> The city’s Department of Transportation announced on Wednesday that it’s seen a 50 percent increase in bike traffic on bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens compared to last March.
It's also been regularly 5-10C warmer than average each day so far in March:
Not sure what to make of your last line. If someone has a bridge somewhere on their trip path, for most people it's somewhere in the middle, and distant from the start point where the decision of how to travel takes place. Their street being ice-free is probably more meaningful than the bridge's being ice-free.
There has been barely any snow this year in New York. Certainly none was on the bridges before the corona thing. It hasn't regularly been freezing even for most of February. Which was mostly the same as last March.
While it's probable that the warmer weather probably has had some effect, I doubt it can explain the whole increase.
The bridges most likely have no causal relation here, they are simply a measurement artifact. They're a bottleneck so a preferred spot for measurements.
That is why climate scientists have been trying to change the phrasing to "Climate emergency". It is not a shift in seasonal changes, summers will get warmer, also.
Do you honestly believe that the cause of a 5-10C average in Feb/March is not due to a shift, but will actually materialize into +10-20F average over this Summer?
The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Probably, higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are thought to have almost eliminated the north-south temperature gradient: temperatures were about the same across the planet, and about 10°C higher than today.
That is astonishing. Imaging how much energy takes to warm your home 10°C, how much more will take warm a museum or a stadium. Now apply that to the entire planet. Storms in the Cretaceous were probably no fun with so much extra energy.
I could be wrong, but a more homogenous temp across the globe seems like it would result in milder storms. Since temperature gradients account for a lot of storm activity.
Solar radiation intensity has been increasing gradually since the earth was formed. Current sun intensity may not allow for the same CO2 concentrations that earth tolerated in prehistoric times.
Someone recently made an app here in Germany where you can take a photo of offending cars and the app automatically forwards the information to the authorities. Perhaps someone can do something like that for NY?
But it only really does anything for Taxi & Licensing Commission-plated vehicles (taxis, rideshares, black car services, that kind of thing). For every other vehicle, it doesn't do shit, and the cops don't care. They largely don't even live in NYC and most of them commute to work in cars. There's a big culture of police not enforcing parking regulations on themselves, so you see rampant placard abuse and personal vehicles parked illegally all over sidewalks and such near police stations. The cops mostly have a windshield view of the city (they almost never patrol outside of a vehicle, and they don't live here), so they see themselves as drivers and the inhabitants of the city themselves, especially cyclists, are othered.
So it's a horrible combination all around and practically what it means is that cops rarely do shit about vehicle infractions but go after cyclists with a vengeance. And the mayor is too chickenshit to do anything about it; he's afraid of upsetting the police union, and the police union is terrible (it almost always sides with cops even when they are guilty of absolutely egregious abuses of power).
Not being from New York, it was hard for me to comprehend how much political power the police union has there. Dating someone from there, and by extension taking a passing interest in the city's politics, it has been eye-opening to see how much influence their protests exert over the mayor's office/political process more broadly.
It's crazy. Most of them don't even live in the city, and yet they have an unbelievably larger amount of political power per capita than any other constituency in the city save for higher-up politicians.
Police unions are the only unions that people on the right like, and they're the only unions that people on the left dislike. It's a weird inversion.
They also joyride at reckless speeds around the borough of Queens blaring sirens and driving the wrong way down one way streets for fun. That's at night, while ON duty.
Inebriated police driving off duty are also a significant problem in the outer boroughs and are rarely prosecuted in any meaningful way for doing so...
If nothing is done about the above, seems like there's little chance that parking in bike lanes or on sidewalks in front of lunch/snack spots is going to be addressed.
Yes, you can document this kind of thing all you like with the 311 app but cops will "investigate" and find no problems and take no action. Another good twitter account documenting this kind of stuff is https://twitter.com/placardabuse
Yep, citizen effort here as well in Oakland. Me and a couple folks created https://www.lanelookout.org to do precisely this. We got a lot of support from our local code for America chapter, OpenOakland.
I can pass parked cars in relative comfort, but stopped buses are way beyond my risk tolerance, and those are ~80% of the bike lane obstructions I meet in SF. Why bother cycling if you’re going to be limited to the bus’s schedule anyway?
