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He festooned New York City with hundreds of miles of bike lanes and dispatched chairs and picnic tables to Broadway, where cars once roamed.

He helped finance plans to send the No. 7 train to the Far West Side, and carried the banner of congestion pricing, even if in vain.

But for all of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s efforts to reimagine transportation in New York, critics and supporters seem to agree on the one that is most likely to define his 12 years at the city’s controls.

And it starts on Monday.

With the introduction of a European-style bike-share system, billed by city officials as the first new wide-scale public transportation option in more than half a century, Mr. Bloomberg’s longstanding bet on cycling has reached its climactic moment.

The lofty ridership predictions presented by Mr. Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, will no longer be theoretical. Opponents’ admonitions of overstuffed streets and perilous pedaling will prove either prescient or exaggerated.

“It is the free market, if you think about it,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Friday during his weekly radio show. “If people want to use them, they’ll use them. If people don’t, they don’t.”

The program, which is to begin with 6,000 bikes stationed across parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, will face immediate scrutiny from residents, riders and elected officials whose love or hate for the endeavor seemed to intensify over the past year of delays.

The holdup, wrought first by faulty software and then by flooding to equipment stored at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during Hurricane Sandy, has given the rollout a sharper political edge. The system, which was supposed to begin last summer, will now be introduced through the peak months of an election year. And the crop of candidates — many of whom have been lukewarm toward Mr. Bloomberg’s cycling policies in the past — will be watching closely.

“If this is a fiasco — and to me, a fiasco is mostly that the bikes just don’t get used — then, yeah, it’s going to tarnish the legacy,” said Charles Komanoff, a transportation economist and longtime cycling advocate in the city. “More important, it’s going to make it easier for the next mayor to backtrack.”

But if the program is an instant success, he added, “it’ll mean that almost anybody imaginable who is mayor is going to have to stick with whatever this mayor has already done.”

For all the administration’s legwork — which included hundreds of meetings with community groups, elected officials, property owners and other stakeholders, and an online feature that received more than 10,000 suggestions for bike station locations — precise demand for bike share is near impossible to gauge.

Though bike commuting has grown on Mr. Bloomberg’s watch, the most recent city figures showed that commuter cycling remained flat in 2012 during the typical riding season of April through October. In the same period, cycling had increased by 26 percent in 2009, 13 percent in 2010 and 8 percent in 2011, according to counts conducted at commuter points like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge.

Some officials remain skeptical about the depth of citywide interest in cycling.

“The projections for bike share, I can’t say I buy,” said Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the Council’s Transportation Committee. “But we have to accept them as a given at this point because we have nothing else to go by.”

Ms. Sadik-Khan dismissed the most recent in-season cycling figure as statistical noise amid years of consistent growth numbers. She also pointed to an increase in off-season cycling in recent months: From December through February, the Transportation Department said, commuter cycling increased by 23 percent over the previous year. And the bike share program has already sold more than 14,000 annual memberships, Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Whatever the appetite for bike share, Ms. Sadik-Khan has long argued that cycling infrastructure must be built in advance of demand as a way to encourage riding. In this way, the bike share program could be seen as an inevitable outgrowth, a plan that required years of investments before becoming feasible.

“We didn’t just drop this bike share system in overnight,” she said. “We spent five years installing more than 350 miles of bike lanes.”

Asked about some residents’ view that the bike share system amounted to the final chapter in the city’s tussle over bike use — the playoffs after a regular season that has lasted years — Ms. Sadik-Khan wondered if any more rounds could possibly remain.

“If this is the playoffs, what’s the finals?” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re there.”

While city officials have said that bike sharing is beloved in virtually every location at which it has been tried, some beginnings have been bumpy. The Vélib’ system in Paris, one of the largest programs in the world, saw a spate of rider deaths in its early years and suffered widespread theft and vandalism of equipment.

John C. Liu, the city comptroller and a Democratic candidate for mayor, has called for a helmet requirement for the program, and accused the city of underestimating its financial exposure in bike crashes. The city said that helmet requirements were found to depress ridership in other cities.

