Despite the best efforts of bike lane opponents and overprivileged New Yorker columnists, bike commuters in the Big Apple have increased by 102 percent since 2007, according to new figures from the New York Department of Transportation. Bicycle commuter numbers have almost quadrupled since 2001. Just imagine what it will look like when their bikeshare debuts!
This presents some infrastructural challenges, of course, but the city is up for it. There may be some bike lane growing pains, cough cough John Cassidy and his Jaguar, but there are also ambitious plans to expand the bike lane network. As for parking, the city has kind of an ingenious solution: They're repurposing 6,000 old parking meter poles, now that the two-car coin-op meters are a thing of the past.
