Last October, I moved from the East Village to South Slope. I immediately bought a bike helmet and a yearlong Citi Bike membership. I’d lived in Manhattan for my whole life, but had never biked around on the street much. For most of my life, there were very few bike lanes on the Upper West Side, the ones that existed were always blocked by double-parked trucks, and doing anything near the 96th street entrance to the West Side Highway (which the New York Magazine labelled the “Pedestrian Zone Of Death”) always seemed scary. Happily, I never needed to. The 1 train stopped every seven blocks, showed up every five minutes, and had useful transfers everywhere. The M86 transformed from inchworm to bullet train after the 2015 Select Bus Service lane and ticketing upgrades, and could get me across town in ten minutes. And if I timed it right, the M5 served as a private door-to-door taxi that could take me to Manhattan School of Music and the apartments of both sets of grandparents. I had the same experience in the East Village. Biking anywhere near the six lane race track of East Houston would have been insane, but there were plenty of convenient train stations and speedy buses. With a MetroCard, I could get anywhere I needed quickly.
It was only when I got to South Slope that I realized how good I’d had it. I could get to and from Manhattan okay via the F train. But if I wanted to get to my girlfriend’s apartment in Prospect Heights, or even my sister’s in Park Slope proper, I was looking at a 35 minute trip that involved either a bus that seemed to never come, or at least two trains, a ten minute wait at each train, and a path so indirect it would make Euclid sob.
But I could also bike. My new place was a few blocks from the southwest corner of Prospect Park. From there, I could bike in the protected lane (in between the park and the parked cars) for the full mile-long stretch of Prospect Park West without interacting with a car or even a stoplight, all the way to Grand Army Plaza. Thanks to the big pedestrian-friendly redesign there, I was able to cross one street at the light, and then head up Underhill Avenue, thanks to the brand new bike boulevard that placed cement medians (with pretty potted plants) that force cars to drive slowly in a zig-zag pattern in single file. This 35 minute trip on transit became a 15 minute one on two wheels. Even better, they became an incredibly fun 15 minutes! It feels absolutely amazing to zoom up Prospect Park West on a nice day, you feel like you are connecting to the city in a completely new way.
A lot of this wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, and I often think about the systems that the city needed to set up in order to make any of it work. All these streets needed to be redesigned to have new medians and a painted-green bike lane, at the expense of a lane for drivers. Docking stations, which can house twenty bikes but displace two or three parking spots, needed to be installed every two blocks so that riders could just find a bike anywhere, and then find a place to drop it off anywhere else. All the bikes needed to be maintained, and the gray pedal assist bikes, which are now available at basically every station, need their batteries swapped out when they run out.
I still can’t get everywhere from South Slope via CitiBike. Crossing Atlantic Avenue is completely impossible, and will be until they get around to the upzoning and redesign that’s been in the works for years without any physical progress. You run into the same problem if you stray more than two blocks from the park on the PLG side. But when I think about my CitiBike membership cost in terms of time (and Ubers) saved, I think I am getting close to ten times as much value from it. When my family went around at Thanksgiving and each said one “B-list” thing we were thankful for (ie not health, safety, food, shelter, etc), I said the CitiBike docks. I’m a 26-year old working on a mid-five-figure salary at a nonprofit. I cannot afford to pay Brooklyn rent and also buy a car, I certainly do not have the time to streetpark it, and I’m profoundly grateful for all the people and systems that make it possible for me to live somewhere without one. The Citi Bike program is something that the government (and the subcontracted private company Lyft) does for me that makes the city a much cheaper, easier, nicer, and more fun place for me to live.
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this on Friday when I saw Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani zip down the protected bike lane on Prospect Park West on grey pedal assist Citi Bikes. I also thought about it when Andrew Cuomo illegally parked his oversized Dodge Challenger (which he drives alone) in a turn lane in midtown Manhattan last week, or when he turned right on red in his oversized Dodge Challenger, also in midtown, the week before, or when his oversized Dodge Challenger picked up four speeding tickets in three months, or when he drove three blocks from his daughter’s Sutton Place apartment to his polling site and sent ahead campaign staffers to stand in a parking spot to hold it for him while he voted. I also thought about it when Zohran Mamdani spent six hours last Friday night walking from the tip of Manhattan in Inwood Hill Park all the way to the Battery, not because he was trying to get out the vote or contact a specific constituency (this is actually a pretty inefficient thing to do if you want to do that, you can’t spend enough time in the parts that are high value for the campaign and you have to walk through a bunch of places that aren’t to get there), but because he wanted to be out in the streets, seeing and being seen.
“Voters aren’t dumb. They pick up on that stuff.” Michael Lange told PIX 11 this morning. “It just seemed like Zohran Mamdani wanted this so badly and Andrew Cuomo didn’t really care.” This is how I’ve felt this whole election, that Zohran, Brad Lander, and Zellnor Myrie, who all clearly love the dense, pedestrian-centric, transit-rich, vibrant city that I do, were all about to lose to someone who fundamentally didn’t care about it, or at least about the parts of it that I know.
This was going to suck for all sorts of objective, on-paper reasons. The dense parts are more environmentally friendly, safer from vehicle-related injuries and deaths, are more economically vibrant, and are able to achieve scale to create well-funded local public entities. But it would also just suck for me. For the past few years, my experience of election day has always been the experience of realizing that I am a weirdo living in a bubble, that even though the people I know are all listening to Brat and Chappell Roan, out there in the real world we’re hopelessly outnumbered by people who want to hear about sad men drinking whiskey.
This is a feeling that New Yorkers know extremely well. The entire rest of the country, dripping with envy from our cultural dominance, parrots the narrative that we are a crime-ridden hell-hole, and that we are all absolutely nuts to be spending so much on rent to live in tiny boxes without front lawns or parking garages. State politics work much the same way, as suburban and upstate concerns take precedence over ours even though we make up the vast majority of the state’s economic output and revenue.
But damn it, it shouldn’t feel like that within the five boroughs! This should be the one electorate where a proudly urbanist, transit-focused, anti-car agenda can actually flourish. Above all else, this should be a place led by a mayor who actually likes New York, who likes that it’s actually a proper city, and wants it to become even more of one. For many years, this has seemed like a virtual impossibility. Even before Adams, de Blasio’s coalition relied heavily on outer borough (often Black) homeowners that often hamstrung him from this sort of politics.
I realize that Zohran ran on other stuff too, stuff that I was annoyingly nitpicky about a few weeks ago. We’ll have plenty of time to worry about all that in the next few months and years. But in that piece, I underestimated just how good it would feel to have someone who actually likes it here beat someone who doesn’t. Today, I’m not underestimating that. It feels really really good.