Between 2007 and 2008 bike traffic in New York increased 35 percent. Hard to tell if the cart is leading the horse here—whether more lanes have inspired more bicycle usage or the other way around. I happily suspect that for the moment at least, both the Department of Transportation and New York City cyclists are on the same page. As more young creative types find themselves living in Brooklyn they bike over the bridges in increasing numbers. Manhattan Bridge bike traffic just about quadrupled last year (2008) and the bike traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge tripled. And those numbers will keep increasing as the city continues to make improvements to bike lanes and adds bike racks and other amenities. In this area the city is, to some extent, anticipating what will happen in the near future—a lot more people will use bikes for getting to work or for fun.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town. Unlike many other U.S. cities, here in New York almost everyone has to step onto the sidewalk and encounter other people at least once a day—everyone makes at least one brief public appearance. I once had to swerve to avoid Paris Hilton, holding her little doggie, crossing the street against the light and looking around as if to say, “I’m Paris Hilton, don’t you recognize me?” From a cyclist’s point of view you pretty much see it all.

Just outside a midtown theater a man rides by on a bike—one of those lowriders. He’s a grown man, who seems pretty normal in appearance, except he’s got a monstrously huge boom box strapped to the front of the bike.

I ride off on my own bike and a few minutes later another boom-box biker passes by. This time it’s a Jane-Austen-reading, sensible-shoe-wearing woman. She’s on a regular bike, but again, with a (smaller) boom box strapped to the rear . . . I can’t hear what the music is.

What is it about certain cities and places that fosters specific attitudes? Am I imagining that this is the case? To what extent does the infrastructure of cities shape the lives, work, and sensibilities of their inhabitants? Quite significantly, I suspect. All this talk about bike lanes, ugly buildings, and density of population isn’t just about those things, it’s about what kinds of people those places turn us into. I don’t think I’m imagining that people who move to L.A. from elsewhere inevitably lose a lot of that elsewhere and eventually end up creating L.A.-type work and being L.A.-type people. Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so. How does this happen? Do they seep in surreptitiously through peer pressure and casual conversations? Is it the water, the light, the weather? Is there a Detroit sensibility? Memphis? New Orleans? (No doubt.) Austin? (Certainly.) Nashville? London? Berlin? (I would say there’s a Berlin sense of humor for sure.) Düsseldorf? Vienna? (Yes.) Paris? Osaka? Melbourne? Salvador? Bahia? (Absolutely.)

I was recently in Hong Kong and a friend there commented that China doesn’t have a history of civic engagement. Traditionally in China one had to accommodate two aspects of humanity—the emperor and his bureaucracy, and one’s own family. And even though that family might be fairly extended it doesn’t include neighbors or coworkers, so a lot of the world is left out. To hell with them. As long as the emperor or his ministers aren’t after me and my family is okay then all’s right with the world. I had been marveling at the rate of destruction of anything having to do with social pleasures and civic interaction in Hong Kong—funky markets, parks, waterfront promenades, bike lanes (of course)—I was amazed how anything designed for the common good is quickly bulldozed, privatized, or replaced by a condo or office tower. According to my friend civic life is just not part of the culture. So in this case at least, the city is an accurate and physical reflection of how that culture views itself. The city is a 3-D manifestation of the social, and personal—and I’m suggesting that, in turn, a city, its physical being, reinforces those ethics and re-creates them in successive generations and in those who have immigrated to the city. Cities self-perpetuate the mind-set that made them.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet. How long does one have to be a resident before one starts to behave and think like a local? And where does this psychological city start? Is there a spot on the map where attitudes change? And is the inverse true? Is there a place where New Yorkers suddenly become Long Islanders? Will there be freeway signs with a picture of Billy Joel that alert motorists “attention, entering New York state of mind”?

Does living in New York City foster a hard-as-nails, no-nonsense attitude? Is that how one would describe the New York state of mind? I’ve heard recently that Cariocas (residents of Rio) have a similar “okay, okay, get to the point” sensibility. Is that a legacy of the layers of historical happenstance that make up a particular city? Is that where it comes from? Is it a constantly morphing and slowly evolving worldview? Do the repercussions of local politics and the local laws foster how we view each other? Does it come from the socioeconomic-ethnic mix; are the proportions in the urban stew critical, like in a recipe? Does the evanescence of fame and glamour lie upon all of L.A. like whipped cream? Do the Latin and Asian populations that are fenced off from the celebrity playgrounds get mixed into this stew, resulting in a unique kind of social-psychological fusion? Does that, and the way the hazy light looks on skin, make certain kinds of work and leisure activities more appropriate there?

