Feeling the Strain: Cracking Under the Crackdown

To Whomever Finds This Letter,

It is the year 2020, ten years after The Great New York City Bicycle Crackdown began, and five years after I, along with the city's few surviving cyclists, moved to a vast underground smugness bunker built with funds from Transportation Alternatives and Streetsblog in order to hide from the NYPD's dreaded "anti-bike death squads." I don't know the exact date, for we don't receive Wi-Fi down here and all my Apple products have long since reached their built-in obsolescence points and self-destructed. However, I do know the year, since we have a few recumbent riders down here with us and we are able to measure the passage of time by their beard length.

I write this letter in the hope that, should we be discovered and exterminated, it might be found and the world will know that there once existed a "bike culture" in New York City as great as any ever known. For a few glorious years the streets thronged with salmoning "Beautiful Godzillas" on Dutch bikes, and self-entitled hipsters on "fixies," and messengers risking their very lives in order to deliver modeling portfolios so that the world's glossy magazines would not be deprived of fashion advertisements. And Oh!, such finery they wore! Weather-proof pants, and $200 "pivot-sleeve" shirts, and designer fanny packs, and sleeve tattoos of exquisite intricacy.

So if you find this letter, penned in my own blood and secreted in a bidon, please remember us to the world.

--BSNYC/RTMS

PS: We haven't seen the sun for five years, yet amazingly we're still getting Nashbar catalogs down here. How do they do it?!?

I'd like to say that the above epistle is a work of fiction, but horrifyingly it is all too real, for it was actually hand-delivered to me by the time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork, shown here giving a perfect demonstration of how not to descend on a road bike:

Notice the yellow t-shirt billowing majestically, like the sail of a great schooner bound for distant shores of bountiful dorkitude. It's an inspiring image, and I only hope the Tour de France organization takes note and abandons the traditional maillot jaune in favor of a vitamin-enriched urine-colored size XXL Hanes Beefy-T. Just imagine the beauty of the presentation, in which a pair of ravishing podium girls tear open that plastic packaging, unfurl the giant t-shirt, and bestow it upon the race leader.

Meanwhile, further to the portion of yesterday's post concerning the possible banning of child "portaging," here are some friends of the time-traveling retro-Fred demonstrating how to use your child as a "Stemie" when riding offroad:

And here's a guy "popping a wheelie" while dressed in basketball clothes:

It's like Walmart decided to sell its own Danny MacAskill knockoff and had him manufactured in China.

Speaking of The Great New York City Bicycle Crackdown, few people in the world have a bigger martyr complex than New York City cyclists who get tickets for running lights. This is why we must hunker down, ride smart, and above all, maintain our collective sanity. However, this can be difficult, and a couple of days ago I received an email from a cyclist who was outraged that he had received a ticket for running a red light in Central Park and wanted me to share his story.

"Anyway," concluded the cyclist, "as far as I can see this is essentially tantamount to the criminalization of recreation in New York City."

No it isn't. It's criminalizing running red lights. Sure, it certainly sucks to suddenly get a ticket for something everybody does, like running lights inside of Central Park, but at the same time a red light is a red light, and what are you going to do? Well, naturally you're going to alert the "media" to this miscarriage of justice. While I sympathized with him, I also opted not to share his story at the time, but obviously I wasn't the only blogger he emailed because local muckrakers Gothamist ran with the story:

I've experienced more than a few of these "crackdowns" over the years, and while they're certainly irritating at least there's really no secret to how they work. It's not some video game where you have to find a secret magical shield under a mushroom to keep the evil police from ticketing you. All you have to do is follow the laws--and yes, that includes stopping at lights while you're recreating. Sure, following the letter of the law is very inconvenient to our collective hardcore urban cyclist dreams and Fred-tastic training delusions, but it beats getting a ticket, and there's no reason to stop riding your bike or to grow despondent and delusional.

Sadly, as for the composer (the police are not supposed to ticket artists, everyone knows that), he may be this crackdown's first mental health casualty, for the ticket has clearly sent him into a spiral of indignity and he's now penned a searing screed:

Which culminates in the following "epic" indictment of New York City and society as a whole:

The homogenization of our lived experience in the city, the disappearance of variegated and unexpected interactions with shopkeepers and members of the community, the sensation of being a regular somewhere (that isn’t a bar), where the owner actually knows something about your life and you feel a moral obligation to try as hard as you individually can to keep them in business, these are phenomena that have been lost in almost all of Manhattan. So when real estate brokers try to sell you on the gritty aspect of a neighborhood, what they are really trying to say, without them really understanding it of course, is that the place actually retains a semblance of the Real. There remains a possibility for types of human interactions to occur that aren’t choreographed by late-capitalistic tropes of social exchange, but rather that anything could happen, that someone could say something that might catch you off guard and make you think twice about who you really are. Of course it also means that someone might try to invoke a localized spirit of communism and redistribute whatever possessions happen to be on your person amongst his or her socio-economic peer group. You take the good with the bad I suppose.

Wow. Hell hath no fury like a white man ticketed. I certainly feel his pain, but as the reciepient of summonses both automotive and bicycular, my advice would be to pay the two dollars and be done with it.

Anyway, as they say in the laxative industry, "this too shall pass," and in the meantime I am riding in a sycophantically law-abiding fashion so as not to give "the Man" anything to work with. I'm also dreaming of faraway exotic lands like Maine where people ride snow bikes, as in this video forwarded to me by a reader:

Not bad, and they even have a Portland there. Perhaps we should all retreat to the woods, join the "shed culture," and wait out the crackdown. We'll all be safe--at least until those Nashbar catalogs find us.

Posted in: cycling in new york city