The Ideology of the Bicycle
Updated at 12:29 p.m. ET on June 2, 2022.
Back in the late 2000s, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was the world’s coolest neighborhood. And if lifestyle blogs were to be believed, everyone in Williamsburg rode a bike. But not everyone in New York did, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to change that. He installed hundreds of miles of bike lanes throughout the city, which had the potential to cut both pollution and traffic deaths.
In the Hasidic section of South Williamsburg, the Department of Transportation striped a white corridor down a particularly chaotic section of Bedford Avenue, home to kosher grocery stores and Hasidic apartment buildings. Locals, already wary of outsiders, were furious. To them, bikes were not symbols of hip urbanism but of unwelcome intrusion—particularly by women riders whose clothes offended the community’s religious mandate of strict modesty.
Ahead of Bloomberg’s reelection bid, the city removed the bike lane. A few nights later, the Hasidic community patrol found renegade cyclists at 3:30 a.m., but the lane never reappeared. Cyclists still ride that stretch, finding their own path through tightly crammed vehicles. The Hasidim still seem to resent the cyclists. The conflictgrinds on.
