Pedicabs, Pedestrians, and Bicycles
Cycling in New York City is a rapidly growing mode of transport. In 2009, an estimated 200,000 city residents bicycle on a typical day, and make 655,000 trips each day, greater than the number of the ten most popular bus routes in the city. The City Department of Transportation estimates there are an additional two in-line skaters for every cyclist in New York. The city has 420 miles (680 km) of bike lanes (as of 2005) including the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway and has in recent years expanded separated bike lanes on major thoroughfares and on bridges across the East River. As part of PlaNYC 2030, bike lanes will be added at a rate of about 100 miles per year until 2010, and 1,800 miles (2,900 km) should be completed by 2030.
The city annually hosts the largest recreational cycling event in the United States, the Five Boro Bike Tour, in which 30,000 cyclists ride 42 miles (68 km) through the city's boroughs.
More than 500 people annually work as bicycle rickshaw aka pedicab drivers, who in 2005 handled one million passengers. The City Council voted twice, including an override of Mayor Bloomberg's veto due to the market cap, in 2007 to license pedicab owners and drivers and allow only 325 pedicab licenses. Neither the limit on pedicabs nor the law itself went into effect due to a successful New York City Pedicab Owners' Association lawsuit over permit issuance. Ultimately, 943 pedicab business owners permits were issued in November 2009 after a second law was passed to address shortcomings of the 2007 law. Today, pedicabs meet market demand in midtown for both ecological transport as well as quick trips within the central business district during afternoon rush hours when vehicular traffic moves cross town at an average speed of 4.5 miles per hour.
Walk and bicycle modes of travel account for 21% of all modes for trips in the city; nationally the rate for metro regions is about 8%. In 2000 New York had the largest number of walking commuters among large American cities in both total number and as a proportion of all commuters: 517,290, or 5.6%. By way of comparison, the next city with the largest proportion of walking commuters, Boston, had 119,294 commuter pedestrians, amounting to 4.1% of that city's commuters.
Read more about this topic: Expressways In New York City
Famous quotes containing the word bicycles:
“Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)