‘Back To School’ Means Back To Fear For Teen Cyclists

I am a 12-year-old cyclist in New York City. I’m constantly wondering if I’ll make it to 13.

My mom and I ride all the time, but even though I’m allowed by law to ride on the sidewalk (well, maybe I am — more on that later), I ride on the same streets as she does. So every time we go anywhere on my bike, I review my hand signals, especially the ones I use to go around a car parked in a painted bike lane, and take a deep breath.

Nine times out of 10, there is a car or truck parked in a painted bike lane. Trucks are the worst because they have huge blind spots. Typically, my mom and I have a strategy discussion about going around these scofflaws, though sometimes we just pull over when we don’t feel safe. That’s not cycling. That’s walking with a bike between your legs.

Car-filled unprotected bike lanes are a problem for all cyclists, but especially for someone my age. In theory, I should just be riding on the sidewalk, as riders under 14 are allowed to do) — except that I’ve also seen rules that say that I must bike in the roadway because my wheels are 26 inches in diameter. That rule (that 12-year-olds and under can only bike on the sidewalk if their wheels are less than 26 inches) is quoted a lot in all sorts of places — summaries of bike rules, legal code — but the city Administrative code says that as a 12-year-old, I can bike on the sidewalk. So it may just depend on the cop — which then may subject the biker to police bias.

In any event, many kids stop biking once they graduate to an adult-sized frame. After all, the streets are a mess, and pedestrians frankly resent seeing middle-schoolers biking on the sidewalk. (As Streetsblog once reported, roads with schools are much more dangerous than roads without, so students have an especially unsafe biking experience.)

Many more middle-schoolers would bike if they had safe routes to school. And that can’t merely mean painted, car-filled bike lanes because if we want more tweens biking, we have to make the roadway safe for people who are still just learning to bike in the city. 

Of course, politicians don’t care because people like me can’t vote until we’re 18. That means that for six more years, I don’t have much of a say in the policymaking that could determine whether I get killed or seriously injured by a car driver. And it’s not just the driver’s fault — it’s the fault of a system that allows cars to dominate all the streets; menace cyclists, pedestrians, and air quality; and push kids to the curb.

I once attended a “biking class” (about traffic patterns, signals, that sort of stuff), and everyone besides me was an adult. The class emphasized avoiding crashes while staying on the good side of the law — and treated illegal, crash-causing car behavior as a fact of life. Who decided that crashes are normal? Other forms of murder certainly aren’t.

Nonetheless, I’ve stuck with biking because, I suppose, I’m just a contrarian: I want to spite the cars. I want to defend the environment from today’s politicians. And biking is fun.

But it’s not so fun to navigate around wheeled boxes of death on a regular basis, thinking something along the lines of, “Am I going to die today?”