New York traffic has become noticeably worse over the past decade. Many factors, like the ones that [member=5]Bob Marino[/member] already mentioned, but I'd like to focus on one.
Bicycle lanes: Starting under Bloomberg and continuing apace under Di Blasio, NYC has become a bike friendly city, with dedicated bicycle lanes and traffic signals. Overall this is a good move, given how concentrated a city New York is and therefore easily accessible on two wheels. The problem is that these bike lanes have resulted in reduced lane-age on many streets. On Queens Boulevard (affectionately known for years as the "Boulevard of Death" due to the relatively high mortality rate among pedestrian crossers), for example, there used to be two lanes along the local/service road, but now there is just one to accommodate a dedicated bike lane. This means that when any driver decides to double park to let out a passenger, or grab take-out food, or whatever, it stops the whole line of cars behind them, whereas previously you used to be able to go around them to the left. This is just one example, but multiply this by several hundred across the city.
My larger issue with bikes, though, is that bicycle culture has not yet caught up with the new reality of a bike-friendly city. In the 90s and early 2000s, city-biking had kind of an outlaw culture (I remember, because I worked as a bike messenger for a while). It was driven as much by a need for self-preservation -- swerving into and out of traffic at full speed to avoid crazy cabbies and the hundreds of pedestrians crossing at any one time; riding hard through the intersection to beat or blow the red light -- as it was by the youthful vigor of many bicyclists.
Now that biking has become respectable, you would think that the culture would naturally adapt to round over the sharp edges and stay between the lines, so to speak. And to a certain degree I guess it has -- those who use the city bike program, for example, generally follow the rules. But a significant number of bicyclists still ride like it's the Wild West, gunning through intersections and red lights, riding in and out of vehicle lanes to gain an advantage, and generally being a public menace. The social contract should be that now that we've made the accommodations, bicyclists should stick to those and follow the rules of the road. But too many of them don't, which is why you see a lot more white bicycles (put up as a memorial to a bicyclist killed by a car) locked to signposts throughout the city these days.
When I lived in Munich in the early 2000s -- which was my first experience with a bike-friendly city -- I remember in the first week of riding in the city, I was given a ticket by a cop who had observed me blowing through the red light on the dedicated bicycle traffic signal. Being used to the anything-goes bicycling culture of NYC, I was shocked, but let me tell you, I followed the rules after that.
I've thought about having bumper stickers printed up that show a stick figure of a bicyclist sailing over the hood of a car, and saying something like: "When bicyclists start obeying traffic laws, I'll stop running them over." But I'd also better budget for some new tail lights if I do.
And finally, can I just say that if I had a nickel for every time I got stuck behind a car at an intersection when the light had turned green, but where the driver's gaze was still fixated on their phone screen, I'd have a shop full of Mafell...
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