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Good question. Frame of reference: I did the Lycra thing on weekends and early morning training, but I also commuted about 18mi each day in street clothes. Rode daily, weather permitting.
(adjusts jaunty cycling chapeau and assumes casually deliberate pose)
Before bike lanes, bikes rode with cars, between them, filtering up to the light at each stop. At lights, you’d safely be out in front of the cars, visible to all, front wheel just behind the crosswalk. Head start at the light so you’re seen, cars catch up, repeat. It was a thrill and required some guts but that kept tourists and entryists at bay. I can’t say whether fewer cyclists got hit by cars back then, but in any case all this stayed in the traveled lanes of the streets where wheeled vehicles belong.
(Aside: Food Delivery bikes were old mtn bikes back then and they just rode on the sidewalk (illegal but selectively enforced)).
Gradually the city added more and more bike infrastructure along with the (anti-car) street redesign / project zero in the 00s and teens. Cars got squeezed, and these new bike paths provided lots of space that might have been intended for bikes, but in reality just became multi-use space. Or more accurately no man’s land.
Litany of issues with trying to use a NYC bike lane: it’s the Wild West now. They’re laid out such that you have to cross 3-4-5 lanes of vehicles at opposite-way intersections; many but not all are between the sidewalk and the row of parked cars; all cyclist rightly fear getting “doored” by a parked vehicle; bike path use is not preserved for cyclists so inevitably there is a black SUV, a police car, a vending cart, an UBER, a yellow cab or three, and/or a hundred pedestrians using it as an extension of the sidewalk, driving you into the street unexpectedly; the aforementioned e-bikes are everywhere as are oblivious tourists on citibikes.
The worst part was that once these lanes showed up, expectations changed. It felt like a theft of the commons or eternal September or something like that. Bikes, formerly road users like cars, were in a weird place where the core users were squeezed out by all the above, but were no longer welcome or expected on the roads.
I would inevitably just take my chances in the streets. And if you’re quick enough you don’t really piss off the cars much.
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