You can't get there from here

Lost in the Bronx ... again.



So I tried to bike to City Island the other day.
And I should know better.
It's not that I don't know where City Island is. It's a lovely gem of a neighborhood located off the Long Island Sound in the Bronx.

I've just never biked there.

And when I've never biked somewhere, I break out the trusty NYC cycling map, follow the marked paths, and never make it where I'm going on the first try.
You might be wondering if my bike dummyness extends to an inability to read maps. Well, let me assure you that it does not.
I am convinced that the official NYC cycling map was drawn by someone who hates cyclists and wants to kill us all - and I think the same person is now in charge of planning all the new bike lanes (but that's a whole other essay).

I've done a bit of riding in the Bronx. It's a lovely borough.
According to the bike map, there is an unbroken greenway leading from Van Cortland park, through the New York Botanical Garden, down along Pelham Parkway North, and across to City Island.

I had some stuff to do, so I headed up the West Side, across the University Heights Bridge, and down Fordham road towards the Zoo. I've biked this before, so I didn't let the traffic and buses get me down. It's horrible, but I was headed for a nice secluded pathway, so who cared.
I hit the park, made a left and tried to find the connection to the path coming down from Van Cortland Park. - Remember, all the roads I've been on so far are recommended bike routes - and I'd only almost died five or six times, not too bad.
I followed my map, but found no sign of the mystery bike path through the Botanical Garden. I even asked the security guard, who kindly informed me that not only were bikes not allowed, he had never heard of a path nearby.
I tried on my own and ended up - I kid you not - ON THE MOSHOLU PARKWAY.
My fault. Just check the map. It's patently obvious that you should be in the oncoming traffic lane in order to find the entrance to the path. (irony intended)



By the time I got around to Pelham Parkway and discovered how nasty the road surface is, I was ready to head back to Brooklyn.

And then my adventure really started.

I ended up on crappy ass streets, going up and down hills, struggling with bike lanes that go nowhere, stop suddenly, don't exist, or magically enough - end on the Bruckner Expressway.



By the way, thanks for the sign. Maybe it would have been more helpful at the intersection before this so I could have gotten off this one way street.

I was tired, hot, and in the process of discovering that spray-on sunblock does not work as well as the greasy, goopy kind when I made a wrong turn on Randall's Island.
(See my post about fear of lightening.)

So I lived through the storm.
I made it back to Brooklyn.
I was pondering the insanity of some of the bike lanes I was being asked to ride in, when heading up Sands Street (recommended bike path), my rear wheel dropped into a pothole and I felt the tire blow.

Just to add insult to injury, by the time I made home - it was raining again.

Well That Sucks

I started a new job recently, which I find pretty traumatic even though all of my jobs have basically been in the same one square mile of Manhattan.
You have to figure out what subway to take - and where to stand on the platform to get to the secret exit that gets you closest to the side door of the building. What time you have to leave - in order to miss the worst of the crowds and not be late. Where to get food from - and how long they will take to get to you.
Are the elevators packed to bursting twice a day? Do they wax the halls at night? Is it freezing or broiling or both?
It's the little things that can make or break a new work experience, not just the salary, the perks, or the hours.
My new building doesn't allow bicycles.
Not after hours. Not via the freight. Not using the stairs.
Never.

This is a first for me. Everywhere I've ever worked let you bring a bike. And usually your dog, your six-foot tall purple friend Barney, and anything that wasn't on fire at the moment. I mean nobody ever cared. We had security, just not this kind of security.
So I looked it up, and this is what I found in the NYT...



Twelve flights of stairs. That's pretty serious.
The article is also from 1895. (See the whole thing here)
Apparently bicyclists and buildings have been having this problem since the first person tried to bring a bike inside for safekeeping.

Lynette Chiang at Bike Friday has been doing an interesting study where she tries to enter NYC Office buildings with a folding bicycle to see if she'll be turned away.
With a FOLDING bike. And LEGALLY. And she still has problems.
See her study here

I guess everyone knew this was an issue except for me.

It's not a problem today. The sleet and snow is keeping all but the hardiest (craziest) bicyclists off the streets, but I am going to want to start riding in at some point.