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn’t any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn’t it indeed “true,” not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

The organizers have closed part of the FDR Drive, the BQE, the Belt Parkway, and the Verrazano Bridge—so we participants get the thrill of riding in the middle of a highway, and of not having to stop at red lights. Gone are the worries about the ubiquitous jaywalking New York City pedestrians hell-bent on suicide missions.

There are a couple of mandatory stops—for water, free bananas, and peanut-butter crackers—in Queens and near the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano Bridge, so racing and winding your way to the front of the pack get you nothing—except maybe the best bananas.

There is lots of spandex, way too much spandex. There is a characteristic sound of spandex skidding on asphalt that I’ve heard a couple of times already. I guess, for some, the fun of these events, or the fun in weekend cycling, is in dressing up. A change of outfit announces, “I’m doing this now! I’m a biker today.”

Of course, some guys (and gals) who join this event are a little behind on their bike manners, or maybe they are trying to prove how manly they are—both to themselves and to everyone else. There is some high-speed zooming and jockeying for those meaningless leads. I had been warned that the most dangerous aspect of this thing would be the other cyclists—especially those who are determined to get closer to the front of the mob—wherever that is. I can’t even see the front anymore. The compact clump at the starting area in Lower Manhattan quickly elongates by the time it leaves the island. (This is accomplished intentionally by creating a couple of bottlenecks on Sixth Avenue in midtown that causes the ridership to become less dense.) It’s not just the hotdoggers that you have to watch out for. The fact that there are so many cyclists here who are not used to riding and certainly not used to riding en masse, scrunched together, inevitably leads to some absentminded behavior that can cause some nasty pileups.

Mostly though, there is a rare and great feeling of civic togetherness—something we New Yorkers regard as suspect, but that’s what it is. We have to give in to it—the feeling generated when a mass of people do something together, energetically, en masse. Like what happens in a mosh pit or on a roller coaster—a deep biological thrill gets triggered. Unlike some crowds this is a friendly mob, happy to abide by the barriers and traffic cones (for the most part), running on banana and peanut butter crackers power.

The longest part of the route goes through the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, which gives one the pleasantly skewed impression that the old, nutty industrial city that New York once was still exists. These neighborhoods are made up of an endless series of little factories that make plastic wrap, cardboard boxes, ex-lax, coat hangers, hairbrushes, and the wooden water tanks on top of every Manhattan residential building. Sure, some neighborhoods like Williamsburg, which we riders touched the edge of, have filled up with art galleries, cafés, and wonderful bookshops, while other neighborhoods are all Hasidic or Italian, but mostly the waterfront area is still composed of funky factories. These old structures are a million miles from the industrial parks, high-tech campuses, and corporate headquarters that one sees out west (west being across the Hudson). They are small in scale, and often they are family run. These are the places that make those glue-on reinforcement rings for notebook pages and apple corers that you look at and think, Who thought of that? Who designed that? Someone actually thought that up?

Getting to this neighborhood I ride through the various Brooklyn ghettos—Dominican, West Indian, Hasidic, and black. By ghetto I don’t mean a poverty-stricken, desolate, or decaying area. I don’t necessarily mean that the area is black either. Some areas that might be considered ghettos are lively and flourishing. East New York, however, is pretty dicey. A friend was mugged here recently and forced to go into a bodega and buy a man some infant formula! At its worst the neighborhood looks like some of the very bleak places I’ve seen in the former Soviet bloc—derelict housing surrounded by crumbling industrial superstructures. (The elevated subway line looks like it hasn’t been painted in decades out here.) These signs of decay and ruin are interspersed with lots of churches, and huge temples relocated into former theaters. The official neglect is obvious and plain. We laugh at Borat, but we have our own Kazakhstan right here.

Having viewed enough stimulating squalor I decide to take the more conventionally scenic route home. I head toward the water, which is nearby, and ride along the bike path that follows the Belt Parkway along the Brooklyn waterfront. On my left are the swamps and marshes of Jamaica Bay. It’s not quite Nantucket, but it’s pretty damn nice—and it’s surprising that it’s inside the New York City limits. Today is a Saturday, and there are lots of people barbecuing. They have set up in the grassy areas at the side of the highway and even on the median strips. It would be almost lovely if the ugly highway weren’t so close.

