We’ve addressed (broken link) New York City’s increasing focus on cycling on the policy side . And man has it worked. As Gothamist reports, biking and public transit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has released an annual estimate on bike ridership using DOT data. They found that the number of cyclists in New York City has increased a whopping 28% in the past year. According to the report:

* 236,000 New Yorkers are riding bikes every day.
* 51,000 New Yorkers started biking in the just last year alone.
* One out of every 24 vehicles in motion on city streets is a bicycle.
* New Yorkers travel 1.8 million miles by bicycle every day.
* Bicycling is New York City’s fastest-growing mode of transportation.

As Gothamist notes, the cycling boom, which is in its fourth year of growth, is largely due to the NYC government’s commitment to increasing the city’s bike lanes, with more than 200 miles of lanes installed over the past three years, including 5 miles of physically-separated lanes. Granted, there’s also the possibility that subway cuts — which mean more crowded trains and worse service, not to mention the elimination of some lines entirely — are leading more commuters to turn to biking. Still, it’s safe to say that New York is emerging as a model of how policy initiatives can drive urban commuters to switch to cycling.

Granted, this is all assuming that “Bike-Gate,” aka the recent confiscation of hundreds of bikes in downtown Manhattan as a security measure for Obama’s visit to Cooper Union, is and remains an anomaly.

Source: infrastructurist.com

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