No, the math for QALY benefits vs risks works out greatly in the cyclists favor, and there are common sense precautions you can take to reduce your injury risk below the population average.
As another commenter mentions, last March was freezing cold and this March has been relatively warm. (I went jogging last night in Brooklyn in 63°F weather!)
But the article also doesn't mention that Citibike finally rolled out the e-bikes for good. I'm not sure how much of a difference that's making, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also accounts for an extra increase on the bridges specifically, since getting up the bridges is really their main use case.
I've definitely noticed a decline in the number of people on the streets of Manhattan and riding the subway. It's been a breath of fresh air. It's easier than usual to get a seat on the train, so I've been taking full advantage of the opportunity.
I haven't really noticed a change in the number of cyclists, but the weather has gotten much better recently so it makes sense that people are biking again. It might be the virus, but it's probably just the good weather (correlation != causation).
I wonder if it's better to take the subway, or use a citibike. With the shared bikes, you're farther away from other people, but you're physically touching the shared bike all the time.
The primary transmission route in inhalation in close proximity to an infected person. Yes, it can persist on surfaces, but this hand-washing meme is mostly a result of (1) it costs nothing and may help, so we should try and (2) masks are supply limited and the healthcare industry doesn't have enough. In reality, if we had an abundance of masks, masks would be more important than hand washing. As it stands, we reserve them for HC workers and infected persons. The point being, subways are worse.
If you take the hand washing and not touching your face, then you're at almost zero risk from using shared bicycles. Even if someone gets some rona on the handlebars, if you don't transfer it to an orifice in your face you won't catch it. It's not gonna re-aerosolize off the handlebars.
"Not touching your face" is not a viable solution for most people. It's subconscious. If anyone could master this kind of self-control within a week, everyone would be an arahat.
It's pretty easy to not touch your face when your hands are physically on the handlebars. As long as you are able to wash your hands immediately after getting off the bike, I think you are reasonably safe.
Face touching is literally unconscious in many cases. It's entirely possible you've been touching your face and not noticing it, but have just become more conscious of the times you attempt to stop yourself from touching your face.
If you aren’t aware of this those ML apps that beep when you touch your face are pretty surprising.
Also there’s the whole psychological thing about telling someone not to do something when it was previously largely automatic, making people do it more. Like having an itch or imagining insect bites.
I read N95 masks were basically useless when walking outside, they only mattered indoors and in confined spaces (like public transit). I’d imagine biking is even less transmission and wearing a mask with that is pretty unrealistic.
It’s hard to find what is right on the internet though.
There is definitely a higher risk you inhale enough virus progeny indoors than outdoors, yes. We know from the flu that indoors the virus can stay suspended for many hours. Regular talking can project enough virus from an infected person for the air to become sufficiently contaminated, though shedding varies by individual. The more (longer) you breathe that air, the greater your chance of becoming infected. This might also explain why indoors is a greater risk than outdoors, you spend less time in the air that's contaminated, in addition to the greater diffusion/dispersion outdoors, of course.
Are you saying I could breathe in some, conveying a small amount of the virus, and not get infected? That seems to be the opposite of what highly contagious means.
Whether an aerosol hits your face, or you breathe air with suspended particles containing the virus, the virus has several challenges it needs to overcome (described in the link above). Its success is not guaranteed. An increase in virus particles improves its chance while a decrease improves your chance.
In theory, a single virus particle could achieve its goal.
I biked in an N95 in Vancouver during forest fire season in 2018. Not fun, but doable and it definitely helped -- without the mask I felt absolutely awful.
That's for a different situation, though. The smoke particulates are very small and are omnipresent, so a mask definitely helps. Coronavirus, by contrast, is only airborne for a short while, so unless you're close to someone who's infected you're not going to be breathing it in anyway. That's why they're saying the masks have limited effectiveness outside.
Oh, when the GP said it's unrealistic to bike in a mask, I thought they meant it would be too difficult. Maybe they just meant unnecessary, in which case I agree.
Yeah, I'm thinking that's what they must mean. An N95 mask doesn't cut down your breathing that much, and you can simply down-moderate your effort a little bit so that you never hit a pant. It's no gas mask.
Do you have a citation for this? I don't want to blindly trust that fomites aren't a major risk.
