On Bicycles

Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New Yorks streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the citys first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycles place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many usesrecreation, sport, transportation, businessbut because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are. In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycles place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the citys changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Mosess car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Kochs battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it todayveined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanesreflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York Citys people and its politics.