I'm concocting a plan. We'll see how it works.

A Little Hell, A Lot of Heaven

Oh Wow.


I set out to find the South County Trail again.
I keep hearing that the Putnam Trail is in fact paved and passable on a road bike, but considering the mini - disaster that was my last attempt through Van Cortland Park, I decided to give up on that for the moment. I skipped riding through the park entirely and stayed on Broadway heading north.
I think I can honestly say that the stretch through Yonkers is the most miserable I've been on a bicycle, without actually falling over. The traffic is terrible on Rt 9. It's all buses and potholes and cobbles and exhaust and then - hills. Hills, and hills and more hills.
I think I've mentioned that I hate hills. I'm not a triathlete. I'm not in training for the tour de Georgia (don't even get me started on that name). I ride for fun and because it's a great way to explore my surroundings. Ok, I mean there is a great deal of personal satisfaction in achieving goals and feeling healthy and strong, but I don't go looking for things to climb over.
Up and down, up and down, the wind whipping into my face off the Hudson. In the words of the inimitable Bob Roll, I was "Doing the PaperBoy".
I forget who he was describing when he said that, but unlike me, I think that rider bonked while climbing an alp.
I thought about bailing out, but I knew I'd just be pissed the whole way home.
Long story short, I found the entrance to the South County Trail at Barney Street in either Yonkers or Hastings - on - Hudson. It runs right between the Saw Mill Parkway and Saw Mill River Road - and it is heavenly.
Paved, shaded, tree-lined, smooth, picturesque and a complete and total surprise to me. In classic Bike Dummy form, I used to live about a third of a mile away from this path when I got out of college - and Friday was the first time I ever saw it.
I felt like I could go forever.
Unfortunately, I got a late start, so I started to lose the light around New Castle. I had just enough sun left to take a slight detour around part of the Croton Reservoir, dive down to the Mount Kisco Metro-North train station, and head home.

view across the reservoir to the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Research Center at Kitchawan

If anyone knows of a more pleasant way to get to the trail head from NYC, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I'm not even sure where it starts on the southern end.
To see my route, click on the map to go to bikely.com.

“I'll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn't have bruises.”

You have to whine really annoyingly and be wearing torn fishnets when you say this, just like in ‘Sid and Nancy’. Or you could just be me.
I don’t even have a drug habit or doomed affair with a rock star to blame. I just fall over a lot.
This time I didn’t even fall down. I fell up.


I was riding through Van Cortland Park in the Bronx for the first time and like many of my experimental expeditions, I got lost.
Van Cortland Park is huge. At 1,146 acres it is New York City's fourth largest park. It is home to the country's first public golf course, the oldest house in the Bronx, a protected wetland, and the borough's largest freshwater lake. I know this because I passed all of these repeatedly as I tried to find the entrance to the Putnam Trail and my chosen route into Westchester.

View Larger Map
It turns out, most of the trails in Van Cortland Park are not paved. It turns out that now that I’ve looked online, the Putnam Trail is unsuitable for a road bike. I think I’ve mentioned before that the NYC Bicycle Route Map sometimes feels like it was drawn by someone who wants to kill all cyclists, well I don’t want to sound unappreciative, but sometimes they really are out to get you.
Following the NYC bike map, I’ve encountered more closed roads, closed bridge crossings, and listed bike trails that aren’t bikable than I thought possible. It’s really making me want to put together some kind of online clearing house of up to date route information so that we don’t all have to go through this. Hmmm.
Anyway. As I biked in ever more frustrating circles on gravel trails, I finally dropped my chain. I was at the base of a commanding set of steps that lead up to the Van Cortland House Museum and I thought that might be my best bet to find actual pavement and maybe a place to fix my derailleur too, so I hefted my bike up onto my shoulder and started the walk up. About half the way up, I tripped, fell on my bike, and to add insult to injury, punched myself in the nose with my own handlebars.

Some days I just shouldn’t get out of bed.
Am I the only one who can’t ride a bike without bashing some part of myself on something? At this time of year, how bruised are you?