If true, that changes how I want to get food to my elders. (I've already gotten them several months worth, but I don't see an end to this and would feel safer if they had more runway.)
Just wash your hands and try not to touch your face. Any virus that is on the bike isn't going to walk up your arms and down your throat. Personally I find it pretty easy to not touch my face. I doubt I am perfect at it but I catch myself a lot.
Being outside has to be better than in an enclosed space (a subway car) holding onto handles that dozens of people touched in the last hour.
I mean, by the time I'm gone from a citibike to a place where I can wash my hands, I've had to touch a lot of other things. It's not like there are sinks directly next to the citibike stands.
Then you should wash them at the first chance and avoid touching your face. The only way to be safe here is to seal yourself into a room and avoid all exposure. Since that’s probably not possible the next best thing is to just do the best you can.
You can sanitize a bike pretty easy, or just wear gloves, you only really touch the handlebars. More control over whose air you breathe. I can understand the choice.
Because the bike industry is currently switching over from rim brakes to disc brakes, you can get some pretty good deals on older (but still brand new) road bikes if you look around. A few months ago I bought a carbon road bike for less than $1,500 including tax. Granted expect to spend at least as much on accessories, but if you live somewhere where you can use it for both commuting and exercise then it still pays for itself pretty quick.
This is the whole problem with American bicycle culture summarized in a single post. There’s way too many carbon-fiber sports bikes and not anywhere near enough step-through town bikes with panniers, fenders and lights.
The basic issue is that in Amsterdam most trips are only a mile or two, whereas in NYC it's often a 10 or 15 mile commute between home and work. But yeah if you're only going a couple miles on mostly flat terrain then no question a commuter bike is a better choice.
And commuting even a couple miles on Philadelphia roads is basically like off roading at times - and San Francisco hills are legendary in their own right. I was rattling my brain out of my skull trying to deal with rough Philly roads in the winter and a proper carbon bike with good brakes/ability to stop on a dime if a crazy driver is cutting me off (I have heard legends of these things called "protected bike Lanes" - I hope to see one someday...) was a godsend.
On rough roads I’ve never been happier than on my longtail Xtracycle Edgerunner. With the seat post far removed from the axle, and a flexible steel frame, and Big Apple tires, it is ultra-comfortable.
That sounds like a sweet ride - glad you found one that works for you. I got a trek something (one of those cases where the fancy version from last year was on sale because the new model has cables inside instead of outside and made it obsolete or something) and it's been awesome. It also got me into cycling for fun as well - and again - Philly streets, it's been nice to have something able to stand up to it instead of what I had before haha
Amsterdam has humidity and weather in which parts corrode. And bikes get stolen often. It just does not make sense to buy expensive bike that gonna get damaged fast or stolen fast.
If you have further to go you’ll be even less happy with the sporting bike because it can’t carry your stuff. The solution to long distances is electric bikes, not sports bikes.
I don't think that's right. Most of my bike rides are about 1-3 miles. When I commute to work it's about 6 miles and that's farther than most people bike here.
My commute would be almost six miles by bicycle. I'm not especially looking to replace the subway with a bike trip.
We cycled 8 miles to high school every day (so, 16 per day). Cycling 6 miles is not a lot, unless you have to stop every minute at a traffic light.
Up till 1.5 year ago (when I wasn't working remotely), I cycled 7 miles to work every single day (also through rain and snow). For good measure, I'd take an extra hilly route the way back twice a week for some extra exercise.
If you say so. It is for me. It's not only a long distance (google maps says 35 minutes, which I suspect is an underestimate), but also would be significantly inconvenient -- do I shower at work, and when I get home? What if I want to go somewhere after work -- leave the bike and come back for it?
I love the idea of biking, but I don't see it being useful for my commute.
Fundamentally there is no transportation solution to land use problems. If your destinations are inconveniently far apart, no bicycle, tram, bus, or train can fix that. The closest you can get to the convenience of a car without all the externalized social costs is an electric bicycle.
If you can't bring your bike inside your building then no question steel is the way to go. NYC has some laws to encourage building owners to provide bike storage though, e.g.:
The problem with the bike shaped Walmart thing is that it is absolutely irreparable.
