Desperately Seeking BikeNYC

What do we know about the nearly two million people who ride bikes in New York? Desperately little. That knowledge gap is driving a new Transportation Alternatives campaign called BikeNYC 2020.

At the dawn of Twitter, the hashtag “BikeNYC” became a virtual watercooler for real talk about biking in New York. From #BikeNYC, you could follow conversations about how to calm an enraged driver, find the best route from Sunnyside to Midtown, and even hear reports on winter icing conditions on the city’s bridges.

Today, BikeNYC has hopped off the internet and into the discourse as a catch-all moniker for a diverse, expanding, and largely mysterious group of people. But who is BikeNYC really?

With the exploding number of cyclists on city streets, advocates have set out to learn the habits, desires and fears of people biking in New York. It’s a cycling census that will guide the near-future of our bike lanes, bike parking, bike laws and the bike-riding population of the potential-someday greatest bicycling city in the world.

There is no shortage of stereotypes about cyclists in New York: entitled, elitist, scofflaw, food-hauling, spandex-wearing, package-delivering, park-looping and lawbreaking bikers — the lot of you.

While people on bikes can take a good-natured ribbing as well as any New Yorker, the problem with cyclist stereotypes is that without facts to contradict them, the stereotype becomes the dominant paradigm.

In 2016, this is pretty much all that we know about people who bike in New York: 1.6 million people, or 25 percent of New Yorkers, rode a bike at least once in the past year; three-quarters of a million New Yorkers ride a bicycle regularly; the number of people who ride a bike every day is 320 percent higher than it was in 1990; and 893 percent more people are biking over the East River bridges than were 25 years ago.

All that data points to the same fact: New Yorkers love riding bikes. But this generalized adoration won’t be much help to City Hall officials when they’re deciding where the next bike lane should go or trying to figure out what they can do to help more New Yorkers start riding a bike.

By contrast, what we don’t know about people who ride bikes in New York could fill the Kissena Velodrome: demographics, preferred routes, preferred class of bike lane, departure points, destinations, reasons for riding, reasons for not riding, to name a few.

In 1993, Transportation Alternatives published a 164-page book titled The Bicycle Blueprint: A Plan to Bring Bicycling into the Mainstream in New York City. Among the accounts and analyses of cycling in New York in the 90s, the text listed 151 steps that, if implemented, would grow cycling in the city. Included on that list was a call for the New York City Council to require commercial buildings to allow bicycles indoors (check), for the Department of Transportation to install 500 miles of bicycle lanes (done and done) and for City Hall to double bicycling by the year 2000 (a little late, but check).

Six years after its original publication the Blueprint was reissued for the first time online, on the then brand-new World Wide Web. John Kaehny, executive director of Transportation Alternatives at the time, wrote in its introduction that the text “remains a vibrant and spirited reminder of how tantalizingly close New York City is to becoming a cycling paradise. It makes clear that the obstacles to cycling here are not physical or financial but the result of ignorance, prejudice and pessimism.”

Today, the two-decade-old optimism of The Bicycle Blueprint looks in large part like a completed “to do” list. With bike share clearly beloved; with the city’s bike lane mileage and count of daily cyclists growing by leaps and bounds; and most importantly, with a second-consecutive administration at City Hall actively courting the cyclist constituency, it’s clear that the Blueprint defined how New Yorkers ride bikes today; and how often, and how safely, and where. Bottom line: bicycling New Yorkers drawing up plans together is what gets results.

After his 2013 election, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to double the number of regular cyclists on New York City streets by the year 2020. About 750,000 New Yorkers ride a bike at least a few times a month right now. For de Blasio to reach his goal, that number will need to jump to 1.5 million.

With Mayor de Blasio’s bold vow on the table, but few details from the administration about how it plans to reach it, Transportation Alternatives is looking back to the lessons of The Bicycle Blueprint, and stepping in to light the way.

TransAlt advocates recently launched the first-ever large-scale public opinion poll on bicycling in New York. It asks everyday cyclists, the bike-curious and those who know they’ll never ride about who they are, what they care about, and what, if anything, could make biking in New York work better for them.

The online poll, presented in English and Spanish, is just the first step toward getting the answers needed to draw tomorrow’s biking blueprint. Focus groups about why people do and don’t ride in NYC are just getting started. It’ll all come together in a modern version of The Bicycle Blueprint — complete with a plan to reach Mayor de Blasio’s goal — to be published next year.

“I can’t predict what bicycling in New York will look like in 2020, but I know that if we’re going to steer things in the right direction, it’ll take the participation of so many of the people riding bikes today,” Transportation Alternatives Deputy Director Caroline Samponaro told Reclaim. “We need everyone at the table, from the hardcore cyclists to the bike-curious, and we need to hear what they really think.”