For all it’s candy coated political correctness & college town nostalgic dreams, cycling in Manhattan’s over-congested streets is dangerous & often out of control. Not the least of which it is unregulated, unenforced & totally uninsured. My wife’s brain surgery alone cost $15,000 which was just the tip of the medical bills we faced.

NYC cyclists rarely use bike lanes, ride in any direction they please, yell at pedestrians to get out of the way and basically are on power trips with no regard for anyone. There is even an ever growing, non-gender specific, macho cyclist subculture that promotes bikes without brakes & gears…mimicking the urban warrior professional bike messengers from the 80s & 90s who didn’t want their preferred Shimano parts stripped. People are shelling out thousands for these dangerous configurations in order to stand out and look cool…in the eyes of their fellow cyclists, of course. Their unwitting victims have a completely different viewpoint after
impact.

So for all the idealism, egos and fanaticism behind this project it remains totally impractical for Manhattan. Yes it works in places like Paris or small towns like Boston & Denver where there are large swaths of open space. Manhattan is way too congested requiring vast endless fleets of motorized vehicles to supply it’s enormous hunger and thirst that makes it …Manhattan.

If anything, the wunderkinds of the Bloomberg administration should be real thinkers instead of trying to imitate others. NYC should partner with Google on a Shweeb monorail system that allows short distance cyclists to be above and away from the rest of us. That would be forward thinking instead of dragging us down into the gutter where more victims like my wife are guaranteed to wind up.