycling were not a prerequisite of his messenger job, he knows his bike is more efficient than the train to almost every destination.

For a growing number of New Yorkers, like Evers and Woody, bikes are already their Plan A. When their commutes grew longer and public transit less reliable, they found a way to pedal around the problem. Their stories are a testament to the simple power of bicycles and bike lanes.

With some major transportation disasters on the horizon, New York is going to see a lot more people following their path. For a cyclist like Jason Woody, the L train shutdown next April is no big deal. For a lot of his neighbors, it is going to be catastrophic.

When the L train shuts down, it will set off a ripple effect of crowding and delays on adjacent lines that are already running at capacity. The loss of the L train will be felt aboveground, too, with buses stalled by thousands of people in cars, ride-shares, and taxis.

With so much going wrong for New York City’s transportation network, biking will become a more and more obvious Plan A for many New Yorkers. Shmuli Evers already figured out how to pass the bus. Jason Woody made a career out of not taking the subway. Living along the L train, Rachel Albetski is getting ready.

Albetski, an employee of the City of New York, could get from her home in Woodside to her job in Lower Manhattan by taking the M train to the J train, except the M has been shut down since last summer. Instead, she could take the L train to the 4 or 5 trains, but the L is about to shut down, too. Needless to say, Rachel Albetski now rides a bike. She can take a bike lane on Metropolitan Avenue to a bike lane on Grand Street, over the Williamsburg Bridge bike path, to a protected bike lane on Clinton Street to the bike path on the East River Esplanade.

For the past ten years, the popularity of bicycling in New York has grown at a rate unseen anywhere else in the country. That bicycling boom was the direct result of infrastructure like bike lanes and bike parking, built for cyclists like Albetski.

“The more bike lanes and the safer the bike infrastructure, the more people will feel encouraged to bike, just like more people will try biking when the subways get worse, especially during the L train shutdown,” Albetski told Reclaim. “I hope that the L train shutdown will encourage some people who have been nervous to bike to get out there and try it, because we definitely need the demand of more bikers to facilitate the continual improvement of bicycle facilities in the city, and if we can have a bunch of people using bike lanes on a daily basis, the message is sent that bikers are an important part of New York City and that we deserve just as much respect and space on the road as cars.”

Soon, the growth of bicycling will overtake its already unprecedented progress. More and more New Yorkers will figure out what Woody, Evers, and Albetski have: bicycling is the ultimate Plan A.

No matter how many bike lanes that activists convince the city to install, New York’s new cyclists will be refugees from the transit system, a far less joyful introduction to cycling than taking to two wheels of your own free will. These masses on bikes will require the camaraderie of learned cyclists and TransAlt members like you to show them the ropes. If you see someone looking shaky on two wheels, or acting oblivious to people in the crosswalk, let them know what you already do: Keep your tires filled. Go slow at first. Always respect pedestrians. And welcome to the indisputable best way to get around New York City. You are one of many, and soon there will be many more.

If you are the token bicyclist in your friend group, you may be about to get a lot more requests for riding lessons and company on first-time commutes. Here are three sure-fire ways to help your L train-orphaned friends get started:

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