2. ditto for this one, too — probably. every block should have a loading zone temp ‘parking/loading’ space that is at least a couple of car lengths wide. if that is not the case, then remember to call DOT when you get home and let them know what’s up. it’s possible we should put parking meters at these locations, even and especially in residential neighborhoods. cops on bikes can check them efficiently. or use road sensors. in SF, I’ve seen UPS trucks *not* block the bike lane, and just kill a lane of traffic on a multi-lane one-way. I’m not sure i’m crazy about this, but i appreciate the gesture. maybe our Euro-based bike nerd friends can offer some advise on proper protocol? if you want to fight and possibly die, then slap/punch/kick the car as you pass by. otherwise, just roll by. or stop and take a pic and post to mybikelane.com. there are plenty of battles to fight. a disapproving stare can work. a little shrug of the shoulders can be nice. a hands-up shrug with the raised eyebrows in a ‘WTF?’-type glance is nice, and you still won’t get shot (probably). if i actually thought some piece of junk blocking the bike lane was all that dangerous, i’d be bent, but there are many other more dangerous road hazards we need to worry about — and most of it goes back to pressuring the Mayor/DOT to make better road design choices, etc. i generally don’t want to be bothered getting into my ‘fight or flight’ mode when i just want to chill on the way to my destination — it always ends up amping me up for at least another hour, so the way i see it, i lose if i go there. if i just chalk it up to ‘experience’, then i can speak and write with vigor and authority on bad road design — every experienced injustice is just more motivation to rid the earth of cars. and we have to allow a little bit of time for car folks to adjust their thinking, to understand that blocking the bike lane, while not the end of the world, is kind of rude, not such a nice thing to do, and a little bit dangerous. as more people take up the bike, there will be more people to get your back, so next year, if they’re still parked in the bike lane, then we’ll all just hop off our bikes and pick up the car and move it out of the bike lane. by any means necessary. i kid. i kid. really. what is the fine for parking in the bike lane? let’s lobby to up it by next year to something stiff — something worth the City’s time. $150 at least. put some cops on bikes and start collecting cash. put an APB out on the local tv stations and say that cops on bikes are now going to be ticketing drivers who park in the bike lanes and endanger the lives of kids and parents riding to school, and other folks just trying to get from Point A to Point B in one piece. “This is a public safety hazard — bikers are moving around this city making the city a nice place to live work and play — and we’re going to do our best to make sure bikers stay safe out there.” listen, i’m not the biggest fan of cops, but if you want to get serious about getting some respect from the authoritah! — then get some cops on bikes. watch the bike lane culture change overnight. oh, and tell the cops to skip on the uniforms every once in a while — see what it’s really like out there as a normal person. man, would i love to see this scene play out: undercover confronts car loser in the bike lane — “Hey buddy, you know you’re in a bike lane, right?” “Yeah, what of it?” “Sir, step out of the car.” [cops on bikes, by the way, is an excellent policy decision for about 1,001 reasons, and we should be pursuing that policy with the police.]

2) If a car is double parked, go around. It’s NYC, for the love of god. We invented double parking. (Try biking any busy street in Asia. You’re not entitled to obstacle-free city cycling.) Get over it!

Cyclists traveling the wrong way on bike lanes tend to prevent cars from driving in those lanes especially, when cyclists take possession of the lanes (i.e., when cars are not driving fast in the bike lane which is often the case) and order car drivers out.

Even if cars are driving fast in the bike lane about a block or more ahead the car drivers tend to realize that they are wrong or at least tend to not want to kill or maim the approaching cyclist and ultimately get out; or at least maybe don’t want to experience the minor inconvenience should they kill or maim a cyclist . . . ; or, have some other good and or obscure reason.

2. Re cars double parked in the bike lane, this only really bothers me enough to get a rise out of me if the car is idling in the bike lane surrounded by plenty of available parking, but just can’t be arsed to parallel park. Which usually gets a similar “you are risking lives out of selfishness!” outburst, if the idler has their passenger window open.

Education ‘on the roll’ as described in this question is not very effective, particularly with other cyclists, because of higher adrenaline levels. We all get pretty defensive on the road, especially when someone tries to correct us! I think this is why we have so many incidents of road rage and even hostility between people riding bikes.

Of course, there is always leading by example!

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bikelaneparking.pdf

I often also find that I have to pull into traffic against a “salmon”, as in the US it doesn’t make immediate sense to someone who is obviously slow anyway to reverse the natural flow of traffic (riding on the left side). Today, a lady was carrying her son, helmetless, on an xtracycle riding the wrong way down the already-too-narrow bike lane on Lafayette street north of Houston. She apologized by endangered everyone’s lives by doing this.

Point being, let’s work together, get NYPD to do a ticket blitz for bike lane offenders, give the money to the MTA, and build protected two-way bike lanes. Bikers should not have to feel as though they are patrolling the streets.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty clear that I was not advocating salmoning, but just noting that it is a sensible (if partly selfish) way of letting us know that the one-way-ism is – or that car-induced one-way-ism – is nonsense.

What you seem to be saying is that private car driving should be optimized because it has the additional side effect of allowing pedestrians to look only one way before crossing the non-pedestrian part of a street (some will wait for signals and never cross at mid-block… but not my friends.)