“I hope nobody gets hurt,” Mr. Liu said in an interview recently. “But this is thousands of bicycles on the streets of Manhattan, used by people who haven’t ridden bikes on the streets of Manhattan.”

Elsewhere, bike share programs have had a long history of attaching themselves to the reputations of their municipal cheerleaders. London’s rides are called “Boris bikes,” after Mayor Boris Johnson, despite the fact that Mr. Johnson was not the mastermind of the plan, but merely the man in office when the bikes were introduced.

“I hope people call them ‘Mike’s bikes’ or ‘Bloomberg’s bikes,’ ” said Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor for Mr. Bloomberg. “It would be a powerful affirmation of the legacy for him.”

But as the program makes its debut, there remains one high-profile holdout, intrigued by the idea of bike share but unsure if it is for him: Mr. Bloomberg.

He said during his radio appearance on Friday that his last meaningful contact with a bike was in 2002, when he bought one before a possible transit strike that never materialized. So would he ride on Monday?

“I will ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh,’ ” he said. “Whether I’ll get on one,
I don’t know.”

For Bloomberg and Bike-Sharing Program, the Big Moment Arrives,
NYT,
26.5.2013,
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/
nyregion/on-eve-of-bike-sharing-debut-
watching-for-a-fiasco-or-a-success.html

Bikes in the City:

Pleasures and Perils

September 16, 2011

The New York Times

To the Editor:

In “Bicycle Visionary” (column, Sept. 11), Frank Bruni writes as if pedestrians don’t exist in New York City, not to bicyclists anyway. Advocates of more perks for bicycles always forget or play down the arrogant behavior of cyclists who do not believe that safe-traffic rules apply to them.

How many times have I seen bicyclists going through red lights, riding the wrong way on one-way streets, riding on the sidewalks and otherwise endangering pedestrians?

A few nights ago, I was shocked to notice cyclists riding in the dark, without lights or reflectors, wearing dark clothes so they were almost unseen.

Ever since my best friend died as a result of being hit by a bicycle, I have been particularly aware of this disregard for safety and courtesy. And this applies not only to delivery men and messengers but also to otherwise law-abiding citizens.

Even with the bicycle lanes, they travel the wrong way and do not stop for lights. Citizens would look more kindly on bicycles in the city if the cyclists were more respectful of the rules. Only then would they deserve the special lanes and other perks that Janette Sadik-Kahn, the transportation commissioner, is giving them.

PAUL SILVERSTONE
New York, Sept. 11, 2011

To the Editor:

We want to thank Frank Bruni for his great column about Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, and bikes in New York City. We’re avid bike riders who see new bike lanes, increased ridership (and an enforcement of biking rules) and a bike exchange system as significant and welcome improvements to urban life and to New York in particular.

SUSAN HORTON
ERIC RAYMAN
New York, Sept. 11, 2011

To the Editor:

Why the nostalgia for bike riding in the middle of the city? Even by Frank Bruni’s own statistics for major cities, we might increase bike riding to only 2 percent or somewhat higher, inconveniencing a substantial majority of car drivers by carving out bike lanes and eliminating parking spaces.

I am glad to have people ride bikes in the country, but the urban density and fabric of New York City and other large cities should be treasured and admired.

As a New York-born and -bred person who now lives in the country (that’s where the job was), to which I have never quite adjusted, I am disappointed to see city people not accepting where they are and complicating urban life for most people more than it need be.

JAY M. PASACHOFF
Williamstown, Mass., Sept. 11, 2011

To the Editor:

While I agree with Frank Bruni’s column supporting more biking in New York, I fear that others might share an experience like my recent painful encounter with a young female cyclist, who ignored a red light, hitting me and nearly knocking me to the ground. As a very senior citizen, I am aware that this encounter could have ended my ability to get around at all, much less on a bike.

As with motorists, there are a small number of cyclists who do not follow the law and endanger pedestrians. Licensing cyclists as we do car drivers would help ensure the safe use of bicycles. It would also benefit cyclists in reducing theft and perhaps reduce opposition to biking by those, like me, who daily become more afraid to cross the street.

