On Bicycles

A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-18256-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 236 mm x 162 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of not only the city’s first bicycle but also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are.

In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of bicycles—and bicyclists—in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how the bicycle has served as a mirror of the city’s 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 Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown bike ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes and dotted with bright blue Citi Bikes—reflects a fitful journey powered—and opposed—by New York City’s people and its politics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Friss, Evan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte Regionalgeschichte der USA: Einzelne Staaten, Städte
• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Sport Fitness, Freizeitsport, Gesundheitssport Radfahren: Allgemein und Touring

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
1. Rough Start
2. Up and Down
3. Moses
4. The Ban
5. Bloomberg
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Evan Friss is an associate professor of history at James Madison University and the author of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s. He used to pedal around New York City, but now lives in Virginia with his family.