Got a $200 bike shaped thing first thing when I got a job (technically Kmart but otherwise the same). Dumb mistake. The crank gear bent out of shape before too long, just from applying pedal power to climb a hill. On another bike, that’d be $20 in parts and $40 in labor maybe? On this one it was basically impossible as it was not designed to be replaceable or even serviceable and I had to throw the bike away.
Never mind that they're assembled by Walmart employees who have no idea what they're doing, and can be quite unsafe. You wouldn't buy a $10 airbag replacement for a car, and you shouldn't buy the cheapest bike possible. This is safety equipment; a failure at speed can be quite injurious to your body.
Exactly. Cheap bikes are made out of aluminum, which can fail at any time without warning and cause injury or death. Much better just to pay extra for carbon / steel / titanium. Carbon still fails, but there are more likely to be warnings first, and even if it does fail completely you're not likely to puncture a lung or whatever from it getting impaled through your chest. Steel and titanium shouldn't fail at all unless you're in a bad accident first. Bikes are great, but you need to take seriously the fact that they can cause serious injury or death.
Where are you getting this from? Carbon fiber is more failure-prone than aluminum is. There are some very nice bikes made out of aluminum (up to the several thousand dollar range). Steel vs aluminum is more of a choice in ride comfort vs weight.
Aluminium is fatigued with use over time, so will at some point fail, even if it's not subjected to major trauma. (This is opposed to steel which is only fatigued by major trauma, and carbon fibre which cracks when you look at it wrong.)
This seems like an overblown concern. How often are aluminum frames actually failing? How many miles and how many years do you have to put on one before it fails? And how do these figures contrast with steel? And don't forget that steel is more susceptible to rust than aluminum is, so depending on climate and salting conditions the steel might fail first.
My aluminum road bike cost me $600 new and I have four years of daily commuting on it so far. It's still in good condition and I expect to get many more years of riding out of it. At this rate I'm gonna have it for longer than the average car ownership period in the US (which is about 7 years).
As someone that used to be an avid cyclist. Disc brakes are almost completely pointless for commuter bicycles. Don't get me wrong they are great when mountain biking (I have cable discs on my mountain bike). On a commuter bike they are mostly just overkill IMHO. But I wouldn't buy a carbon road bike either (All my bikes are steel framed).
I'm a year-round bike commuter, and I really appreciate those disc brakes when I'm biking in heavier rain. Don't underestimate how much better they work than rim brakes in adverse weather conditions.
I'd say it's just the other way around; disc brakes are most useful for commuters, and least useful for dedicated race bikes, because you just don't go out racing when it's raining a lot (and you're typically on a closed course besides so there's less braking).
Disc brakes are almost completely pointless for commuter bicycles
Ignore this comment. Year-round commuting is the prime reason to buy a bike with disc brakes. Is it overkill not to burn through a set of rims each winter? Is it overkill to have decreased stopping distance in the rain?
Anyone want to go back to drum brakes on their “commuter” car? Yeah, didn’t think so.
I have short-reach dual pivot brake calipers on a bike which sees >2000 miles year-round each year in NYC, and my rims are still fine after 7 years.
From my experience, stopping distance is usually dictated by road conditions more than the brakes. This is with 34mm wide tires, and properly adjusted brakes (a lot of times when people complain about rim brakes, the issue is that they are not working properly).
Sure and the point is discs will much more easily stop you, the limit of the stopping power is not the brake (friction on rim) like they are in cantilevers, but with the overall physics of the system. Discs are generally in alignment, or very very obviously out of alignment (rubbing loudly), canti's have a lot more room for error.
I'd much rather have a brake system that out performs the rest of the equation than not have enough stopping power.
> I’m not the only one on my race team that would eat rims every year or two.
This really says it all. When I am cycling to work, I am not trying out for the tour de france or trying to beat someone else's strava record.
> Fact is, rim brakes are inferior in every way to just about every alternative, save two: they’re inexpensive and lightweight.
It doesn't matter if they are inferior. My regular disc brakes on my Ford Focus is inferior in every way compared to whatever they put on a Ferrari. However they are perfectly is sufficient and safe for driving to work and back.
The best argument you can make for discs vs traditional rim brakes would be that the modulation is slightly better.