I stop for scungilli (conch cooked in red sauce) at a place in Sheepshead Bay. There are picnic tables on the sidewalk and a window where one can order clams, oysters, and various kinds of seafood. This neighborhood is named after the tasty Sheepshead fish, so they say. It was once abundant, but now it’s gone from here. It was also known as sea bream.

I’m reminded that the other day I wanted to bike to Long Island City to catch an art show at PS1, but it was the day of the New York City Marathon and the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for handicapped runners they said, though it was completely empty). So I took the bike on the Roosevelt Island tram instead and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum on the south end of that island that sits in the middle of the East River. There was no one around. Spooky. From the tip of the island there’s a great view of the UN building and of a tiny rock island filled with cormorants—an odd thing to see in the middle of New York City.

Once I managed to get to Long Island City I stopped for a snack at a nice Hunters Point café and watched outside as the marathon cleanup crews picked up the piles of paper cups and tissues that had been handed out to the runners. The streets ran bright yellow with Gatorade—it looked like the marathon ers had all peed themselves after taking lots of vitamins. A few stragglers limped and walked by. I wondered to myself if I would be privileged to see the very last person in the race—a sight rarer and much harder to establish than whoever turns out to be first. I thought I saw him. It was a man in a multicolored head wrap who had a few days’ growth of beard, his marathon number was askew, and I thought he might have been smoking a cigarette as he made his way up the street, listing slightly toward the curb.

This route goes almost all the way to the top of the island, where there is a nice park on the very tip of Manhattan in the Inwood neighborhood. There’s also a great route along the Staten Island boardwalk that lines that borough’s Atlantic beaches. It runs for miles, from the Verrazano Bridge and Gateway Park south. There are no cars, and there are a couple of places to eat. The beaches are surprisingly clean and some are even secluded. (The secluded ones are not so clean; I guess one can’t have it all.)

In Brooklyn, besides the previously mentioned path along the wetlands near East New York (which can also be ridden out to the Rockaways), there is a path along the water from Bay Ridge that leads one under the Verrazano Bridge out to Coney Island. It does, unfortunately, have a highway on one side, but the view of the harbor on the other side makes up for it. And one is rewarded with a Latin band playing on the Coney Island boardwalk on summer weekends.

The owner, whom I’ve never met, fills the walls with his paintings. There are some odd-looking portraits and some typical Greenwich Village scenes of charming tree-lined streets. The owner’s daughter Lisa is often there and says hello. I ask her what’s up with the funky airplane models hanging from the ceiling and she says her dad decided no more paintings; he’s going to do airplane models now.

Arturo’s is a neighborhood joint. There are a lot of regulars. It’s not the sort of place that would ever attract the attention of serious foodies or get mentioned in the new trendy guides to New York City. The piano sits smack in the middle of the front room at the end of the bar, which forces the upright bass player to squeeze into a corner. A drummer sometimes joins them on a rudimentary kit made up of a snare, a high hat, and one cymbal. He has to squeeze over on the other side of the piano and he almost blocks the entrance to the kitchen. Singers grab a hand mic that rests on top of the piano and often have to dodge waiters and customers who want to use the restroom in back, which has a bathtub in it. A big one. I wonder how many people have fallen into it, or if the staff sometimes decides to have a hot bath.

A pear-shaped woman begins to sing, to enthusiastic applause. Someone mentions to me that she is the mother of Savion Glover, the famous tap dancer. I can see the resemblance, in her face at least. Her hair is a mixture of black and gray and is wound in a tight vortex, like Kim Novak’s in the movie Vertigo. She sings a standard, and she’s great, astounding even.

She sings another song and then sits down at a nearby booth with some friends. The pianist shows Paul some chord charts then sits in the booth behind the singer, near the kitchen door. He begins furiously focusing on some music scores he has with him, spreading them out across the tabletop. He’s suddenly oblivious to the scene.

A man named Jimmy takes the mic. He had introduced himself to me earlier. “I do Thursday nights,” was how he put it. Jimmy’s hair is hard to describe. It’s like a combination of a mullet and a Mohawk, but super slicked-back. He’s got on a black jacket and a tie with big yellow trumpets on it. He sings a standard (they all do, except Paul, who tends toward Stevie Wonder tunes), putting his heart and soul into it.