Also, a technical note: Try making up some new words or phrases (hyphenated or not). It does wonders for one’s argumentation strategies.

> It is natural, just like taking the shortest line as possible between A and B.

What’s natural about it? We’re talking about busy streets here, by now you’re used to traffic laws, right?

And like it or not, they are shared by lots of different people. Including people who look left when they step out into the road because the traffic is coming from the left and then you crash into the kid or the old lady or your sister because you’re coming from the right. And from there one of you is probably bleeding and sometimes people die this way.

Conversations with your friends is crucial. Bitch about it! We love to bitch. Atrios / Duncan Black is actually doing the world a favor when he bitches about cyclists going the wrong way on a one-way — you’re asking to get killed. I’m not hearing that “four blocks” excuse. C’mon bikers, we’re not that lazy, WTF?

Anyway, if you don’t want to end up as a road-rage or friday carnage stat, DO NOT go getting confrontational, you have no idea what you’ll be dealing with and chances are nothing good will come of it.

25 responses yet only one suggestion – thanks, Kaja! – that one-way streets (with one-way bike lanes, and also no contraflow for cycling on narrow one-way streets) might not be the ideal set-up?

How ’bout some cool videos with the high-production standards of some in the recent contest showing people responding constructively – rather than reactively – to the totally stupid monodirectionalingualism of many streets in Manhattan and all over NYC?

Real salmon are acting instinctively to propagate their species. It is natural, just like taking the shortest line as possible between A and B.

I wish I could help, but I am in “Europe” fighting my own battles against stupid mobility and public space practices. I can only tell you what to do.

***

Regarding the car blocking the bike lane, or any illegally/dangerously-parked car, the most important rule is keep your level of harassment below what would cause them to call 5-0 and risk a ticket on their own bad behaviour , e.g. not crapping on their dashboard GPS or giving them some concrete overshoes, etc. In Prague on illegally parked cars I used to put notes covered with mustard along with the text “No parking. Mustard police.” It is so stupid that they would not call the police to complain…

We’d welcome any ideas/feedback you have on our project. You can provide feedback via a survey we have up here: http://www.deardriver.org/survey.html or via email.

> energy would be better used lobbying for the NYPD to enforce the law.

I sass salmon. But I often yield the bike lane to them, especially if I can keep up with automobile traffic and safely merge in. Salmoning annoys me not because it’s illegal, or unnatural, or unwarranted, but because it’s unsafe in our current configurations; I feel the bike lanes should in many cases be bidirectional and two feet wider. But, they’re not, so, sass.

In #2, depending on (my mood and) whether I can get by the parked car, I’d probably slap it with the palm of my hand. My plausible deniability for the palm slap is that their engine is running and I think they might be in gear, and they’ve demonstrated they’re a threat to me by being in the bike lane; I want to let them know not to pull out into traffic while I’m passing them.

Once in a while I skid-stop and fall softly but loudly into the offending car like it’s some cyclocross stunt, and then — while picking myself up and pedalling away — yell, without obscenities, that this is his fault and that he should get out of the bike lane.

I am under the impression that any accident involving a car in a bike lane, where the bike cannot safely pass, and the bike has skid its tires attempting to stop, is the fault of the car’s driver automatically; but I am not a lawyer.

Larry is right that salmoning while dark is the most dangerous thing. Folks with no lights, salmoning, routinely enter intersections while cars are accelerating to their their green-lit right of way; it is as if they are asking to be killed; they must have no sense of just how dangerous it is.

The enemy of the bicycle is not the motor vehicle but rather the idiot, and idiots use all forms of transportation.

This was a great post, the replies have all been really interesting.

In my younger and slightly more angry days, when a driver cut me off or blocked the lane, I’d give the mirror or window a good thump, but that didn’t accomplish much. It would either make drivers angry (because nothing makes drivers angrier than touching their cars), or startle unaware drivers who didn’t know they were somewhere they shouldn’t be.

I mostly accept it as a fact of city traffic, and merge in with the cars to pass, but when I’m feeling a little indignant, I might try to squeeze between the stopped car and the curb to make the driver’s actions clear to them. At least, I’ll give them a “get out of the bike lane” shout.

Riding down Bleecker the other evening, a car was stopped in the bike lane. A cyclist in front of me rode by the window and yelled at the driver, which prompted me to do the same. After passing, I heard a cyclist behind me yell at the driver as well. Nice moment, there.

As for the reverse riders, I’ll generally give a polite “don’t ride against traffic, please” or “the bike lane is one-way.” Some will tell you to shut the eff up, but it wouldn’t be New York City otherwise.

So do I, in general. After all they can see the traffic coming from behind and I can’t.

When driving, what really worries me is cyclists who ride at night in dark clothes with no lights. Although I’m only 48, I’ve noticed a decrease in my ability to see well at night while driving, especially since I almost never drive at night.

I suppose what I could do is put a set of lights and a vest from LEDTronics like the one I have, along with some receipts, in the back of the car, and try to catch up with cyclists and make them buy them from me. That’s what I’d like to see the police do — buy it with a 50% markup or get a ticket.

I also have employed the play chicken w/ the wrong way cyclist (also w/ the cyclists who bike on sidewalk).

This usually works for me because 1) I am bigger and 2) I am bigger.