• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, May 13, 2008

This is National Bike-To-Work Week.

We have our own Bike Month activities here in NYC, serving up every counterculture taste from a bicycle film series to classes on how to draw bikes to a group ride for folding bicycles. Over 100 people showed up for the latter, almost three times the number who came last year. Biking is big in New York, and by all accounts it's getting bigger, as the city, driven (so to speak) by bike-friendly Mayor Bloomberg tries to remold the city for two wheelers.

People have been catching on to the potential bike-ability of New York. The New York City Department of Transportation says cycling in the city has increased 75% in a decade, and bike stores say there has been a tremendous increase in business in the past two years.

Of course, it is impossible to pin any recent increases on higher gasoline prices. For one thing, people in cycling distance of everything here are more likely to have a subway pass than a car. New York City car ownership has been declining since 2001, and the city has the fewest car-owning residents of any major U.S. city. Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives, a bike, pedestrian and cycling advocacy group, says the long-term sales growth in bikes is being driven by commuter bikes, not the $6,000 carbon-framed wonders ridden by Lance Armstrong fantasists.

"What's really changed is a huge explosion in urban riding and bike commuting," says Norvell. He says the majority of commuter-bike customers make their way to two wheels after switching from cars to mass transit. "That's not to say that the current up-tick in gas prices isn't driving more people to bikes; it's more the overall increase in the cost of living across the board. It used to be more people coming in looking for top-of-the-line bikes," he says. "Now, it's bikes people can ride to work, bikes that can take a beating on a daily ride."

That's me. Yes, I've been covering the car business for 10 years, but I really bike everywhere. It costs less than a gym membership and a $70 monthly subway ride through hell. No, I'm not one of those who ride a fixed-gear track bike, weaving among accordion buses with a u-lock in my back pocket and a messenger bag slung over my shoulder. (Yes, that's the trend, and I love those bikes, but I chuckle when they zip by. "You're cool now, homey, but wait till you hit 49, and your back and knees are about as flexible as rebar.")

Most days - rain, snow, shine, apocalypse - I bike from the wilds of Brooklyn, over the Manhattan Bridge and up to 26th Street and Broadway, where I work. I have two folding bikes, a hybrid, and a tandem on which I ferry my kid to school. Ten going on 18, she insists that I let her dismount a block from the entrance so nobody sees her on a bicycle built for two, with her strange dad who sings from the Johnny Mercer songbook, while he rides. "Dad, you please shut up and let me off right here."

Says David Lam, who owns Bfold, a New York shop specializing in folding bikes, "Business is really tremendous. I've been in business for five years, and I can see the demand of people getting into cycling in New York is huge. Bike shops almost can't handle the volume." Lam, who sells high-end folders like Bike Friday and Brompton with price tags north of $1,000, says the financial crisis has hurt some of his sales to Wall Street types, "but typical customers are commuters, working-class New Yorkers who like the value of folding bikes."

Charlie McCorkle, an owner of Bicycle Habitat, a top bicycle retailer in NYC, says he's seeing a shift to commuter bikes. "It's definitely busier than in the past. There's more labor business, and we are selling more bikes in the commuter market, but it's been going up steadily over the years."

John Burke, the CEO of Trek Bicycle Corp., argued last year in the Transportation Alternatives bulletin that bike companies' focus on marketing and high-end product development for the "flies-in-the-teeth" crowd means the business is missing the real boat: the opportunity for sales growth will come from people who take to bicycle commuting.

In what he termed the bicycle industry's skewed sense of priorities, he said that manufacturers spend 3.9% of sales on marketing, 1.6% on product development and only .001% on supporting bicycle-advocacy organizations. "If bicycling in the U.S. grew from less than a percent of all trips to 5%, the bicycle industry would grow from a $6.2 billion industry to a $31 billion industry."