It really annoys me that a lot of cyclists seem to push very expensive kit that for the commuter is completely unnecessary.
> Is it overkill not to burn through a set of rims each winter?
I dunno how you are doing this. A set of brake pads last quite a while usually. I have rims from the 1990s I am still using.
> Is it overkill to have decreased stopping distance in the rain?
Your stopping distance is more about how much grip you got on the road from the tyres. You can easily lock the wheel with a rim brake, especially if you have a good set of dual pivot or V-brakes.
For commuting you don't need anything flashy or complicated (because it will be a magnet for thieves). I literally get a basic but decent bike. If the parts are basic and ubiquitous you can go to any bike shop and get it repaired or by the parts yourself. If you have fancy equipment, then it more difficult to buy a replacement.
When I was commuting on the bike still, I used an old 90s mountain bike with V-brakes and I converted it to Single Speed (the gears were knackered) and stuck some touring tyres on there. However I was cycling in Manchester which is mostly flat. It really depends where you are.
I commute year round in Germany and never had to replace my rims because of wear. They last years until I hit a curb too hard with barely any wear. Maybe it's different in other climates?
As someone who rides 2k miles a year in seattle for multiple years your attitude is why I had to pay through the nose and do all sorts of custom crap to have a decent braking solution that didn't eat my rims and worked well on steep hills and the oily wet on the rims. I'm glad that discs are finally taking over, even if it's 10 years after they should have because "they're not tour legal".
Yeah if you're commuting in the rain or with lots of hills then disc brakes are definitely worth it. But if neither of those apply to you, they're probably not a good use of money, especially considering it still costs quite a lot to get good quality hydraulic disc brakes.
I cycled approximately 5000 kilometers per year (cycling to work + over the weekends), also through hilly terrain. I have never had my brakes eat my rims.
Also, even if they did. Replacing a 800 Euro bike once per two years is peanuts compared to owning a car or taking public transport.
Good for you, does that somehow make my experience invalid? No it's a YMMV which is why discs are important to me.
Replacing a 2k usd bike every 2 years in addition to paying for car while I try to work into cycling is a big cost. I'm a big person, I've had pretty much every rim but velocity touring rims fail due to weight and stress, and rim brakes made this worse and fail faster, it's also real shady to have a rim crack while you're riding it. Discs completely remove that from the equation.
I would get rim brakes over another set of cable disc brakes. I recently got a gravel bike as my "go anywhere" bike, and the cable disc brakes are absolute garbage, constantly going out of adjustment and rubbing, making noise, or just being ineffective. As a contrast, my hydraulics on my mountain bike are absolutely fine with minimal work, just a flush every year and changing the pads when they wear down.
I had shitty cable disc brakes before. With the same complaints. I Replaced them with TRP Spyke brakes and all of that went away. I'll never lose another perfectly good wheel to rim wear. But I can see how that is a secondary concern.
TRPs are so good and so cheap. I rode Shimano XT for years, and the TRP is the only thing I’ve experienced that is better quality and more reliable while not being outlandishly expensive. Super happy with them!
Cable discs, while better than rims, still suck. I feel unsafe riding anything but hydraulics, even on the road.
wouldn't it be risky to ride behind a potentially infected rider?
after all you'd be breathing in their exhaled air, or would the speed and wind dillute the aerosol quickly enough to make it harmless?
I read that italy banned bicycling in affected locations to avoid accidents that would further strain their already stressed health care system. sorry, no source.
But they're bicycling to some place with other people, so it's not like they're out of close contact with others. Although I suppose it's still better than having that same contact and the additional contact of public transport.
No, but they're in less contact. While the infection rate is still low[1], we're not trying to eliminate the "possibility" of infection, we're trying to reduce the likelihood of a transmission event. So biking to a workplace and not sitting in a subway car is eliminating a bunch of transmission events. That reduces the R0 of the epidemic, which determines the exponent with which it will grow (or shrink). Enough measures like this and the case count starts going down over time and not up.
Defense in depth, basically. Is it enough? We just don't know. But it's absolutely not useless.
[1] This stops being true once the infection rate starts being non-negligible. That's where you have to go to hard quarantine measures that try to eliminate all non-essential contact. But we're not there yet.
