Cyclist of the Month: Pete Wagner
Welcome to our new StreetFilms feature. Each month we'll be profiling a cyclist we find to be an interesting representative of the bike community.
Our first is Pete Wagner a furniture maker who lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn who gave up his car, bought a bike trailer, and uses it to haul tools and deliver his work.
Cyclists of the Month are inspired by the Commuter Profiles in Transportation Alternatives’ Magazine. Got nominations? Send 'em.
Pete Wagner: [00:00] My name’s Pete Wagner, I’m a furniture maker and I ride my bike to work.
[pause]
Pete Wagner: [00:08] I had an Isuzu Rodeo, SUV. It was very helpful, you know, for the first big projects in the house cos I mean if I didn’t have the car, you know, quite frankly we probably would have taken, you know, a few extra years to accomplish what we have so far. So it helped us, you know, do what we wanted to do. But then after a while I kind of realised it’s sort of obsolete, I’m lucky enough to live pretty close to some good hardware stores and so a lot of the building supplies I could just have delivered.
[pause]
Pete Wagner: [00:40] I’ve been riding my bike around for the last couple of years anyway. And that’s what I always prefer. So there was quite a bit of overlap between having the car and starting to use my bike for work related things. It’s pretty much used to the whole moving things around on my bike, at least tools and stuff, when I decided to get rid of the car.
[pause]
Pete Wagner: [01:00]
Yeah, I mean people like honk at me but, you know, it’s for the most
part they just go around. And people are used to seeing people
on bikes I think for the most part, especially in this neighbourhood.
I’ve certainly come across plenty of, you know, drivers that are just
really annoying and like double parked cars mainly. Like in the
5th Avenue bike lane, they think it’s bonus parking.
Or they think it’s a cellphone lane, like oh man, I’ve got a call,
better pull over right here, oh perfect spot, a bike lane. No-one
seems to enforce the law. No-one seems to ticket these people
who double park all over the place. People seem to think that
if they better cut… their car comes with an instant parking space,
which is the hazard lights, you know, they can just turn those on and
that means that they’re legally parked. Because in Brooklyn,
you know, unfortunately, people don’t get ticketed when they just
park and leave their hazards on. I’m really just going to have
to deal with the fact that people are going to honk at me a lot and,
you know, if you’re on a bike and you’re causing some kind of traffic
slowdown, then you get a lot more, you know, grief for it. This
is the first winter that I’ve wanted to really try and commute through
the winter. Last winter I’d sort of, you know, hibernated so
to speak. And my threshold seems to be around 20 degrees for actually
riding, so it’s nice to get up and, you know, get some fresh air and,
you know, the exercise is obviously a, you know, great plus. It’d
be nice to see a lot more people out there riding their bikes to work
or, you know, using methods other than cars. My name’s Pete
Wagner, I’m a furniture maker and I ride my bike to work. And
I was going to make a left turn. She couldn’t get around cos
of a double parked car and she wouldn’t have honked at me if I were
in a car, you know. But she felt like she could honk at me because
I was on a bike.
