October 2009

We started early – hostels don’t lend themselves well to sleep – and were up around 6am. After a quick (disposable) breakfast, we met near the hostel on our bikes for an early morning ride in the city. Riding in New York is like riding most places, just with more honking, no right turns on red lights, and a slightly higher sense of awareness and caution changing multiple lanes to turn left. It’s a good city to practice what is, I think, the most important traffic cycling skill: negotiation.

Eye contact and a few quick gestures communicates a great deal with surrounding traffic. Imagine you’re one of those hilarious little three-wheeled sidewalk plows, making a beeline down busy streets back to the garage. Faster-moving traffic is obligated to accommodate and make space for the slower moving vehicle – accomplished through negotiation, respect and legal behaviour.

Back to NY – the most challenging part, for me, was entering into Columbus circle, which is a seemingly chaotic multi-lane roundabout. But if this book is to believed, it is precisely the apparent disorder which actually makes roundabouts a great deal safer than conventional four-way intersections. Drivers respond with caution and heightened awareness when presented with different driving environments.

The city has some very neat – and very new – pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure. Some major street closures in downtown – near Time’s Square and Harold Square – were initially controversial, but are obviously huge boons to the sense of community and enjoyment of the city:

And check out this amazing(!) separated bike path:

We spent the rest of the weekend riding, doing drills and practicing teaching the wide variety of modules covered in the League’s Smart Cycling courses. I feel confident, excited and super empowered to be back riding in Peterborough, and really look forward to sharing that sense of enthusiasm and comfort with people taking the course.

We returned from New York City late last week after (successfully!) completing the League of American Bicyclists’ League Certified Instructor (LCI) training course.

We left on Thursday evening in a rental van loaded with our bikes, and pulled into a hotel on the outskirts of Syracuse around 11pm. After an utterly ghoulish complimentary breakfast (including a slop of grits that looked like week-old cold mushroom soup), we left around 7:30am for NYC. The breakfast was the first of several days of a really disappointing trend: disposable everything! A restaurant serving meals on styrofoam with plastic cutlery and disposable cups. Even the LCI course had us drinking out of plastic cups (throw out), eating on plastic plates (throw out) — while taking place in a hostel with kitchens easily available. More waste in a couple of days than I would normally create in a month. I’d happily do the dishes for a few folks if it meant we didn’t just trash everything.

I digress: the drive from Syracuse into NYC is gorgeous — its gentle hills, beautiful deciduous escarpments, and large median separated highways beats the 401 eastbound hands down. But this appearance fades too: as we came closer to the city, we were stopped dead for nearly 30 bladder-stinging minutes because of an overturned tractor trailer. Desperate for something to distract from the bizarre absurdity of sitting stopped among hundreds of trembling vehicles (would this ever happen on a bike?) in the middle of nowhere, we took to looking at the wide grassy median between the two directions of traffic. I was totally shocked to see beer bottles and cans: endless quantities of them! Some looked years old, some brand new. I mean, really? Sigh.

We pulled into NYC around 2pm on Friday, and easily found parking due to a few minutes of investigation earlier in the week using Google’s fabulous street view tool. Awesome!

The hostel didn’t allow check-ins until 4pm, so we hoofed it down to the American Museum of Natural History (30 blocks south).

• Suggested admission: $16. Actual admission necessary to get in: $0. We paid around $11 each, but would have much benefitted from this knowledge ahead of time.
• Holy s@&^: this museum is. so. cool. Spider silk tapestry? Check! Squid and the Whale? Check! Forests and Trees? Most beautifully designed exhibit I have ever seen — and it’s clearly from the 50s-60s.

After a quick tour through the human origins and meteor room, we had to leave to start the LCI seminar. 30 blocks back, check-in at the HI-NYC (where we’d be staying, and where the course takes place), scarf dinner to stave off the wobbly low-blood sugar crankiness that had been setting in. Course starts.

Needless to say, I was not in peak mental or physical condition to do this: the sole driver for the 10 hours of motoring + a sleepless night in Syracuse + several meals of consistently bad/mediocre food + fatigue + disassociated sense of self at being in radically new surroundings = a not awesome Clifford. But we pulled through the night after some introductory games (you know, the ones that sound utterly awful and awkward when they’re being described, but actually end up being fun in an everyone-is-equally-embarrassed sort of way). We worked directly with a couple of interesting folks in the class:

• Rich and Jim, who facilitated the course with admirable energy and endurance.
• Blue, a remedial high school teacher in NYC (Quote of the weekend: “Ensure any live ammunition is cleared off the lot where you end up doing bike drills”)
• Mark, the co-founder of a bike infrastructure consulting company, BICI

The course wrapped up around 9 or 9:30 that night, and we collectively crawled out and up to bed in the (remarkably clean and quiet, if you don’t take then men’s bathroom into account) hostel.