Travel Tuesdays: Tech to Help Bikes and Cars Share the Street

On the desolate streets of Manhattan during the bleak early days of the pandemic, Rosemary Sigelbaum found that riding a bicycle to work at Lenox Hill Hospital offered a desperately needed respite from the stress of 12-hour days witnessing the worst of the coronavirus’s frightening effects.

“It was quiet, and on my way home it gave me time to decompress,” Ms. Sigelbaum said of her commute between the Upper East Side and her home on the Lower East Side.

Those empty avenues of late March have given way to the city’s usual cacophony of traffic, just as more people are discovering the advantages of cycling to work: no crowded subways, buses or shared taxis. Bicycle companies have posted out-of-stock notices for the first time in years. Sales in May skyrocketed 103 percent compared with a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, a research firm.

But as all those new bikers are discovering the joys of cycling, they’re also discovering the dangers of riding on two wheels, especially in cities.

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