LITIGATION KEEPS BIKE MESSENGERS TERRORIZING STREETS
 

Miami Herald, November 19, 1987
 

Every workday in midtown Manhattan, thousands of bicycle messengersdelivering parcels zip through nightmarish traffic, some of them blowingshrill whistles at hapless pedestrians who get in the way.

The messengers, lacking the steel armor that protects motorists andcab drivers, thread their way among people who surge off the curbs wheneverthey think they can walk, or run, across the street.

Midtown Manhattan streets have simply grown too narrow and congestedto handle the tides of vehicles and pedestrians. So, the city has proposeda solution: ban the bikes, the newcomers on the scene.

"They're scaring the public to death," said Police Commissioner BenjaminWard in July, announcing a City Hall plan to ban all bicycles from threemajor midtown thoroughfares.

The problem goes beyond simple fear. Three people have died this yearafter being struck by bikes. That's the same number of fatalities as inall of 1986 and one more than in 1985, according to city Department ofTransportation records. Most of the victims were elderly.

"Many of these bicyclists are messengers who are paid by the numberof deliveries they make," Mayor Edward Koch said. "This business arrangementgreatly encourages the speeding and dangerous riding habits which threatenthe safety of any New Yorker who is not blessed with eyes in the back ofhis head."

On a good day, a swift messenger may make up to 40 deliveries and earn$200, said bike messenger Stephen Athineos.

Not surprisingly, bicycle enthusiasts and the messenger companies thatemploy about 5,000 delivery people in midtown organized to fight the ban.

"If we were gas-guzzlers and air polluters and took up half a city blockat a stretch, like limousines, I could see this ban as justified. It reallyborders on the criminal," said Charles Komanoff, a spokesman for TransportationAlternatives, a local organization of bicycle commuters.

"I think that the bike messengers have to share the blame with the otherusers, such as pedestrians who jaywalk and cab drivers who drive throughred lights," said Stuart Gruskin, a lawyer representing the Associationof Messenger Services, a trade group of 40 midtown bicycle messenger companies.

"You do get a few bad apples," acknowledged Nelson Vails, who used thespeed he developed as a messenger to win a cycling silver medal in the1984 Olympics. "If one guy screws up, it screws up all his fellow workers."

He estimated there were "one or two bad guys" among the 120 messengersin the company he worked for, and said he thought the way to curb the "badapples" was for fellow messengers to talk to them about the problems theycreate.

The city had a different idea, proposing to ban all cyclists -- notjust messengers -- from Park, Madison and Fifth avenues, the silkstockingstreets where many multinational corporations and banking, finance andmedia companies have their home offices. The ban would keep bikes off thoseavenues from the southern border of midtown at 31st Street to 59th Street,the southern edge of Central Park. Violators would be subject to a $45fine.

Sixth Avenue and Broadway were to remain open under the ban, and bicyclistscould still walk their bikes on the forbidden venues.

The ban was to be enforced from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, and wasto have begun Aug. 31.

In New York, however, issues without unanimous acclaim seem doomed tolitigation, and so it was with the bike ban.

The Association of Messenger Services, Transportation Alternatives andthe national League of American Wheelmen filed suit in state court challengingthe city for not holding hearings before implementing the ban.

A state judge decided the order was issued improperly. The issue hasyet to reach the state's court of final appeal.

History suggests that the city may have committed a tactical error whenit decided to outlaw all bicycles, bringing the League of American Wheelman,a national association of bicyclists, into the fray.

The last time the league fought the city over the right to ride thestreets of Manhattan was more than a century ago.

According to league official Doug Miller, in 1879 the city adopted ahorse-drawn-vehicle-only policy in Central Park. The next year, policearrested three cyclists in the park.

The newly founded League of American Wheelmen fought the park commissionand appealed to the state courts and legislature from 1880 to 1886 forthe right of bicyclists to use any public roadway.

By 1886, the dispute was over. The state of New York adopted legislationguaranteeing bicycles the right to use any public street in the state,a precedent no one challenged for more than 100 years.