Today a friend and I bicycled from Brooklyn to Manhattan, riding over the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather was beautiful, and many people were out and about. The pedestrian/bicycle path between the two boroughs is an alternate New York, lovelier and less fast paced than the world of automobiles whizzing by below.
Most people followed the etiquette of the narrow divided space wonderfully — pedestrians on one side, bicycles on the other. Which made it more jarring on the very rare occasion when a clueless tourist would stand in the middle of the bike lane, looking for all the world as if they didn’t understand the dangerous situation they were creating for everyone around them. They might as well have been wearing t-shirts that said “Yes, I am trying to get somebody killed.”
But other than that, it was glorious. We arrived at the middle of the bridge just in time to watch the sunset behind the Statue of Liberty. Our green-clad Lady of the Harbor looked even more beautiful than usual, surrounded by the orange glow of the slowly sinking sun upon the far horizon.
Delightfully, the trip takes no more time by bicycle than it does by subway. And it is so much nicer a ride.
I once descended the stairs at the Eiffel tower as a busload of British school kids were on their way up. “Pardon! Excuse me! Beg your pardon!”. It quickly occurred to me they drive on the left over there, and I’d best walk down the other side.
Kinda makes one not want to visit new places, knowing that you’re inevitably gonna screw up and make some people annoyed. After all, none of us like “clueless tourists”. That dislike makes me not wanna be one.
It has nothing to do with being annoyed. It has to do with not hurting people.
Out of perhaps thousands of people we encountered on the bridge, only two were standing directly in the path of the bikes. The shared lane is *extremely* narrow, and unless everybody uses their head (which thousands of other people managed to do just fine), eventually an accident will happen.
Part of the joy of crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a beautiful day is, in fact, seeing so many tourists enjoying the walk and the view. All in all, we encountered thousands of gracious clued-in tourists, and only two clueless tourists who were placing everyone else in danger. That’s a pretty good ratio, don’t you think?
I don’t think you need to worry — I am completely confident that you would never be one of those two people.
Indeed. I ride my bike across that bridge as little as possible because of the clueless tourists and the clueless natives who think that it is not a big deal to just step into the bike lane (one which a bike often has just passed) without looking into the path of another bike. When I was in the UK last month, I certainly was a clueless tourist and almost stepped into traffic several times for want of looking the correct direction. Yes, it is just one of those things that is hard to get used to as a visitor, but that wouldn’t make me less injured, not the driver of the car that would have hit me less traumatized, if I did step in to traffic