Upper West Side Bikelash: We See What We Look At

by Yvonne Vávra

We see what we look at. I’ve been thinking about this lately because I learned a new word: iniquitous. I had managed to get by without it since I came to this country. Never encountered it, never needed it—until one day I stumbled across this vowel-heavy, letter-salad of a word in a newspaper and looked it up. And now it’s suddenly everywhere. It shows up in articles, conversations, podcasts, and it feels iniquitous of me to have ignored such a fine word for so long.

This is what brains do. Once we notice something, we start noticing it everywhere. You see one person smoking, then maybe another, and suddenly think: Is everyone smoking again? Rest assured, from then on, your attention will keep finding more examples to confirm that they are.

I recently became aware that a lot of Upper West Siders eat ice cream in what—to me—is not ice cream weather. Now all of you are eating ice cream all the time. Are you? All I know is that my brain is tuned to spot every cone and cup and ignores anything that doesn’t support my belief that you’re all doing ice cream wrong.

The more unusual something seems, the more it sticks—especially if it feels like a threat. Like a ruthless e-bike rider. Once you’ve seen a few frightening examples of reckless cycling, your brain starts scanning for them everywhere. You notice every near miss, every bad story, every rider who confirms what you already suspect: that dangerous bikers are all over the place. What fades into the background are the dozens of completely unremarkable, friendly cyclists in between.

If what we mostly notice are rule-breaking riders, it’s understandable to be concerned about the city’s plan to add a bike lane to 72nd Street. A portion of the Upper West Side is strongly opposed to it. They’re not convinced by the city’s promise that the change will improve safety for everyone. The main worry is that pedestrians, especially seniors and people with disabilities, will be at risk when crossing the bike lane or getting into a double-parked car. At a rally against the plan last weekend, one resident said that “stepping off of your curb onto a bi-directional bike lane is suicide.”

Hm. I’d say stepping off the curb is always a risky moment. It’s a street, full of fast-moving, unpredictable traffic that can hit you if you don’t make sure it’s safe to cross.

But while my mind is racing with thoughts, I’m not going to settle the debate over the 72nd Street bike lane in this column. What interests me more is the figure at its center: “the biker.”

They ride into the conversation as an urban menace that knows no laws—a force that slips through red lights, materializes out of nowhere, and is now somehow being rewarded with infrastructure. But the thing about “bikers” is how quickly they turn back into people once you actually look at them.

It’s a woman biking to work, a guy heading to a date, a dad taking his kid to school, a delivery worker trying to make rent, me with my puppy in a basket. We’re all just ordinary New Yorkers, trying to get somewhere in one piece.

It’s hard not to think this very mixed group deserves a measure of safety too. People on bikes are also constantly navigating dangers created by others: cars veering unexpectedly, passengers flinging open doors, double-parked vehicles forcing cyclists into traffic, pedestrians wandering into bike lanes—and yes, reckless riders too.

What may feel unsettling is not simply the bike lane itself, but the attempt to reorganize a choreography the neighborhood has long learned to navigate. However, change is coming, and the conversation about the 72nd Street redesign might feel different if we looked a little more closely at the full mix of people we call “bikers,” not just the ones who stand out.

To be sure, New Yorkers on bikes have a long history of alarming parts of the Upper West Side. When the bicycle craze rolled into the city in the late 19th century, many residents regarded the new riders as a threat to the way things were. The businessmen of the West Side Association, founded in 1866 to shape the neighborhood into an investor-friendly enclave, complained bitterly about cyclists zipping through the streets and parks. Others were especially troubled by women on bikes. Some were convinced that cycling could cause sexual arousal or might even enlarge women’s hands into something distressingly masculine.

Different eras, different fears.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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