Yes, and excellent point! Thanks for pointing that out. Considering we're not all able to completely stop all action outside the house, it's all about reducing & minimizing risk surface, just like with computer security where zero risk is not possible, risk profile can be reduced.
Not really. There are 20M people in the metro area and 421 positive tests so far. Assume (reasonably conservatively) that those tests reflect about 10% of the active infections, and that there are about 2x as many contagious but asymptomatic cases as sick people (both the doubling rate and the incubation period seem to be about 5-6 days). That's one potential transmission event per ~2500 people right now. You'd have to be on a lot of subway cars to be within infection distance of that many people.
It's close enough to be worried, but not at "going in public will make you sick" yet.
(Edit: covidtracking.com just pushed some new numbers, and NY is at 524 cases. Up 25% in a day is freakout territory -- a doubling period of just a little over 3 days. We have to hope this is an artifact of more testing capability or just a data burp.)
Silver lining in the epidemic that more folks might get used to biking to work over the next few months due to social distancing, so that becomes more normal and cities start to adapt even further.
General city traffic will be way down and bikers will have a lot more freedom, so it feels safer, so more people adopt, etc
Could be a positive step in making the cities more liveable
You're much more likely to infect someone else by riding the subway than you are riding a bicycle. It spreads best in enclosed spaces with calmer air. It doesn't transmit well outside, unless you're breathing right up in front of someone's face (which just doesn't happen on a bicycle, but might happen with e.g. pedestrians waiting in close formation for a light).
It's true that Trader Joe's in Manhattan are jammed with lines going out the door and shopping there is mayhem regardless of whether there's an ongoing pandemic.
No amount of google-fu turned up anything other than a single article that mentioned long lines in a store on the Upper West side. Maybe it's making the rounds on facebook/social media as a scare-story but there's no apparent truth to it.
> it was uncertain whether New Yorkers who aren’t used to cycling on the city’s inconsistent network of bike lanes —which are frequently clogged by parked or idling cars and trucks — would take the mayor’s advice
The notion that New Yorkers use bike lanes is funny. I live on a major Manhattan avenue with a bike lane and there is at least three times as much bicycle traffic on the sidewalk right next to it. Even motorized scooters are more commonly seen on sidewalks than the road. When I lived in Brooklyn I learned to peek my head around the corners of pedestrian bridges because motorists and cyclists will speed around them recklessly. The food delivery gig industry has put this behavior into high gear. It’s illegal, but New York laws are more like guidelines.
From my fire escape I can see a vacant lot that is used to store stolen bicycles while they are advertised on craigslist. I guess I wouldn’t have to go far if I decided to buy a bike.
Major Manhattan avenues are thronged with people. Bicycling on the sidewalk is going to be way slower than using the bike lane. Plus sidewalks are bumpier with more obstacles... what cyclist is going to choose the sidewalk?!
I use Citibike all the time in Manhattan. The only bicycles/scooters I see on the sidewalk are the ones pulling up to a building on that block. Everyone else is on the road because it's just faster and easier and safer.
The only blocks where you see cyclists possibly more often on the sidewalk are the handful of cobblestone streets left in the city, which are honestly just murder to bike over. Or a certain small number of roads that function more like highways where cycling in the road is unsafe period.
Most of Manhattan is north of 59th street and most of the day is not rush hour. It is so bizarre to me that I would be accused of lying about something like this. I hear complaints about cyclists from all kinds of New Yorkers, especially those who are cyclists and bother to follow the rules to the best of their ability.
Edit: I am abandoning this account. I was downvoted below for refusing to specify where I live. This community is not worth being a part of.
I removed that level of specificity out of an abundance of caution. I still use the internet by the rules of the 90s, except that I no longer ask my parents for permission to visit AOL keyword “kids”.
There needs to be consistent and safe bike lanes first, including sharp enforcement against drivers who don't honour them.
I made the same decision years ago at University. I'd much rather risk a ticket or minor pedestrian accident by riding on the sidewalk than risk my life comingling with cars who don't give a shit.
It's also been regularly 5-10C warmer than average each day so far in March:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/new-york/10007/march-weath...
Almost entirely above freezing means no snow either.
And bridges are the first place to melt their snow/ice.