The audience at Arturo’s, which is not a very big place, is usually a mixed bunch: some are paying attention to the singer, some are shoving food into their mouths, and some are talking to their friends. Sometimes all three at once. It’s not an ideal audience for an entertainer by any means, but it doesn’t seem to deter anyone here. Jimmy sings as if there is a whole theater out there, rather than people slurping down a slice. He’s singing to the back row, projecting; it’s incredible.

Jimmy disappears for a second. He has an Asian pianist who has his eyes closed, so maybe he doesn’t notice Jimmy’s absence. Jimmy reappears in a cream-colored jacket carrying a matching cream-colored umbrella. He immediately launches into “Pennies from Heaven,” and one gathers these are the props he keeps on hand somewhere in the back of the restaurant specifically for this number. “Ev’ry time it rains, it rains . . . pennies from heaven” and up goes the umbrella, in the middle of this crowded room! Pizza is being served up, and folks are ordering wine using hand gestures, as the waiters can’t hear above Jimmy’s singing. No one here seems fazed or the least bit surprised by the corny umbrella gag. Jimmy’s jazzing up the song now, scatting and improvising—the tune is almost unrecognizable at times. He sometimes acts out the lyrics as he sings them, holding his hands in a praying gesture or grabbing Mrs. Glover to dance a step or two. They make an improbable couple. Now he’s got a little black hat on too. At one point his singing is so impassioned that he abandons the mic on the piano near the tip jar and begins hopping, really hopping, around the room singing at the top of his lungs.

All the clocks—the ones with dials that is—on the nearby buildings now say four thirty. The digital ones are dark. By late afternoon there are traffic jams everywhere, and since I live near a tunnel entrance the traffic around here is stuck for hours. A few cabs roam around picking up people, but most eventually head home. It’s unexpectedly noisy. There are alarms going off everywhere. They started hooting right after the power went out.

I ride my bike downtown to see if my office is okay. A Mexican kid on a bike asks me how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge—I guess he is going home and usually takes the train. I talk to him in Spanish and he says he is surprised, judging by my face, that I know some Spanish.

My office had cleared out in a flash, they were pretty weirded out—memories of 9/11, I guess.

After the sun goes down I ride my bike through Times Square, which is dark except for police vehicles. The great signs and the intense glow that can usually be seen for blocks have been shut down. The signs are just abstract shapes now. It’s even hard to make out what some of them are selling. The area is strangely crowded with people. The tourists are all still here, but don’t know what to do. Black shapes, moving in clumps. Thousands and thousands of people. Many are just hanging out. Maybe they can’t get home. An Irish bar on West Forty-fifth Street is open, and the crowd of drinkers spills out, filling the entire street.

Hundreds of people are waiting at every bus stop—all hoping to get home to Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, or uptown. They too spill out into the streets, in clusters that surround the bus stop signs, or they just sit on the curbs, as bus service, though continuing, is slow and intermittent, due to there being no traffic lights. All traffic is moving slowly, tentatively creeping along in the almost total darkness, like you do when you walk around the house with all the lights off. When a bus comes it is a large, looming shape with two blinding lights in front. They emerge slowly from the darkness, like bioluminescent deep-sea creatures.

People are all walking out in the streets, and they’re hard to see in some parts of town. There is a fat man at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street directing traffic. He is using a sign—a piece of white cardboard on which he has scrawled “Stop.” At another intersection farther uptown a kid in baggy pants is also directing traffic, wildly, energetically; he’s having a great time. There’s no looting. It’s calm. People are helping one another out, and there are spontaneous parties.

The stairway in my building is getting dark (the elevator doesn’t work, of course), and, one by one, the emergency lights in the stair shaft are failing. Flashlight beams now move erratically in the darkness as tenants look for their floors. Most of the tenants are now on the roof, drinking. I join them, briefly. We can see a financial brokerage building a block away. It’s lit up inside—bright as day—though there’s no one in it. We can see desks covered with paperwork, abandoned. I guess they have their own generator. Not much else for me to do now but go to sleep.

The traffic is noisy outside. What are they all doing out there? Where are they going? I notice that there are some scallops defrosting rapidly in the freezer, so I cook them for lunch.

I go downtown again to my office and the power comes back on at around three PM.

