Hipsters, Hasidim, and My Bike Lane
A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant remained.
That’s an excerpt from a new essay of mine in The Huffington Post, one of two pieces I published today on the controversy about the lane’s removal. Since it’s a corridor I bike along regularly, and since I’ve long been curious about the religiosity of those who live along it, I did what I could to understand what happened and why. Most of my fellow cyclists believed that religious prudishness was mostly to blame, but what I learned from conversations with Hasidic men on Bedford convinced me that we cyclists have to share some of the blame for the lane’s removal as well. I write in my piece for Religion Dispatches:
That’s what nearly everybody walking up and down Hasidic Bedford in daytime says as well. When asked directly about it, they concede that they believe many cyclists to be inappropriately dressed, even while insisting that that alone was not reason enough to remove the lane.
An ambulance driver said that there had been a lot of accidents with children, though he had never personally seen with one. A man named Moshe, however, said he did once see a child hit by a bike. “It’s terrible,” he said. A yeshiva school bus driver complained, in an extended conversation aboard his bus, “bikes don’t obey any laws.” He doesn’t think religious concerns about clothing were the motivating force at all. “It is a free country,” he said.
“The problem is how they ride on it,” added a Hasidic man named Abraham while checking his mailbox on Bedford. “They don’t care about the kids.” Both a bicyclist and a school bus driver, he enjoyed using the bike lane but now is glad, for the sake of safety, that it is gone.
I go on to call for a new sense of responsibility among bicyclists for their own behavior, especially where neighborhoods provide lanes for us on their streets—both for myself and my fellow cyclists. Again, in HuffPo:
The city has added hundreds of miles of bike lanes in recent years, and bicycle commuting has more than doubled since 2000 as a result. I see new lanes being added all the time and feel grateful every time I do. Each one lowers my chances of getting whacked by a taxi.
As the city finally starts investing in keeping us safe, it is time for cyclists to do our part. “There is not a single community board meeting about bike lanes where cyclist behavior is not an issue,” says Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives. His organization has launched Biking Rules!–a program to encourage more responsible riding in New York City.
The rules are simple and, from now on, I’m going to do my best to follow them: Pedestrians come first. Stop at red lights, and don’t ride against traffic. Obey the laws. Wear a helmet, and use a light in the dark.
Read the rest of these at Religion Dispatches and The Huffington Post.
Related: hipsters, Judaism, New York
Nathan Schneider is senior editor of Killing the Buddha and writes about religion, reason, and violence for a variety of publications, and is working on a book on the search for proof of the existence of God. He is also a founding editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence. Visit his website at The Row Boat.
December 28th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I’m sorry, it’s sad to see bikers reduced to the stereotype, “hipsters” and Hasidic communities being turned into bike community agitators because of their orthodoxy. Do we really need this? Biking is alternative transportation. Period. In Los Angeles, Haisidic Jews ride bikes as do their their children. There’s always lots of bikes outside the temples.
I’d rather read that those who consider themselves “hipsters” are in reality self-centered people in general who don’t consider the safety of others or respect their boundaries. Watch “hipsters” and the hipster dog community and lack of respect for other people, lawns, keeping the sidewalk clean of feces, etc. This same sort of “hipster” community that have latched on to bikes display the same lack of respect regardless what they do.
Write about hipsters and their behavior patterns maybe.
December 29th, 2009 at 12:38 am
Thank you for acknowledging that responsibility really does cut both ways. I’ve seen bikers risk their lives traveling in the bike lanes in San Diego, which double as right turn lanes for four-wheeled vehicles. And I’ve seen them risk the lives of others when they travel five abreast in large packs, spilling out of their lanes and forcing auto drivers to swerve to avoid them. Share the road.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Scratch, thanks for the critical reactions. Before writing, I debated whether to use the term “hipster”—which is such a confusing ball of wax, esp. considering virtually nobody is actually willing to admit to being one, though everyone has some idea of what it means. I have no real interest in taking part in the discussions (recently given an imprimatur by n+1) about the ins and outs of hipsterdom. (Though if I did, I’d certainly contest your characterization.)
As for the hipsters’ relevance here… From my explorations, it was clear to me that while the bike lanes are used by many different communities of people, it was only a certain group, most recognizably identified as “hipsters,” which took it upon themselves to protest the lane’s removal. I make the distinction clear in this paragraph of the Religion Dispatches article:
While the “hipster” community does probably account for some of the worst-behaved cycling (for many of the same reasons that they were the bike lane’s best-organized defenders), it certainly is not limited to them/us.