Cycling's Untapped Potential

The biggest impediment to making New York a bicycle-friendly city is not money, but attitude. As succeeding chapters make clear, the infrastructure and administrative changes needed to encourage cycling are easy and cheap enough to implement — if only there is political will to set them in motion. One more point: people like to ride bikes. In every city in the world that is set up for cycling, people ride. There is no good reason why New York City, with its perfect topography and compact land use pattern, should deny people the opportunity.

As H.G. Wells wrote in the 1920s, “When I see an adult on a bicycle I do not despair for the future of the human race.” A New York City with hundreds of thousands or even a million people riding bicycles daily would be a city less afraid for its survival and more able to fulfill its promise as a place of greatness and opportunity.