When We Rode Together
Michael Schenkman was a TransAlt member, a parent, an athlete — not unlike you or me before he was killed on his bike. His death in August brought the news that the number of cyclists killed in New York this year had already surpassed those killed in all of last year. It felt like we were regressing, like I was pedaling backwards.
At our downtown office, my deputy director Caroline Samponaro pulled me into a conference room to talk about what we should do. Staff was angry and upset. Everyone wanted our response to be powerful. “No more speeches,” some said, “no more vigils.” We settled on a mass bike ride. With caution at first, I put it out on Twitter:
September 15th. Bring your bike. Wear yellow. #RideTogether.
No one had hosted an unpermitted bike ride of this scale in years. In the office, everyone was nervous. Would the NYPD call up screaming? Would the mechanics of the ride even be possible? Would anyone show up?
That all went away when we filled Fifth Avenue with our bicycles and our bells. You showed up by the thousands. I watched the signs poke up from the crowd: Bike New York was there and CHEKpeds and Right of Way and Black Girls Do Bike and so many more allies and friends.
I rode down Fifth Avenue next to a woman on a mountain bike who couldn’t stop grinning. A father riding a unicycle passed us by with his 8-year-old daughter following close behind on her own two-wheeler. Out in the street, being a little bit irreverent, feeling powerful, reminded with a whole heart how safe it feels to ride together — celebrating felt like the right thing to do, thumbing our nose in the face of injustice that compelled us to ride that day.
Riding with us too was Joan von Ohlen, whose son Matthew was killed in July, and Travis MacClean, whose wife Olga was killed just a week later, and Mirza Molberg, whose partner Lauren Davis was killed in April. As of this writing, 20 New Yorkers have been killed while riding their bikes.
And not one of them had to die. These were not accidents.
All of these humans, these New Yorkers, these people with families who miss them now, they all died because Mayor Bill de Blasio did not do what he said he would when he announced Vision Zero two years ago.
In 2014, the Mayor’s Department of Transportation poured over reams of of crash data and found 446 streets and intersections in desperate need of fixing. These locations, the DOT admitted in a series of reports, are dangerous by bad design. Streets that inherently put our lives at risk when we bike or walk or cross the street because they lack basic safety features like corner sidewalk extensions, robust crosswalks and protected bike lanes. But Mayor de Blasio — despite his promises, our pleading and two successive annual City Council budget resolutions urging him to find the money to fix these streets — has still not acted.
Outrage over tragedy can breed lazy supposition; everyone grasping for comfortably uncoincidental excuses for the death toll. From social media, the tabloids, in leaked crime scene statements from the NYPD, we hear that cyclists are dying because they’re reckless, skitching, riding the wrong way, helmetless, with a death wish.
None of it is true.
What half of these 20 dead cyclists have in common is that they died on the very streets that the city found to be dangerous. While the negligence is potent, so is the irony: lawsuits against the City of New York for letting known-to-be-unsafe places lie will exceed what it would have cost to fix them.
It’s been a rough year to ride a bike in New York City. We’ve lost too many friends, that’s for sure. While I want us to celebrate the steps we’ve taken forward — new lanes from the Upper West Side to Corona to Downtown Brooklyn, Citi Bikes in more spaces — the cost of what remains undone is much too great for us to rest long on our laurels.
When we’re fighting to save lives, I sometimes hear the complaint that our focus on death and injury is morose enough to repel people from bicycling at all, antithetical to the joy of pedal power and the thrill of wind in your hair. I can’t agree.
When we say the names of those we’ve lost, we acknowledge that it could have been us. When we fight to end death on our streets, and especially when we fight shoulder to shoulder with the families of the lost, we more often succeed. When we demand more — more bike lanes, more public plazas, more streets where you can ride and walk without worry — we end up building streets that make us more alive, and remind us why we bike, walk and live in this great city in the first place.
There’s a long road ahead. I hope we can keep riding together.