Kara, my Australian assistant, is moving back there with her boyfriend soon, and they’d scheduled a good-bye party for tonight in Greenpoint where they live. I assume that the party is still on, so as it gets dark I bike over the Williamsburg Bridge. The bridges are full of cyclists, as the subway and bus service is still intermittent, and from this vantage point I can see that not all the neighborhoods got their power back when the Village and SoHo did. Parts of the East Village are still dark, as is most of the Lower East Side. Uptown is all sparkling with lights. Parts of Brooklyn have power, and halfway across the bridge, where the lamps are being fed by Brooklyn, suddenly there is light. So, electrical power is political. I shouldn’t be surprised.

When he wrote this essay, a few years after World War II, the UN building had either just been completed or was still being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were standing opportunities for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions.”

Whether because they were walled, like medieval ones, or because of the sheer numbers they harbored, cities once were secure refuges for their citizens. They were places where people not only met and haggled, but were also, to a degree, protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially, as White points out, that protective aspect of what a city is has been turned upside down.

But, he notes, just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, is rising to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope simultaneously, as always.

That the United States has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years—failed to pay their UN dues and often initiated acts in defiance of UN resolutions and principles—is a bad sign. The United States is not the only country to have done so, but it’s the biggest kid on the block and it sends a signal to all the other kids that such behavior is acceptable, a sign that death and fear is sometimes more powerful than hope, temporarily. The UN is far from perfect. Self-interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its mission—its members are human, after all. But the fact that that little ray of hope still exists, right here in mean, jaded New York, and that it cannot be corrupted by corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues, and crooked election rigging—well, there’s something to be said for that.

The new World Trade Center is being built atop a thirty-story concrete windowless bunker. A monument to fear—a symbolic return to a medieval mind-set and walled cities. Even though we are united and connected in so many new ways, some are still building massive walls and fortifications that won’t really protect us from anyone determined and clever enough. Walls and concrete barricades aren’t really an effective means of protection these days—nothing is, really. All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so no one or no building is truly isolated and “safe” anymore. Safety is in getting along.

I bike up to check out a show at the Studio Museum of Harlem. I follow the improved bike path north along the Hudson. It gets less crowded above 100th Street. I turn right on 125th and head east past churches and fried chicken joints, and I run smack into the African American Day parade on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. T-shirts are being sold that say I “heart” My Nose (or My Lips or My Hair). Shocking that this affirmation is still needed—that the models of beauty presented to us don’t include a lot of us—and it takes T-shirt slogans to attempt to correct things.

On my way back home I see a nun on Rollerblades going up the Hudson River Park bike path, rosary flying behind her.

So, with some tenuous optimism, I decide it might be time to try to give the biking-as-means-of-transport idea a little nudge by organizing some kind of public forum on the subject. I end up spending about a year trying to get a bike-related event off the ground, and am just about to give up when, through a connection with another project, the New Yorker magazine offers to sponsor the event at Town Hall. It is the perfect venue for something like this, having been historically a place where the issues of the day were aired and debated. Race (with Langston Hughes in 1945), birth control (with Margaret Sanger in 1921), and the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel (also in 1945) all were discussed on its stage.

I imagine the event as an evening centered around a meeting, a forum, made up of ordinary people, biking advocates, and city reps from the departments of transportation, parks, health, and urban planning, as well as the police department. Interspersed with this forum would be bike-related entertainment—music, funny bits, and ironic slide lectures. Part of my personal reason for attempting this event is to ask the theatrical question of whether civic engagement, improvement, discussion, and action can be successfully combined with art and entertainment—if culture, humor, and politics can mix, and if making our city a better place to live can be fun. That idea is, for me, almost as important as this bike advocacy business. If the advocacy is going to be boring, then forget about it.

The fuseproject helmet prototype consists of a protective hard shell that can be slipped in and out of various skins—a warm woolen skin with earflaps for cold winters, a porous mesh skin for hot summer days. A very digital-technology kind of idea, variable skins. The idea is that third-party developers—fashion brands, sports gear brands, or anyone who wants yet another advertising platform—might eventually make their own skins and sell or fund them. This design also allows the commuter to lock the shell to the bike and stow the skin—the only part that touches one’s own skin—discreetly in one’s briefcase or handbag.

