Once I began this weblog again in 2007, change as afoot–or awheel–right here in New York Metropolis. Our mayor was this man Michael Bloomberg:
And he’d simply appointed somebody named Janette Sadik-Khan as commissioner of the Division of Transportation:
Who instantly set aside doing bizarre Euro stuff like carving out little plazas and constructing bicycle lanes, together with town’s first “protected” one:
We’d had a bizarre blip again in like 1980 when then-mayor Ed Koch put in a motorbike lane on sixth Avenue for 5 minutes:
And we’d additionally had a bizarre bicycle-riding mayor earlier than that:
And we’ve at all times had plenty of bike paths because of–look forward to it–that Robert Moses man:
However this was actually the primary time within the metropolis’s historical past it had made a sustained try to include bicycles into the road grid. The bike paths of the Moses period had been to serve those that “derive pleasure from this type of train” in mild of the truth that “use of Metropolis streets and boulevards for bicycling is harmful to the bicyclist.” Whereas Bloomberg’s bike-centric planning was additionally within the curiosity of public well being (this was the man who tried to ban giant sodas), it finally endeavored to remodel these streets and boulevards in order that they had been now not “harmful to the bicyclist,” and to undermine the primacy of the car. This additionally marked the purpose at which the bicycle advocates and the Division of Transportation started to brazenly cooperate:
Collectively they harnessed the facility of the cultural elite:
Actually we had been witnessing some kind of a Golden Age of Smugness, and a few say 2007’s “David Byrne Presents: How New Yorkers Trip Bikes” was its Woodstock.
Even Lance Armstrong obtained into the act:
These had been heady days certainly–particularly when you had been a semi-professional bike blogger: