Compared to a lot of cities NYC is doing alright in regard to cycling infrastructure. They’ve put in a lot of lanes and have plans to do more. NYC official statistics claim the number of bike trips has tripled over the last 15 years, so riders seem to be responding.
Obviously there are way more bike-friendly European cities but as far as US cities go NYC doesn’t seem that bad to me (I don’t live there, but have noticed all the new cycle paths when I visit occasionally over the years).
New York City, for one. Heavily used transit, and in recent years much improved bike lanes, and a v successful bikeshare scheme. I highly recommend reading about Janette Sadik-Khan's great efforts to make NYC more walkable and bikeable and reduce car dominance (she has a good book called Street Fight).
I'm not sure if you're already aware of this, but NYC has also been aggressively building out cycling infrastructure since the Bloomberg administration. So your point is not unknown to policy makers:
Cyclists? There are 450k daily bike trips/day vs. 170k in 2005 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/nyregion/new-yorkers-bike...). There are new Citi Bikes and new bike lanes. The cyclists seem to be least affected by the congestion, especially if you take into account how most of them ride.
I do think driving is less dominant in New York, for example.
Bike lanes in Vancouver and Montreal are pretty heavily utilized. But bikes are quiet and take up so little space compared to cars that it's easy to not notice.
One thing the article mentions but the headline misses is the need for more and better bike lanes all over the city. De Blasio hasn't been emphasizing this nearly as strongly as Bloomberg did. But the numbers show that replacing one lane of traffic with a protected bike lane can actually ease congestion and increase average car speeds and total throughput (Lafayette St. in Soho is apparently an excellent example of this.)
It's also worth noting that the counting is done only at the river crossings, one park, and one crosstown street in Midtown. A lot of bike trips within Manhattan are missed by the count, as are any trips taken within an outer borough. I don't know that that affects the growth rate numbers but it certainly underestimates the total percentage of trips in the city that are made via bicycle.
I lived in a city that made a conscious effort to retrofit a bike network with many dedicated routes over the past decade and it has paid off with a massive increase in riders (mode share has passed 20%). There was a corresponding decline in people traveling by car, despite the city also expanding the road network by twice the amount at the same time (they didn't reduce funding).
Europe has been moving in that direction, with an increase in biking, and improvements in biking infrastructure even in countries that weren't traditionally very bike-friendly (like Spain). But it's hard to replicate that in the U.S. because the cities are so much less compact. You would need more than just improvement in roads, but shorter distances, and better transit for the places where you do have longer distances. In the suburb I grew up in, my dad drove 50 miles roundtrip to get to work, the nearest grocery store was 3 miles away, the nearest restaurants/bars were 5 miles away, and there was no transit system at all. So biking tended not to be too popular, except among kids going to friends' houses within the same neighborhood.
I'm hoping one of the knock-on effects of NYC's congestion tax will be more desireable biking on city streets, especially on those currently without bike lanes
which may snowball into those bikers demanding more bike lanes, and so on. the current bike lanes are alright, but somehow i always find myself needing to cut across two lanes of traffic to make a left or something at some point
For starters, NYC cycling infrastructure (especially, say, in Brooklyn, which I'm more familiar with) is a joke to the extent where bike lanes hardly matter, and probably should be avoided altogether because of dooring.
Really, the advice to cyclists is to stay out of bike lanes[1].
Then, congestion and cars blocking the bike lanes are not directly correlated. It's not like drivers could take the bike lane to avoid traffic.
But anyway, I just don't see the situation for cyclists change in any way due to traffic in NYC. City politics regarding bike paths play a way larger role.
In NYC, bike ridership is probably increasing at the expense of subway and bus ridership rather than car commutes (which almost nobody who lives within biking distance of their job does around here unless their job requires an automobile).
In my city they are massively increasing the bike lane network, along with the city run bike service. The result is that bike ridership has been increasing steadily with each passing year.
I absolutely expect more people to be riding bicycles in this generation. It would be a complete failure on urban planners / municipal governments if that were not to happen.
NYC certainly isn't perfect, but there's been significant investment in bike infrastructure (and the expansion of citibike) and is quickly improving. Anecdotally, I find I have to plan my trips a little bit, but can get from my apartment in Queens to most places in Manhattan without leaving a protected bike lane for more than 2-3 blocks
I was speaking of a specific city that has added extensive bike lanes. No idea of causality. Maybe a lot more people have decided to drive in and out all of a sudden.
I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a good idea on net while increasing driving times.
After a quick peek at the bike layer in Google maps, you'll find it demonstrably false that there are more bike lanes than roads. I live in NYC, too. Congestion pricing will help the vast majority of New Yorkers (and NJ/CT commuters) who do take transit.
It's a very slow progress. Boston has been making tons and tons of progress over the last few years that impressed me but any benefit public derived from increasing bike lanes, safer bike lanes etc were essentially undone by the absolute unspeakable clusterfuck public transportation became (frequent subway closures due to maintenance, practically unusable bus service due to disgusting amount of traffic, no investment etc...). I am hopeful things will improve steadily and Boston will be a European-lite city in USA in the next decade or so, but I might be too optimistic. It's relatively practical to bike in NYC and Philadelphia as well. I personally enjoy biking in NYC but many New Yorkers complain about safety, which makes sense given how chaotic and aggressive NYC traffic is, you do not want to be a meat pie on the road. We have tons of more progress to do, not enough investment into this because 99% of Americans who don't live inside a major non-driving big city don't give a shit about non-car transportation.
I don't know about that. NYC has Staten Island and huge parts of Queens which are effectively a rural village, whereas Copenhagen as well as most of Europe is highly urban. If you mapped population density to bike lane coverage, NYC would come out pretty favorably.
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