This a good article from the Boston Globe that talks about what has changed in the mayor's life that now he is making cycling a priority in the city: he started riding.
City Hall has not always helped. After Bicycling Magazine ranked Boston one of the worst cities for cycling in 1999, Menino appointed a Bicycle Advisory Committee, only to disband the panel and lay off its coordinator four years later.
Things began to change last summer when Menino bought a silver Trek road bike and started riding around his Hyde Park neighborhood for exercise at 5 a.m. Two months later, he appointed Nicole Freedman, a former Olympic cyclist, as Boston's first bike czar and declared, "It's time for this issue to come to the forefront."
"He very quickly began to understand what bicyclists in Boston have been talking about all these years, when they have been complaining that conditions are not very good here," Watson said.
Just like Mayor Daley in Chicago, it is always nice to see that after a mayor in a city actually starts to ride a bike, they realize just how poor the infrastructure and layout for cycling really is. Maybe for NYC we just need to get Bloomberg out of the subway car and onto a bike. Isn't that what the 9th Avenue bike lane is for anyway?
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