FRANKLYN SPRINGFIELD
New York, Sept. 12, 2011

Bikes in the City: Pleasures and Perils,
NYT,
16.9.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/
opinion/bikes-in-the-city-pleasures-and-perils.html

New York Chooses

Company to Run

Bike-Share Program

September 14, 2011

The New York Times

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The Bloomberg administration has selected Alta Bicycle Share to bring an ambitious bike-share program to New York, the city’s latest foray into transforming its streets to make them more hospitable to cyclists and pedestrians.

The announcement was made Wednesday afternoon at a press conference at a pedestrian plaza in the Flatiron district, where a sample bike station — a kiosk and a rack of sturdy, utilitarian bicycles — was on display.

By the time the program is to officially begin next summer, it is expected to feature 10,000 bicycles available at 600 stations in Manhattan, south of 79th Street, and in select neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The company said it was exploring options for adding stations in other boroughs.

The city’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, has been anxious to bring New York up to par with global cities, including London and Paris, that have been praised for improving clogged city centers, partially through encouraging bicycle use. In the last four years, Mr. Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, has rolled out 250 miles of bike lanes, and the bike-share program was seen as another central element of the city’s plan.

New York’s program would become the largest bike-share effort in the country, but it also brings outsized concerns about the placement of thousands of bicycles and hundreds of rental kiosks in parks and on sidewalks and streets.

The program will require participants to purchase long- or short-term memberships that include an unlimited number of trips of as long as 45 minutes; additional fees would apply for longer trips. A yearly membership would cost $100 or less; other pricing details have yet to be finalized.

“We could not be more excited to bring our successful bike share system to New York City,” Alison Cohen, president of Alta Bicycle Share, said in a press release. “Bike share is a new form of public transportation that will help connect New Yorkers to their own neighborhoods, to other neighborhoods and to public transit.”

Alta will introduce a trial program in the spring, testing a smaller number of stations at locations yet to be chosen.

In November, the Department of Transportation issued a request for proposal seeking companies interested in running the bike-share program. But the requirements were high: bidders had to promise that the program would be self-financed and would not require taxpayer help. The bidder could not excavate streets to build its stands or allow the bikes to take up too many parking spaces. The contractor also had to consult with city officials on all of its sponsorship plans to avoid making these bikes look purely like two-wheeled advertisements (think Ricky Bobby in the film “Talladega Nights”). Most of all, if the winning bidder makes any money on this venture, it has to share profits with the city.

Six bidders submitted proposals in February, and city officials narrowed the finalists down to B-Cycle and Alta. Alta Bicycle Share, based in Portland, Ore., runs programs in Washington and Boston and in Melbourne, Australia, and its supplier of bicycles and related equipment, Public Bike System Company, provides the bikes in programs in London, Montreal, Toronto and Minneapolis. B-Cycle, which is affiliated with the manufacturer Trek, has been associated with programs in Denver and Chicago.

The selection process has not been without controversy. The Department of Transportation faced heated discussions with City Council members about whether the agency had inappropriately excluded them from the planning stages of the program. Council members argued that because the bike-share network would be run by a third-party vendor, it was considered a franchise, which requires the Council’s authorization to run.

On Friday, the Department of Transportation agreed to hold public hearings and briefings on the progress of the program with the Council.

    New York Chooses Company to Run Bike-Share Program, NYT, 14.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/nyregion/
    new-york-picks-alta-to-run-bike-share-program.html

Bicycle Visionary

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

SOMETHING lovely and all too rare happened to Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s frequently demonized transportation commissioner, as she and I rode our bikes down Park Avenue South one morning last month: Sadik-Khan got unsolicited, unfettered praise.

It came from a young cyclist who happened to pull up beside us, glanced over at her and suddenly beamed.

“Oh, it’s you!” he stammered, then mentioned that he owned a bicycle shop and had recently placed a newspaper ad publicly thanking her for her cycling advocacy. “You’re going to leave a legacy, you know.”

