Bike lane erasure.

The NYPD arrested two men who were trying to repaint a 12-block stretch of bike lanes that runs through South Williamsburg at 4am yesterday. The bike lanes have been a major point of contention between the Hasidic population of S. Billburg and their northern hipsterati neighbors whose women ride through the hood in tight jeans and revealing shirts. If you want to get an idea of the outrage, just check out the 115 comments on the Gothamist article about the guerrilla bike lane addition.

While I hate to see us lose any ground in the city, I also understand that mapping the city’s lanes is an organic process and there will be some give-and-take. Painting our own lanes probably isn’t the best way to garner support among the car-driving city dwellers, but I support the painters’ gusto.

Maybe the fashion side of cycling is going the way of Biopace chainrings. The hipsters of Williamsburg are giving up fixies for vintage mopeds, and Momentum Magazine can’t even find a couple male models for their Interbike runway show in Vegas. While it’s predictable that hipsters would rediscover the irony of fossil fuel burning vehicles, it saddens me that they’ll be using their Kryptonite locks and messenger bags to clog the roads instead of bike lanes. As for the male models, I have no problem with them. Former Varsity employee and friend of the shop Mikey used to strut around in bibs for World Cycling (though they airbrushed out his trendy tattoos). The good news is that if Momentum is unable to find even two guys to ride down a runway among the thousands attending a Vegas show, then maybe they’ll take the hint that people have lost interest in $70 Rapha scarves.