When I told a few people I was planning to write a Substack about my hatred of bikes, I was met with some concern. I also quickly realized that my premise was inaccurate; it’s not that I hate bikes but that I hate their reckless presence on New York City streets. Plus, my childhood taught me it’s not polite to yuck other people’s yums –– and so many people I admire have a yum for biking.
Bikes, however, are not meant to be ridden on sidewalks –– this was another lesson from my childhood. You can imagine my surprise when I returned to a post-COVID, post-college New York to find that people not only ride bikes on the sidewalk, but they zip through lights; they barrel down on strollers; they clatter over potholes with crossed arms, leaning back, ears plugged with the gum of noise-cancelling AirPod Pros (this last behavior is common among certain 14-year-old boys, who wear just a button-down shirt on chilly November nights).
More than once I’ve been cut off by a bike in the Central Park running path, forced to squawk a lame “This is NOT a bike lane!” to a retreating backside. If anything will turn me into an old woman before my time, it’s the strain of bikes not respecting the pedestrian’s dignified lope.
I believe in the essential moral high-ground of pedestrians, whose ethical prerogatives include the occasional jaywalk (an urban pleasure now compromised by errant bikers). Call me inconsistent, but I don’t make the rules: bipedalism was never meant to become bike-pedalism.
My hierarchy of city living is an inversion of Scandinavian cultures, where the bike rules supreme over the gawkish walker. The other day, I watched a YouTube video of a Danish vlogger named Katarina Krebs; she and her sister biked down a verdant corridor in matching balaclavas. Everything about this looked enticing, and I glimpsed a different life for myself, where bikes were friends and balaclavas were not just practical but sexy. In a college class, I watched The Duke of Burgundy, a movie set in a gynocentric world where women live in moldering mansions and trill their bike bells to each other in greeting. These representations are compelling, but I won’t be swayed.
Even so, I experienced another possible opening toward bicycle-fondness the other day: I passed a rack of Citi Bikes and noticed the individual serial numbers emblazoned on their sides. If anything will make me feel warmly toward “wheeled devices,” it’s the suggestion that bikes are individuals. In the big city, a rider might encounter the same Citi Bike twice like a long-lost steed. Now, this is kind of cute, as is the image of a dear friend who brings her bike helmet to the club, and of course the lowering of CO2 emissions. Also cute.
What I’m realizing is my anti-bike bias comes from insecurity, both in the sense of feeling unsafe (i.e. vulnerable to handlebar impalement) and the personal insecurity of feeling I can’t participate in bike culture. This is not to say I don’t know how to ride a bike (I learned, and famously, one doesn’t forget), but I don’t know how to ride a bike in a city, or even really in a town –– anywhere where I’m apt to encounter other people moving in semi-unpredictable traffic patterns.
My nostalgia for a time before bike lanes reflects a nostalgia for, say, a time before Sabrina Carpenter and tooth gems (I’m not dragging either of these phenomena –– just trying to reference a distinctive B.S.C/B.T.G. era!). On bikes, people make abstractions of each other. Passersby become blurs, to whom nothing is owed once they’ve been blazed by.
But also there are some sweet songs about bikes, like Frank Ocean’s “Biking” and Nat King Cole’s version of “On a Bicycle Built for Two.” I also might tap into my esteem for a certain air-resistance bike at the gym, first introduced to me as the “assault” bike (this name always looks funny when I scribble out workouts beginning with “5 mins assault”).
Somewhere right now, someone’s parent is teaching them how to wobble down a road on two wheels for the first time –– that first sensation of balance is priceless. However you self-convey this holiday, I hope you’ll do it safely. As for me? I’ll be stomping around on my two ol’ feet.