As good as this is I personally sense that helmets might be an interim step toward integrated urban biking. Although they might always be a good idea, the wearing of helmets implies that cycling is dangerous, which at present it often is in cities like New York and London. But in other cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Reggio Emilia in Italy, the bike paths and lanes are so safe the riders don’t feel the need to protect themselves. Cyclists in these places—kids, young creative types, businesspeople, seniors—also tend to ride upright with an elegant bearing; they’re well dressed, and even sexy. It’s a different attitude than the New York City head-down-into-battle approach.

Maybe, for some, part of the thrill would go away if urban cycling became safe. But that might be the price to pay if it means more people will start using bikes to get around. That thrill isn’t really an appropriate thing to oblige schoolkids and seniors to be burdened with. Living in New York used to be a lot more dangerous in general, but that’s hardly something to get all nostalgic about. So, while we might need a cool, stylish helmet to be available right now, for everyone in a more perfect world it might be optional.

In one of his slide talks he shows before-and-after images of a street. Here is the after:

Previously, the area bordering this canal had been used for parking; cars would drive along it looking for parking slots. This lovely spot was, not too long ago, primarily an ugly parking lot and a thoroughfare. Now it’s a destination. Cars are still allowed to drive here, but not park. And from that one small change the area exploded as a pleasant gathering place and even as a tourist destination. Expensive “improvements” by the city weren’t even necessary to allow this to happen. The customers and local businesses did the improvements—putting out chairs and installing awnings—though many of them initially complained that if people couldn’t park in front of their establishments their businesses would suffer. That seems to be how Gehl works, making fairly small incremental changes over many years, here and there, that eventually transform the whole city and make it a more livable place.

Gehl has agreed to join the Town Hall event and give a short talk! He has recently been hired as an adviser by the city of New York and has made studies of situations in other cities—Amsterdam, Melbourne, Sydney, and London—in addition to the one he did in his native Copenhagen. The Department of Transportation here in New York has now asked his office for further recommendations. Whether they and the city listen is another matter, but it’s a heartening move.

For the Town Hall event I now can move on and begin to focus on securing the more obviously entertaining parts of the proposed event. I contact the Young@Heart Chorus. They’re a choir based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and their youngest member is in his midseventies. They sing songs by Sonic Youth, the Ramones, Flaming Lips, and Talking Heads. (That’s how we made contact.) Needless to say, “Road to Nowhere” takes on added meaning when sung by this bunch. I ask them if they would sing the Queen song “Bicycle Race” at this event—and a few more songs, as I expect they’ll be well received. They’ve never performed in New York City before, which is a surprise, as they’re almost a staple on the European arts festival circuit. They agree to participate, but will require nap time and sufficient toilets for thirty people.

I recall that I have seen various Puerto Rican and Dominican groups around town who trick out antique Schwinn bikes, often adding giant boom boxes as well. The boom boxes mean that when the group becomes mobile they bring their own salsa or merengue sound track. I approach one group, Eddie Gonzalez and the Classic Riders, and get their card—they have a business card! I invite them to show their bikes onstage and explain briefly what they do. (Their stage entrance ends up being them playing their amazing array of customized horns to a Hector Lavoe tune.)

I’d seen a British Web site, the Warrington Cycle Campaign, that has a section called “Facility of the Month” with wonderful deadpan captions for photos of local bike lanes that lead into oncoming traffic or dead-end into phone booths. A representative of that group agrees to give a short tongue-in-cheek slide show.

The caption on their Web site reads: “After watching an episode of Star Trek, the forward-looking traffic planners of Oxford were thinking about how transport infrastructure would work in the middle of the next century. Boldly predicting that by then bicycles would be equipped with teleportation devices they realized that they could save a lot of paint by designing intermittent cycle paths, with cyclists able to beam themselves from one stretch to the next.”

Hal, who repairs bikes at Bicycle Habitat on Lafayette Street, also has a more unusual job there: as new locks come into the store his job is to determine how long it takes to crack each one. Some locks he can break in a second, with a snip of some wire cutters he carries in his back pocket. Others require more elaborate tools. Hal agrees to break some locks onstage.

