Cycling Through Manhattan

Central Park Cyclists

With an extended holiday in New York, I took the opportunity to ride through Manhattan into New Jersey. From Jamaica, Queens to Manhattan, it is a pretty torturous ride through innumerable traffic lights, potholes, 3 lane roads and the vagaries of New York drivers. We followed a route marked ‘best cycle lane for travelling East’. If this was the best cycle route, I would hate to see any other cycle route.

It wasn’t all bad though crossing Queensboro bridge and George Washington Bridge were pretty cool. You get a great view; it was pretty crowded on a Sunday afternoon with many cyclists escaping the city and pedestrians sharing a fairly narrow crossing.

Reaching Central Park left you with a great feeling of relief, as you finally reached a reasonable place to cycle. As you would expect it’s pretty busy; on a Sunday you find yourself weaving in and out of horse drawn carriages, pedestrians and the full range of cyclists from old ladies on sit up and beg bikes to serious cyclists with their shining carbon fibre bikes. One draw back of Central Park is the crossings and traffic lights. When the lights were red, there was usually no one there. When they were green you could guarantee people would be crossing. Though it didn’t seem to matter as no one seems to pay any attention to traffic lights in Central Park. They could have just been there for ornamental reasons, but, during my laps there didn’t seem much conflict between the different road users.

Three Guys (me on left) after crossing Queensboro Bridge

The overriding memory of riding through Manhattan is the sheer number of traffic lights. You can’t help but ride through New York without thinking – Wow, these people are really clever to build all these huge skyscapers – but have you never heard of roundabouts?

After crossing the George Washington bridge we finally reached more reasonable cycling country – the 9W to Nayak. At last, you could actually stretch your legs without having to slam on the brakes every 50m. But, even on this road, there were still many traffic lights, at junctions which would have been ideal for  roundabouts.

More sedate cyclists through an attractive cycle path near shore

So after two weeks of riding around New York, I probably wore through brake blokes more than if I had been descending in the Alpine Passes at 50mph.

Despite all the obvious difficulties of cycling in New York, the impatient drivers, the speed and unpredictability of traffic, the sheer complexity of the road system (and of course, the never ending traffic lights) it was actually quite good fun. Though my relief on getting a flight back to England is partly at the idea of being able to cycle on English roads… (which says quite a lot)