New York Bike Lane Promotional Video

This video is long on promotion and unbalanced, weak on anything which approaches a description of a comprehensive bicycle program. Parking? Enforcement? Education? Other infrastructure?

0:00 Leads with fear and hyperbole. “Let’s be honest. For many people, the thought of cycling in a city was terrifying.”

0:06 — picture of a door zone bike lane, just like most in NYC, cyclist risks dooring from the left and then is doored from the right. A perfect example of how not to ride. The hazard is obvious to anyone with an elementary understanding, so why did the bicyclist ride right into this trap?

0:24, Picture of a gauntlet, Sadik-Khan says “it was almost like being a cast member from Escape from New York.” Maybe if you were an extreme sport person, it was a great place for you because you were dodging cars (picture of traffic jam, dubbed-in sound of car horns.). Well, yeah, that’s fiction, but as Sadik-Khan uses it, it’s hyperbole.

1:10 “We put down 400 miles of on-street bike lanes.” (Note, all bike lanes are on-street, by definition.) Bicyclist is shown riding in a door zone bike lane, like most in New York, like the one the cyclist at 0:06 was doored in and like the one where a cyclist was killed a few weeks ago when a livery vehicle pulled out, collided with her and dumped her under a truck.

1:20 Claims that the 9th Avenue lane is much less stressful are buttressed by running video clips in slow motion, and with calm music.

1:32 Cyclist is shown avoiding the bike lane.

2:15 Staggered traffic signal timing: The 9th-Avenue bikeway was the first, and well-designed to avoid conflict if everyone obeys the rules, but the video neglects to mention that the staggered timing reduces green time for bicyclists, and the timing still favors motorists (green wave originally at 30 mph, now down to 25 due to city-wide speed limit reduction).

2:20 More slow motion.

2:23 Injury claim is for all users, not bicyclists. This is not stated. “Win” claim is vague, different for each type of user. The win claim for motorists is only that they got a separate turn lane, not that capacity was increased. It was reduced. Claim for bicyclists is of reduced stress, not of reduction in travel time: it was increased. And again, safety claim is an overall claim, not one for bicyclists.

2:50 The 9th Avenue lane was carefully designed. Later ones were done on the cheap without separate signal phases and other amenities. Saying only that more were constructed avoids the issue of their quality.

3:35 “You can’t just paint sharrows on a street and expect that people are just going to, voilà…” Shared lane marking shown is in the door zone.

4:00 Roger Geller’s categories of cyclists are not from a survey. They are a categorization he created out of thin air.

4:25 “If you want to build a better city, you can start by building better bike lanes.” — That’s what the closed caption says. Sadik-Khan says only “building bike lanes.” Conveys that the only thing a city needs to do for bicycling is to build bike lanes.