Midnight rides are generally fun. Generally. Which is what I thought when I set out twenty minutes ago. Despite it being actually midnight, and thus dark, the full moon was directly over my head, bathing the entire road in a nice blue light. As I set out I felt refreshed, I felt exhilirated. Here I was, gliding down a dirt road with nothing but the moon to guide me. I’d spent almost the entire day (rain and shine) in the garage tearing parts off, afixing others, and generally being crabby and pissed. But now it was all paying off. I’d cleared the last obstacle before “rideable” and I wasn’t going to wait for Sunday morning…

My bike was eerily silent as I pedaled up gentle grades and then down into the fog banks collecting in the lowlands. Having a simple one-gear system makes for a very quiet ride, and I felt like a ghost gliding up and down those hills. Like something out of a Washington Irving story… Aside from the steel and rubber thing I was pedaling on, I really could have been drifting through the moors of colonial times. It felt so completely surreal.

Coming down the final hill, approaching the main road, I noticed a slight disturbance in the harmony that was man and machine. My left crank was pulling a little strangely. Odd, I though, as I approached the train tracks that represented the boundry between my own fantastical world and the modern one of macadam and reflective paint. My crank was pulling very strangly now, like the metal axle had suddenly warped. I slowed, I’d better check this out.

As I was pulling my left foot out of the foot strap I suddenly felt my entire foot go free, but not the kind of free I was used to. I looked down. Crap.

The entire left crank was hanging from my foot and swinging freely in the night air. And suddenly I saw my midnight ride for what it was: On a dirt road that sees one car an hour after midnight, if that. Away from my friends who were all going to sleep when I quietly sauntered out of the house, not even telling them I was leaving the house. On a bike that I’d just put together two hours earlier, that obviously had not gotten any type of inspection or anything before I rolled up my pant legs and took off into the darkness.

I was at least a mile from the house when I finally wrangled the bike to a stop and turned it around. Sadly, the hills didn’t look quite as enticing as I trudged back toward the garage.

Cyclists who take the Brooklyn Bridge during a time of massive subway failure are idiots.  Cyclists who hurl obscenities at the throngs of pedestrians that can’t seem to get out of their way should be dragged off their bikes and beaten to death with their own helmets.

Reason #1: The Brooklyn Bridge is a crisis icon.  It’s the worn out teddy bear with one eye and missing stuffing for Brooklynites everywhere.  When bad stuff happens in New York it usually means we have to walk home; and the gothic towers, the steel framework, the overwhelming history that sweeps over us when we even look at it are exactly the friend we need when times are tough.  Standing inside one of those massive natural cement towers is akin to standing in that snow fort you spent hours building when you were a kid.  You’re invincible.  And it’s a feeling that a lot of Brooklynites have.  We love our bridge, and when the subways fail us, it’s the first place we turn.

All of us.

Seriously, nearly everyone walking over to Manhattan from the general downtown Brooklyn area this morning was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.  Never mind the Manhattan Bridge, with its entrance only a mere block North of Brooklyn Bridge Blvd.  Never mind the fact that the Manhattan Bridge deposits you about half a mile further uptown in Manhattan (helpful if you work anywhere that’s not the Financial District).

So when everyone and their mother needs to use a bridge, and they all pick their safety blanket (naturally), there are going to be way too many people for the pedestrian lane.  Which brings me to…

Reason #2: The pedestrian lane of the Brooklyn Bridge is crappy for cyclists anyway.  I bike over this thing every day, trust me, I know.  The lane is anywhere from 15 to 20 feet wide and combines a pedestrian walkway with a bike lane, separated by a foot-wide white strip of paint running down the middle.  What’s crappy, you say?  Well, on paper it sounds fine.  But the designers forgot one key factor.

Pedestrians are idiots.

That might sound elitist, but it’s grounded in fact.  Pedestrians don’t have that much to pay attention to, it’s difficult to mess up walking, so they often meander around, not really paying attention to where they are going or where they are in reference to that big white line in the middle of the lane.  Cyclists, on the other hand, are forced to pay more attention to their surroundings, simply because they are balancing on a collection of simple machines traveling anywhere between 10 and 30 miles an hour.  I can’t afford to meander, I have enough problems just not getting myself killed.  But getting back to the point I was making: Pedestrians are complete idiots on the Brooklyn Bridge, particularly when it comes to respecting the bike lane.  On a typical ride I’ll have to deal with at least two of the following, usually three:

• Someone who is walking in the bike lane.
  
• Someone who darts out into the bike lane to pose for a picture.
• People milling about under the arches of the towers, always a crowd standing where I can’t see them until I’m almost on top of them.
• Self-important joggers that don’t want do deal with running through crowds of people.
  
• Some asshole who is walking his bike up the grade, yet still in the bike lane.
  

Sure, it sounds like I’m whining, but most encounters with said idiots usually involve me swerving, locking up the back tire, or narrowly avoiding terrible injury of all parties involved in some other fashion.  On a normal day I am that asshole hurling obscenities at witless walkers, and I completely support any cyclist who does the same.  On a normal day.

The fact that I work at the extreme South end of Manhattan (the reservoir tip, if you will) is the only reason I put up with the annoyance of using this bridge every day (even though I love everything else about it).  So why the bridge would be used by any cyclists to get to get to Manhattan on a day of a city-wide subway shutdown is beyond me.  Multiply the typical amount of people walking over the damn thing by ten and tell me they’ll all stay on the pedestrian side.  Right…

Reason #3:  Speaking of dedicated bike lanes, did you know that the Manhattan Bridge has one?  Yup, completely separate from the pedestrian walkway, it’s on the North side and it’s wonderful.  I took it this morning and I can count the number of people on there with me on one hand.  Literally, there were three other cyclists on there with me, all of whom were going the same way I was going.  The same thing happened during the Transit Strike.  Cops were forcing cyclists to dismount because of the crowds on the Brooklyn Bridge, but the Manhattan Bridge was a ghost town…

There are other reasons why the Manhattan Bridge is better: shallower grade, steadier climb, concrete riding surface (think about bad weather), but I think I’ve proved my point without getting into the boring stuff.