Bicycle commutes, past and present

I currently ride about 6 miles each way when I commute to work. Bushwick, Brooklyn to Battery Park, Manhattan, and back.

When I first moved to Brooklyn, I always took the Williamsburg...

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Now I often take the Manhattan Bridge:

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The Williamsburg Bridge's great strengths are the wide paths and lack of tourists impeding the flow. Its a steep climb, which is either a plus or minus depending on how I feel about exerting myself.

The Manhattan Bridge's strength is its separate bike and pedestrian paths, which are mostly respected. Its steepness is in between the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges.

The Williamsburg could be the best bridge for commuting except for it being the only shared bike and pedestrian path I know of to have those 2 groups on a collision course towards each other. Most shared paths follow the road standard of 'stay to the right.' Not here -- where bikes are to the right and pedestrians to the left, directly into each other. This could work if the rules didn't contradict so many other traffic norms.

Before I moved to Brooklyn I had a shorter ride, but I had to cross the 1 mile wide Hudson River by mass transit. The ferry was efficient but expensive, and the PATH was cheap but unreliable.



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My first cycling commute was from Newark to East Orange NJ, back in the mid '90s.


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Sometimes I would take this route home:

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The original bike I used when I first started commuting was a crappy Huffy that got stolen from the locked shed in my backyard. So I graduated to a crappy Diamond Back Outlook.

I recently left that bike on the curb in Jersey City right before I moved.

Riding my folding bike was fine, until my commute more than doubled...

So I upgraded...