Rhonda Sherman from the New Yorker suggests adding some culture. In New Yorker speak this means some bike-related writing. Calvin Trillin will read a piece he’s written about riding in New York, and Buck Henry will read an excerpt from a Beckett piece about a bicycle. Rhonda arranges for Mengfan Wu to edit together a touching four-minute film montage of bikes in movies—from Butch Cassidy to Kermit the Frog to a scene from the TV series Flight of the Conchords. Theater director Greg Mosher is contacted and coordinates the evening, and he helps everything move at a good pace and takes an incredible weight off my shoulders.

Transportation Alternatives has come up with the idea to provide valet parking for bikes at the event (!), as there is almost nowhere to lock up around Town Hall and lots of cyclists will be expected to attend.

We’re almost ready. I’ve never done anything like this before—being an impresario rather than performing myself. I’m a little anxious. In the end, I have to modify some of my ideas for the event. It becomes obvious that a panel discussion involving numerous entities and city agencies could be a recipe for tedium and speechifying, so I give up on the idea that some consensus or compromise will be reached among all those folks in the course of one evening. It is decided that the agencies and the organizations will only present what they are actually going to do in the near future—not vague ideas but concrete plans. Naturally, this makes for shorter presentations.

On the night of the event I arrive with a bike cam attached to my helmet—well, the footage and my voice-over were actually shot the previous day but it looks like it is live. The camera shows my POV as I negotiate the Forty-second Street traffic and make my way to the theater, all the while providing a running commentary of tips for riding in New York traffic (“watch out for town cars and people with New Jersey plates”). Because a wide-angle lens is used it makes everything look slightly scarier than it is—cars and people loom suddenly into the frame—which makes it funnier, but probably doesn’t do much to encourage ridership.

I have come to accept that things aren’t going to change overnight, but that this event might be more about bringing a lot of disparate folks together at an opportune moment. It might serve as a kind of tacit encouragement, a visible acknowledgment that change is possible, maybe even likely, and that bike riding as a means of transport in New York City might be okay—if not now, then certainly in the very near future.

In the end, the event, which took place in October 2007, was successful, though I think it ran a little too long. We erred on the side of caution and maybe had more “acts” than we needed, as we were worried that we might not have enough content. We had plenty. It moved along fine but once in a while even I wanted to hit the fast forward button.

Likewise—now don’t laugh—cars and trucks should view the bike lanes as if they are sacrosanct. A driver would never think of riding up on a sidewalk. Most drivers, anyway. Hell, there are strollers and little old ladies up there! It would be unthinkable, except in action movies. A driver would get a serious fine or maybe even get locked up. Everyone around would wonder who that asshole was. Well, bike lanes should be treated the same way. You wouldn’t park your car or pull over for a stop on the sidewalk, would you? Well then, don’t park in the bike lanes either—that forces cyclists into traffic where poor little meat puppets don’t stand a chance.

Same with pedestrians—who in New York famously saunter out into traffic wherever they see a little gap. They’ve got enough brains not to walk in front of a truck, but they’ll step right into the path of a cyclist, thereby initiating a game of urban chicken. The cyclists then have to slam on their brakes to avoid Mr. BlackBerry or Ms. Check-Me-Out.

As I write this in 2009, Janette Sadik-Khan, the new transportation commissioner, and others have made some changes and are initiating a host of improvements that are nudging New York in a new direction—toward being a more livable and sustainable city. In the summer of 2008 the city instituted Summer Streets, a series of car-free days in the summer during which Park Avenue and other streets that connect Central Park to the Williamsburg Bridge were all closed to automobile traffic. A significant new bike lane seems to be added almost monthly—one amazing stretch on Broadway with outdoor seating goes from Forty-second Street to Thirty-fourth. Prince Street now has a bike lane its entire length, but Grand Street has one that has met with some local resistance.

I ask Janette where she sees New York as far as transportation in ten years.

Then I ask her to extend that to one hundred years . . . according to Enrique Peñalosa, ex-mayor of Bogotá, thinking long term frees us from our habitual cynical instincts.

But, I wonder, sensing an uphill battle in some sectors, how does one balance the interests of business, the ordinary citizen, and I guess what might be called “quality of life”?

And ultimately what makes a city a place where one would want to live? For decades they were places that the middle class fled.

When I’m feeling optimistic I believe that the exhilaration, freedom, and convenience I experience as I ride around will be discovered by more and more people. The secret will be out and the streets of New York will be even more the place for social interaction and interplay that they are already famous for. As others have mentioned, the economic collapse of 2008 might be a godsend. A window has opened and people might be willing to rethink the balance of quality of life.