New York’s streets have the best bikes. Let’s look.

Like any big American city, the streets are full of Schwinns. If it isn’t a Varsity converted to single speed hipster everything, it’s a Collegiate, a Suburban or a Sprite. Still the best colors to this day.

Fantastic graphics on this Huffy.

And this Peugeot…

… and this Peugeot.

A Rollfast tandem! Not left for dead with that kind of chain. Look closely for the sliver Raleigh Chopper wedged behind it.

Another Raleigh Chopper, with stick shift and chaise lounge saddle.

A Big Dummy by a children’s museum.

Somebody sells and installs this banana seat mod because I’ve seen it before.

Not enough rack.

Still not enough rack.

This Italian Cinzia folder is a brilliant little thing. Someone relies on this bike because it’s hitched to the rack with two Abus chains. Look at that front basket, it’s as wide as half the bike is long.

Love this seat—handlebars, foot guards, plenty of drainage.

The perils of on-street parking.

I see variations on this everywhere—people want their bars up and they want to sit upright but they don’t know that’s what they want because that kind of bicycle really isn’t widely available here. The best they can ever try is a hybrid, which is a position that purports to give the rider the best of two styles and succeeds in delivering neither.

Bars up, antlers down.

A positive development in take-out delivery: electric bikes. These seem very quickly to have replaced a lot of the two-cycle scooters most restaurants were previously using.

I took a Fr8 for a test ride from Adeline Adeline and 1. all this time I thought they were in Soho but they’re down in Tribeca 2. an electrical fire broke out in a manhole while we were there, filling the block with acrid black smoke, 3. are they the only ones on the East Coast importing Workcycles now? and 4. I am purposefully not talking about the bike because I will only want it more (it would replace my Raleigh but my Raleigh will never die—I’ve been through two head-on collisions with it so far).

Here’s a brand new Brooks.

And a slightly older Brooks (the stippling isn’t part of the wear).

And a Brooks just settling into middle age. This saddle is part of the Dutchiest bike I saw…

No street bikes in the city post would be complete without a few examples of terrible infrastructure. How about this one on 2nd Avenue in which the left-turning traffic is guided toward collision with the bicycle traffic just at the vanishing point? The irony.

Ever executed a 45-degree turn on a bike? Me neither. Bonus points for the pedestrian ignoring the huge, empty crosswalk.

What’s this? Groningen? Amsterdam? No! Brooklyn! I’m pretty sure this is the first time I have ever, ever seen parallel  separated cycling and pedestrian paths outside of Holland. No mixed use! And blocks from where we used to live (and a stretch of Columbia you would be mad to ride on the street because it’s bookended by expressway on/off ramps.) It only lasts a few hundred feet, but it’s a thing of beauty.

A bit further down, past the expressway ramps the street narrows and what were the pedestrian lanes become the cycling lanes with a bit of sidewalk between them and the street. Still pretty good!

Let’s take a break from bikes to look at a tiny, tiny storefront.

A Bridgestone 450 in the dark.

A Chinese knock-off bakfiets in the dark.

And two Raleigh cousins from the extended brown Sports/Superbe/Sprinter family. Even though I got my Raleigh in Philly, it spent most of its time with me on the streets of New York.