The Great Bicycle Wars

By LANCE MORROW

When New York Mayor Edward Koch visited China last winter, he was beguiled by the sight of a million Chinese gliding harmoniously through their streets on bicycles. "I was swept away," Koch said later, "by the thought of what could be." Traffic back home, of course, is a lot denser and meaner than in Peking, but for a time Koch thought that the vision might translate at least partly to New York. A transit strike there last spring swelled the ranks of the city's commuting bicyclists to nearly Chinese proportions. Like Toad of Toad Hall discovering the motorcar, Koch seemed to conceive a passion for the bike. As an expression of his enthusiasm, he spent $300,000 from the city's depleted treasury to install 6-ft.-wide bike lanes along two avenues in Manhattan.

But Koch's passions are sometimes ephemeral; last week, after the lanes had been open for only three months, the transportation department sent crews out to tear them up--at a cost of $100,000 more--while bikers disconsolately demonstrated and tied up traffic. The lanes did not work, the mayor said, because bikers did not use them--his own bureaucrats' statistics contradicted him, but never mind--and everyone else thought they hopelessly slowed motor traffic that even at the best times inches along in a fuming stream of steel through midtown. Koch's decision was both premature (the lanes should have been tried for at least a year) and a bit scatterbrained, but it was also calculatedly political. In the street wars among cyclists, motorists and pedestrians, the mayor judged that he had been backing a loser.

The bicycle, formerly a Christmas-tree item or a Sunday diversion, has become a serious vehicle of transport in some American cities. But when bikes move into heavy traffic, problems of incompatibility arise. The circulatory system of the metropolitan U.S. is designed for cars and trucks, with pedestrians granted their margin on the sidewalks. In the culture of freeway or gridlock, the bicycle is a fragile but aggressive intruder. Today around the nation the shaken fist and flourished finger are exchanged between bikers and cabbies and bus drivers and commuting motorists--and, above all, pedestrians who chance to step in the path of a kamikaze ten-speed scorching silently up on the blind side. Bicycles, those sweet chariots of the old Consciousness III, now flourishing under the flag of narcisso-fitness, are becoming a distinct source of urban tension.

More and more bikers are demanding their share of the American street and road. In 1972, bicycles outsold cars in the U.S. for the first time. Five years ago, an average of 470,000 Americans commuted to work on bicycles on any given day, and Washington hopes that by 1985 as many as 2.5 million will be on the streets, saving as many as 77,000 bbl. of oil a day. OPEC and the huge American self-regard coincided to persuade millions of Americans that the bike makes both financial and cardiovascular sense.

But its virtue has not made the bicycle welcome in many U.S. cities. New York is a serious cyclists' town--but also one of the most dangerous. Still, if it now lacks bike lanes, Manhattan at least has the advantages of being both comparatively flat and geographically compact. Terrain must be right. The sheer distances of Los Angeles rule out anything but neighborhood cycling; San Francisco's hills discourage all but the most muscular. The Federal Government is firmly and officially on the side of the bicycle (healthy, energy-saving and the most efficient means of transportation for millions with short commutes, said the 1978 Energy Conservation Policy Act), but Washington, D.C., itself belongs pretty much to the fuming motorcar. Only a few smaller communities in the U.S., like Davis, Calif, and Eugene, Ore., have welcomed bicyclists with special lanes and bicycle parking areas.

The poor urban cyclist inhabits a hostile world. He regards the car as incomparably more homicidal than the bicycle and more profoundly antisocial -- rocketing down the avenues like a bobsled, excreting carcinogens. Yet bicycling is dangerous -- 905 cyclists died last year in the U.S. -- and the unhelmeted are always merely a tumble away from disasters to the brain. The urban cyclist steers among the potholes with a fierce concentration. People have a way of abruptly opening car doors in his face. Cabbies are spitters of high caliber and range. Drivers flick hot cigar and cigarette butts at him. Some truck drivers with a pathological sense of fun like to see how closely they can blast by a cyclist. Pedestrians jaywalk; their eyes, programmed to see cars, are eerily oblivious to bikes. A man throwing his arm up abruptly to hail a cab can coldcock a passing cyclist. And when the bike is finally parked, thieves as dense and dispassionately professional as cockroaches descend with heavy-duty bolt-cutters that can bite through anything but expensive U-shaped metal alloy locks.

The noncycling creature, of course, sees the world with different eyes. Drivers who are not necessarily hostile to bicyclists are often simply terrified of hitting them and think that fragile frame with a person perched on it has no business trying to navigate such savage waters. The bike seems a sort of prissy intrusion, about as welcome as a rosy-cheeked second lieutenant from Princeton being sent in to command a filthy, unshaved squad that has been in combat for a year. The veterans at the wheels figure that the biker is either going to get himself killed or maybe bring down mayhem on everyone else. Pedestrians see bikers as a silent menace -- and with good reason. In New York just before Koch's bicyclical mood, bikers killed three people trying to cross the street.

Governments around the world have proved to be extraordinarily stupid about trying to reconcile bicycles and cars; they behave as if bikes merely contributed to the squalor of traffic in stead of being a way to dissolve it -- an anticoagulant. But reconciliations become harder and harder to finance: cities with their treasuries already bleeding away seldom have money to spare for anything as frivolous and unpopular as bicycle lanes.

Bicycles still zip around with an aura of childishness, of unseriousness. They still await the mass discovery that they are in fact splendidly functional. They will never replace cars, but they can provide quick, superior transportation for great numbers of people daily over short distances, at tremendous savings in fossil fuels and breathable air. The bike rider also knows that riding one as the day begins is a brief pure aubade of exertion and contemplation. Why else would cyclists risk it? Then, too, subconsciously, the bicyclist may be engaged in a long-term Darwinian wager: In 100 years, which mechanism will still be at work -- the bicycle or the automobile?

--By Lance Morrow

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