ESSAY: A Brush With Danger Made Me Exhibit A in My Fight for Better Bike Lanes in Brooklyn
I was cycling home on Henry Street in Brooklyn on Dec. 20 when I became Exhibit A in my campaign for protected bike lanes in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.
Our area of Brooklyn is a major hole in the borough’s protected bike lane network. Despite an explosion in commuter, delivery and recreational cycling to and through the neighborhood, it has no protected bike lanes and none in the works, nor has the city made any significant traffic-calming improvements of the sort that are now standard. Henry Street, like others in the neighborhood, has changed little in the 23 years since I moved here. There is far more space devoted to drivers than to cyclists and pedestrians.
The day of my crash, the temperature was near freezing. It had rained for much of the day. A car pulled up behind to me after I merged into the main roadway. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the driver was trying to pass me. Normally, I’d have held my ground but in the twilight on the wet street, I lost my nerve and pulled left where a couple of empty parking places gave me room to break away from my follower. A second later, I lay on my back on the street. The car sped by. I’d skidded on a wet, greasy iron grid.
Fortunately, I wasn’t in the middle of the road because I couldn’t get up. I’d broken something. Within seconds, passersby were at my side. Someone called 911. A woman called my husband at home a few blocks away and promised to bring my bike to her house for safekeeping so he could meet me at the ER. A doctor in the crowd took my pulse and checked me for neck and back injury. They hovered protectively for twenty minutes, the time the ambulance took to arrive from NYU-Langone Cobble Hill, three blocks away.
In the Safe Streets movement, the word “accident” is anathema — traffic violence is almost always caused by bad driving, inadequate or unenforced traffic laws, and obsolete or neglected infrastructure — not force majeure events like earthquakes or comets. My little calamity in the making was a perfect example of all the above: Henry Street, a one-lane southbound street has a green-painted, unprotected bike lane through Brooklyn Heights, appropriated with impunity by delivery trucks and taxis. One block after crossing Atlantic Avenue into Cobble Hill, the bike lane disappears to make way for car storage. Cyclists must merge into a single lane shared with drivers, hemmed in by parked cars on both sides, and ride down the center of the street with impatient drivers close behind, often deliberately intimidating them. This point on Henry Street is one of the most dangerous in the neighborhood, as neighbors and transportation activists told Council Member Shahana Hanif at a well-attended Nov. 17 meeting on protected bike lanes.
Given all that, I was “lucky” to come out of the crash in relatively one piece. I always wear a helmet, and my backpack, stuffed with a towel and my laptop, cushioned the fall. The x-ray showed a fractured collarbone. I’m in good shape. But it will be three months before I can ride, six to eight months before I’ll be fully recovered.
This was my first bike fall in more than 50 years. Some might say it was my fault. What did I, a woman of a certain age riding in the evening, expect in the winter? One of the worst arguments against protected bike lanes is that no one uses them in bad weather. First, it’s not true, as anyone who orders food for home delivery on a cold or wet night knows perfectly well. To wit: In Scandinavia, Canada and other cycling-friendly cold regions, protected bike lanes get winter maintenance and cyclists commute in snow. The growing number of bike lanes in Brooklyn inspired me to embrace all-weather cycling. It’s so much faster, even in the rain, and I get a kick from swearing like a sailor at SUVs and trucks and cop cars parked in bike lanes. I had literally been catalogue-shopping for cold and wet-weather riding gear that morning.
Meanwhile, back in the real world of New York City streets, water, gunk ice and the dark are all treacherous for cyclists who must share the road with cars — which brings us back to the causes of my “accident” — an impatient driver, an unsafe street and a culture that begrudges an inch ceded to non-drivers.
Tragically, nothing motivates transportation officials to implement safety measures for cyclists and pedestrians like death — the more the better to persuade politicians to unlock funds and change rules. On getting home from the emergency room, I wrote to my city council member (who does support this campaign) about my misadventure. It was too good an opportunity to waste.
Is a broken collarbone compelling enough to rally NYC’s hard-bitten officials to the Cobble Hill-Carroll Gardens Protected Bike Lane cause? Hey, a girl can dream. I don’t want a white bike or a memorial safety law named after me. An anonymous protected bike lane is enough.
On second thought, a whole bike lane network would be even better.
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