![Has New York Become Less Walkable?](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/09/opinion/04Sachdev-FPO-DO-NOT-PUB/04Sachdev-FPO-DO-NOT-PUB-facebookJumbo.jpg)
In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire described the passionate city dweller as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” In the French poet’s eyes, the city dweller had a unique opportunity to absorb and mirror the poetry of freely moving multitudes. For the committed flâneur, Baudelaire wrote, “the crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.”
I felt this way in New York City 15, even five years ago. Sidewalks could be strolled contemplatively, providing one kept to the right, and roads could be crossed without much trepidation.
But I was hit by three bikes this past summer — two on sidewalks and all three after sunset — and spared dozens more collisions only because of my increasingly frantic footwork. In the years since the pandemic lockdown, drivers, with their ever-bigger vehicles, appear to have grown more aggressive. They seem less likely to yield to crossing pedestrians and more likely to stop, unperturbed, on crosswalks. Motorcyclists routinely whiz through red lights and tyrannize bike lanes. Bicyclists fly down avenues like arrows, bike lanes and one-way signs be damned, and a precious few of them halt for crossers. Electric delivery bikes chase poverty wages down our sidewalks, throwing the last sliver of pedestrian refuge into a novel sort of anarchy.
Weaving through throngs of inimitably colorful, diverse, bizarre New Yorkers once felt like performing “an intricate sidewalk ballet” — which is how Jane Jacobs, another famous literary flâneur, marvelously depicted the scene that was Greenwich Village’s Hudson Street in the 1950s.