Why It’s Faster To Travel By Bike in NYC
GOTHAM is now moving more people more efficiently around Midtown Manhattan than ever before. The catch? About the worst way to get anywhere in the densest part of the city is by car. And that’s not going to change anytime soon — unless Albany lets the city charge drivers and passengers for the disproportionate amount of space they take up on our crowded streets.
If you need to get somewhere fast — well, less slowly — you’re better off hopping on a blue bike than hailing a cab or conjuring up an Uber, according to a report the city’s Department of Transportation will release this week.
Average motor-traffic speeds in Manhattan have fallen by 20 percent since 2010 — and 10 percent in the past year alone.
On a weekday last fall, the 1,673 people who took a Citi Bike just within Midtown — two-thirds of them for less than a mile — clocked average speeds of between 6.7 and 7.8 miles an hour.
The 15,837 people who took the same short trips via yellow cab crawled at between 4.2 and 5.5 miles an hour.
And most Citi bikers in this area are com- muters. More than half of Citi Bike’s Midtown rides occur during rush hours, from 8 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m.
That it’s faster to take a bike than a car in one of the densest parts of the Western world isn’t a transportation failure. It’s physics.
A person on a 45-pound bike can glide by idling cars and trucks. A person sitting in the back seat of a 4,000-pound SUV can only glare at the bicyclists as he waits for all of the other Ubers and taxis to move.
Today, 45,000 fewer cars and trucks come into core Manhattan daily than did in 2010. Yet, as DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg notes, “Traffic in our core has probably never been this slow.” Why? Consider: New York has added 520,000 jobs in the past five years — more than it added in the previous three decades combined, the DOT points out.
Those jobs have attracted 370,000 new people. And that’s just the people who live here: We’ve got 10 million more annual tourists, too, than we did in 2010.
More of everything and everyone mean slower going. Cars and trucks must wait, for example, for more pedestrians to cross. And the bigger you or your car or truck is, the longer you’ll have to wait — because you’ll have a harder time getting around everyone and everything else in the way.
Since 2010, we’ve added half a million more people each day to the subways. And we’ve added 190,000 more daily bicyclists. It’s a good thing that most of these new people don’t rely on cars, at least not regularly. They could never all ride in cars on a regular basis without destroying the quality of life that attracted them to New York. One problem, though, is that even though it’s harder than ever to take a car in Midtown, it’s easier than ever to get a car, thanks to ride-hailing apps.
Though the city doesn’t have great data on Uber and Lyft as opposed to yellow taxis, greater competition among drivers for the customers with the most money likely means more congestion, even when drivers don’t have passengers. The number of cars for hire is at an all-time high.
The bad news for regular car users is that though the city wants to see traffic move more efficiently, officials are hardly in a rush to make more room for cars. Instead, they want “to get the most out of every right-ofway that we have,” says Ryan Russo, deputy transportation commissioner.
That means, hopefully, doing something to speed up buses, which are now mostly stuck in slow-moving car and truck traffic, and losing riders because of it. And it means even more room for the ever-growing crush of bicyclists and pedestrians, who take up far less space than car passengers for the same distance traveled.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a cab or Uber to get around Midtown, of course. Just don’t expect to get anywhere very fast.
“I think without some sort of pricing” on cars and trucks in Midtown traffic, “our tools to manage traffic speeds are not infinite,” says Trottenberg. “There are a lot of modes that are faster to take. It’s faster to take the bike.”