Bathrooms for Bikers

I could really use a map that shows usable, biker friendly bathrooms in the NYC area and I'm guessing that I'm not the only one. I couldn't find one, so I thought I'd ask for your help in making our own map.
I can't figure out how to make a map of just points (not a route) on bikely.com, which is where I post all my bike routes, so for now it's living at google maps.
I know everyone says that Starbucks and Barnes and Noble have the best public bathrooms, but are there better or worse ones? More convenient ones? Friendlier to bicyclists? How safe are they? How safe is your bike?
Supposedly, any NYC Police Station will let you use their bathroom. Has anyone tried this?
Do you have a favorite rest stop in the NYC area?




I'd love to get the following info from local (NY, NJ, CONN) riders who have actually used the facilities.

Place Name and Address
Directions to actual bathroom. (Inside? Around the back?)
Hours?
Seasonal?
Safe alone?
Safe for Women?
Safe to leave your bike? (This assumes standard NYC rules. In other words, will your bike be stripped of all its parts in the time it takes to pee, or do you need to leave a riding partner outside to watch the bikes while one of you goes inside?)
Where do you park? (Right in front or far from the entrance?)
Comments and rating. Is there an attendant, is it reasonably clean? Can you refill a standard water bottle? Do you get attitude? Do you have to be a customer? When did you last visit this bathroom?

Example:

Prospect Park Picnic House - Prospect Park Dr. West at 4th street.
Not directly on the road. Make a left into the park. The building looks closed from the west side, but the bathrooms are downstairs on the other side.
8 - 8, 7 days
Seasonal?(not sure)
Safe alone
Safe for women.
Bike racks outside on the side of the building are probably safe for a short pit stop.

To see the map mashup with the NYC bike path overlay go to google maps

Doored

...or why I hate riding on Manhattan's East Side.
I must be eligible for some sort of prize as of today. I think it would be called "most failed attempts at riding the periphery of Manhattan by one individual". I just can't make it work, and I don't know why.
Well, I sort of know why...
I feel like I know where I'm going when I'm in Manhattan, so if I miss a turn or two, I'm never that worried. "I'll just catch the next entrance", I say to myself. Only, I'm wrong.
Whenever I try to ride completely around Manhattan, I screw it up.
According to the Official NYC Bike Map, there is a (basically) unbroken line that goes around the island. This is a lie.
The West side of the island is quite lovely to ride on until you hit (Pet Peeve Alert), the parking lot of Fairway Supermarket at 125th street. After a little deadly intersection detour, it becomes one of my favorite stretches of bike path in the five boroughs. It passes through Riverbank State Park and then Ft. Washington Park (with a little detour to the Little Red Lighthouse), up along the Hudson into Inwood and the Cloisters.
It was a lovely day for a ride. Sunny, but cool, a little too windy for comfort - I almost got blown over a couple of times, but that's always the downside of riding near the water.
I got to portage my bike on the Henry Hudson Drive to get around some construction. I was impressed to see the workers set up on either end to help bicyclists heft themselves and their bikes over the barriers and across the highway - it was a happy bicycling high point of the day.
The low points followed in quick succession from there.
I followed the greenway signs across Dyckman to the Harlem River Drive Bike Path which quickly disintegrated into a broken glass covered on and off road excursion. Somewhere near Jumel Terrace, I picked up St. Nicholas Avenue and instead of turning left, I went straight.
This is not a disaster. Manhattan is very narrow, so when I figured it out, I turned. My best guess is that this is where I screwed up. Like little red riding hood, I strayed from the path.
My original plan was to go over the Triboro bridge into Queens and then ride down to Brooklyn, but somehow, at 125th street it all went wrong.
125th street is the bane of my bicycling existence. On the west side, it's where my happy, traffic - less riding ends. On the east side, it's where I ALWAYS get lost. Crossing on it is like attaching your mouth to the exhaust pipe of a bus.
The last time I tried it going north, I ended up in a sanitation storage yard where they store sand in enormous piles. And I don't mean that I left the bike path - the bike path ends in the giant pile of sand. The time before that, I ended up accidentally going over the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx. This time, I was sure my plan would work.
I rode to the entrance of the pedestrian walkway of the Triboro and stopped short. It was gated shut with a sign that read, "Closed. Please use the walkway on the North Side." I crossed 125th street again (and the 6 lanes of on ramp, off ramp bridge traffic). The pedestrian walkway was gated shut with a sign that read, "Closed. Please use the walkway on the South side." Umm, WTF?
Is the Triboro closed to Bicycle traffic right now? Or is it my 125th street juju that makes it impossible for me to figure this out?
I sighed heavily and set off along the East Side of Manhattan.