He’s right. Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg both. And it’s past time that more than just a passer-by trumpeted it.

Since the mayor appointed her in 2007 and she began to bring her agency’s work more closely in line with his vision of a greener New York, the city has roughly doubled its miles of bike lanes, to about 500. If you did any biking at all in Manhattan or Brooklyn this summer, you may well have noticed the improvements, including protected bike lanes (ones that separate cyclists entirely from street traffic) on such major arteries as Columbus and First Avenues in Manhattan.

I know I did, and when I rode through the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side, Williamsburg and Boerum Hill, I felt something I hadn’t before, a kind of full permission and robust encouragement, even if motorists continued to behave obtusely.

The city has also plotted a far-reaching and potentially game-changing public bike share program, whose details and timetable are expected to be announced this month. In a swift manner all the more impressive given government sclerosis these days, New York is truly transforming itself.

And for that it has received, from some of its citizens, an unwarranted degree of ill-considered grief. Biking, it seems, is an uphill ride, due largely to mathematics and a sort of Catch-22: with only a small percentage of Americans using bicycles as their primary method of transportation, there’s no huge public outcry for — or immediate political benefit to — remaking city streets so that they’re a little less friendly to cars and a lot more hospitable to bikes.

But without that hospitality, primarily in the form of better bike lanes and more bike racks, biking isn’t convenient and attractive enough to win all that many converts and thus a political constituency.

So if a city believes that biking is part of a better future, it must sometimes muscle through a reluctant, rocky present. That’s precisely what Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan have done, in a fine example of the way the mayor’s frequent imperiousness and imperviousness to criticism can work to the city’s long-term advantage. If anything, the two of them should move even faster and more boldly, but that’s pure fantasy, given the opposition, bordering on hysteria, they’ve met so far.

“There are not only 8.4 million New Yorkers but at times 8.4 million traffic engineers,” Sadik-Khan said in an interview a few weeks after our bike ride. “And we’re, you know, very opinionated.”

I’LL say. Her critics have brutalized her, even making inane schoolyard fun of her surname by calling her Chaka Khan, after the hefty black R&B singer. (Sadik-Khan is white and almost bony, and never belted a tune during any of our meetings.) Before Anthony Weiner’s loins sundered his ambitions, he reportedly taunted Bloomberg with the promise that he would succeed him as mayor and promptly erase all the bike lanes. Additionally, a group of Brooklyn citizens with close ties to Iris Weinshall, the former transportation commissioner and wife of Chuck Schumer, filed a lawsuit against the city — dismissed by a judge last month — for its installation of a protected bike lane along Prospect Park West. And The New York Post was even more truculent, waging a constant, nasty war against Sadik-Khan, who was excoriated in one typical editorial for “turning over vast swaths of city streets to delivery boys on bikes and the occasional cool dude pedaling along in his Day-Glo tights.”

Vast swaths? Day-Glo tights? Those of us on two wheels still get only a sliver of the roads, and my biking shorts are baggy and olive green, with an elastic waist.

By many credible accounts Sadik-Khan has brought some of this misery on herself, with a style that can be impatient, intolerant, moralizing. I’ve gotten to know her a bit, and she has a certainty that borders on righteousness and an intensity in the vicinity of mania. But that’s to her credit — and our benefit. New York needs visionaries who won’t simply let things be.

In the end the resistance that she and the city have encountered has to do mostly with parochialism and selfishness. Some New Yorkers seem offended by the notion that we should be more like such biking havens as Copenhagen, Paris, or for that matter, Portland, Ore.: life here is too urgent and blunt and brutal for such crunchy-granola niceties. Besides which, no one wants to give an inch, literally: not the Prospect Park West gripers who lost parking spaces to the bike lane, not the drivers of delivery trucks whose jobs are sometimes complicated by such lanes, not the Manhattan traditionalists who feel that sharing just a few of Central Park’s transverse paths with cyclists — as the city decided in July they must do — requires too much in the way of vigilance from people ambling among the trees. The complaints were loud and passionate.

And misleading. Several polls have shown that a majority of New Yorkers favor the creation of bike lanes, at least in the abstract. The problem is that it’s a relatively soft, quiet support, reflecting the limited use of those lanes. According to Department of Transportation figures, about 15,500 cyclists daily entered Manhattan’s central business district between Battery Park and 59th Street in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That’s in contrast to 762,000 cars.

But ridership is definitely growing. A decade earlier, only 4,700 cyclists entered that part of Manhattan. And over the last 20 or so years, the percentage of New Yorkers who use cycling to commute has doubled, to 0.6 percent in 2009 from 0.3 percent in 1990, according to an analysis of census figures by John Pucher, a Rutgers University professor who studies bicycle trends worldwide. That still leaves New York behind Chicago, with 1.2 percent of commuters on bikes; Washington, D.C., with 2.2 percent; San Francisco, with 3 percent; and Portland, with 5.8 percent.

WHAT’S keeping more cyclists in New York from doing so? “The indifference of the New York City Police Department is the biggest obstacle,” said Charles Komanoff, a mathematical economist and past president of Transportation Alternatives. He and other cycling advocates said that police officers too seldom ticket drivers who ignore cyclists’ rights, particularly by treating biking lanes as temporary parking spots and thus forcing bike riders to swerve into and out of traffic. As prevalent as such lane-obstruction is, I’ve noticed more news reports on cyclists blowing through red lights, and I’ve found myself envying, of all places, the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Its mayor recently deployed a tank to crush a Mercedes-Benz illegally parked in a bike lane.

Without going quite that far, our city’s police officers must do more. And the transportation department must expand markedly the number of bike racks citywide — the official city count is about 12,800 — so that riders can rest assured that they’ll find a safe place to stow their bicycles. Pucher is the co-author of “City Cycling,” a forthcoming book, which notes that Paris has about 1,490 bike parking spaces — slots in racks, for example — per 100,000 people, London about 1,670 and Tokyo about 6,400. And New York? About 152. “It’s lousy, lousy, lousy,” Pucher said.

TWO summers ago, a companion and I hunted so fruitlessly for a rack outside a movie theater that we locked our bikes — illegally — to a parking sign. The sign’s mooring in the concrete must have been loose, because we came out of “The Hurt Locker” to find it lying on the sidewalk across the street, where it had apparently been deposited by a thief or thieves who’d pried it from the ground so they could liberate our bikes. This happened in full view of a busy grocery store and within feet of a Mister Softee truck. New York really is brutal.

The bike share program will help enormously, because for every bike, there will be a locked place at the stations where you will be able to pick it up and drop it off. In the transportation department’s request for bids from private companies, it outlined a network of about 600 stations with at least 10,000 bikes, to be at least partly operational next year. Usage fees might be just a few dollars for short rides, making bikes a sensible alternative to, say, subways, which have suffered from service cutbacks and increased crowding.

The Chicago transportation commissioner, Gabe Klein, noted that biking pushed back against a range of modern ills. “There’s the congestion problem,” he said. “The pollution problem. The obesity problem. The gas problem.”

On top of all that, it makes an important statement about our priorities — about our willingness to amend the reckless, impatient, gluttonous ways that have created not only smog and clog in our cities but also a staggering federal debt.

“Bikes are definitely a symbol of what your city stands for,” said Klein.

    Bicycle Visionary NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/
    bruni-janette-sadik-khan-bicycle-visionary.html

Before Bike-Share Effort Starts,

Concerns Are Raised

About How It Will Work

June 3, 2011

The New York Times

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The Bloomberg administration is only months away from rolling out an ambitious bike-share program intended eventually to rival ones in London, Paris and Washington, yet the proposal has already been plagued by questions of its viability.

Community board members have raised concerns about whether bike-share kiosks and racks would encroach on precious sidewalk areas, or swallow parking spaces. Some of the more seasoned bike-share companies did not bid on the project.

And the equipment provider for Alta Bicycle Share, one of the two finalists vying to run the operation, has run into financial problems in Montreal. Government officials there eventually provided $108 million in financing to that provider, Public Bike System Company, in part to cover losses incurred by Bixi, the city’s bike-share program.