Now some parts of the path are quite nice. And the sections in the North are fairly empty of pedestrian and bike traffic. But trust me, it may look like a path on the map, but it's not.
First of all, it's made of hexagonal concrete tiles, very bumpy on road tires. Second, though parts of it are quite beautiful, they end abruptly in flights of stairs that you have to carry your bike up or down. Third, when heading South, the section from 55th street through 34th street runs on 2nd Avenue. Not next to 2nd Avenue, not marked with a bike lane, just follow the NYC greenway signs straight to the bus lane.
So I was cranky and possibly not concentrating as hard as I should as I swung off onto Sutton Place and promptly got doored by the passenger side door of a car parked at the edge of the bike lane. I did a nice little slide on my elbow between the idling car and the moving traffic, leaving a bit of myself embedded in the road, but my bike seems ok and the rest of me is just slightly more bloody and banged up than normal.
I hate riding on the East Side of Manhattan.

Thanks for the door.
What do you do when you get doored?

Your Mileage May Vary....

I'm saying it out loud.
I am going to try to ride the NYC Century this fall.
I've never ridden a century - I've only ridden over 50 miles in a day once, and that was during this years 5 Boro bike tour, which as many of you may know is more an exercise in patience than it is exercise.
I've been trying to train for longer distances, but it's been challenging to find the time every day to get out and ride.
I understand that the willingness to train is what separates those that do from those that don't, but it's still tough when you are looking for blocks of time sometime before or after working at a job with very unpredictable hours.
I don't know about you, but I've got things to do. I've got a dog that needs walking and a house that needs cleaning and friends that need beer drunk with them ('need' may not be the correct term in the context of beer drinking).
Saturday is bike riding prime-time.
This week was complicated. I had a thing on Tuesday night, another thing on Wednesday night, a birthday party on Thursday night, The Police concert at MSG on Friday night, and then my company picnic in Dix Hills, Long Island on Saturday. (I know, the world's smallest violin is playing for me.)
I was going to miss my long ride of the week, and for those of us with minimal motivational skills, that could be disastrous. So Saturday it was.
I broke out my NYC bike map, bought a Nassau and a Suffolk county street map, and decided to go for it. At 40 miles, it's not much longer than my regular 'long' ride up to Inwood and back along the West Side Highway bike path.
It would be an adventure.
Saturday morning came too early thanks to after concert drinks with my friend Jenny, and the weather was promising to be hot. I needed to hit an ATM. I needed air in my tires. I needed to leave.
After much dithering, I finally managed to get on the road pointed in somewhat the right direction.
Now, I've got no idea how to get where I'm going other than the driving directions that everyone was given, but I figured how hard could it be? I know next to nothing about Long Island, but exit 51 off the Long Island Expressway should be easy to find. Right?
Turns out, this is actually correct. The Long Island Expressway access road is very easy to ride. It's not particularly scenic, and the cars are shooting past at about 70 mph in many sections of it, but for the most part, it cuts across the island in an easy to follow straight line. Except when it doesn't.
The hardest part of the ride was figuring out how to get out of NYC and how to find the access road again whenever the highways intersected. I ended up on a couple of 'death roads' that are marked as bike paths on the NYC bike map, but that's par for the course. I'm convinced that there's a saboteur who wants to kill all bicyclists working for the department that makes that map.
At the end of the day, I arrived 2 hours late and jumped in the pool fully dressed. Water has never felt so good.
Now, if someone could just find me a better way from Brooklyn out to Long Island, I'd be really grateful.
To see the route that I took - click the map below to go to bikely.com