All things considered, it has been somewhat of a bumpy start for a program that could help shape Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s legacy of leaving a more environmentally friendly city.

When the city issued its request for proposals last November, it called for “financially self-sustaining, 24-hour transportation that complements existing transit and transportation options.”

The city called for a 30-station test program to start later this summer and for the official program, featuring 10,000 bicycles at 600 stations, to start on April 1, 2012. The city emphasized that not only would it not finance any part of the program, but it also expected the winning bidder to share its profits.

With each news conference and public event, the mayor’s enthusiasm has grown.

“Every city that I’ve talked to mayors in around the world, it’s one the most popular things they’ve ever done,” Mr. Bloomberg said last month. “I would expect it to be popular here in the city.”

Sean Sweeney, who runs the SoHo Alliance and is chairman of the landmarks committee for Community Board 2, said he liked the idea of a bike-share program. But he fears that the Transportation Department will just add the kiosks to the packed streets of SoHo with little feedback from the community.

“We want our sidewalks back; the sidewalks in SoHo are not for sale,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Our sidewalks are precious to us because they are so narrow.”

Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, declined to comment on the city’s plans.

Many leading bike-share companies expressed early interest in the city’s proposal. Wayne Sosin, president of Worksman Cycles, a bicycle manufacturer based in Queens that placed an unsuccessful bid for the contract, said representatives from some of the biggest bike-share companies in the world were at a meeting in December about the program: Cemusa, responsible for programs in Pamplona and San Sebastian, Spain; J. C. Decaux, which designed the Paris program; and Clear Channel, which started the Washington program but later abandoned it.

But while other cities have given advertising companies unlimited opportunities to use the bike-share program, New York specified there could be only one advertising sponsor per bicycle and on each station computer unit.

Mr. Sosin said that when Worksman approached Cemusa, J. C. Decaux and Clear Channel to possibly team up with them on a proposal, they all declined and did not bid. Risa B. Heller, a spokeswoman for Cemusa, said the company passed it up because “right now we are focused on our street furniture contract in New York City.” J. C. Decaux did not return calls and e-mails; Nancy Zakhary, a spokeswoman for Clear Channel Outdoor, said she could not “comment on prospective bids and strategies.”

In March, the city narrowed its field from six bidders to two: Alta and B-Cycle, which is affiliated with the manufacturer Trek, and has done programs in Chicago and Denver. Trek did not respond to requests for an interview.

Roger Plamondon, the board chairman of Public Bike System, said his company had the financial resources to come to New York, despite its issues in Montreal. In 2009, Bixi’s first year, the program lost $5.5 million; last year, it lost $7 million, Mr. Plamondon said.

The City of Montreal lent $37 million to Public Bike System to be repaid over 12 years and guaranteed a $71 million private loan to help finance the expansion of its programs.

Mayor Gérald Tremblay of Montreal said he supported the bailout because it would help preserve a popular program, and because Public Bike System showed promise in developing international programs patterned after Bixi.

“My intent is not for Bixi to make money,” Mr. Tremblay said. “But it is for Bixi not to lose money.”

Mr. Plamondon said he underestimated how long it would take to secure financing to help pay for its expansion.

“I can guarantee you we are not on the brink of bankruptcy,” he said.

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

This article has been revised

to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 7, 2011

An article on Saturday about problems with a proposed bike-sharing program in New York City misidentified the company that had financial problems with a similar operation in Montreal. It was Public Bike System Company, the equipment provider for Alta Bicycle Share, which is a finalist to run New York’s program, not Alta itself. The error was repeated in a front-page summary of the article. The article also misstated the Spanish cities where another company, Cemusa, which decided not to bid for New York’s program, operates bike-share programs. They are Pamplona and San Sebastian, not Madrid and Barcelona.

Before Bike-Share Effort Starts,
Concerns Are Raised About How It Will Work,
NYT,
3.11.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/
nyregion/new-yorks-bike-share-program-is-plagued-by-questions.html