HUDSON SQUARE — As Hudson Square grows into a hub for technology and creative companies, an increasing number of young cyclists — many with high-end gear — are using pedal power to get to work.
The influx of two-wheeled commuters has forced the Department of Transportation to install 35 bike racks in the former printing and manufacturing hub.
"This is a real biking community," said Ellen Baer, president of the Hudson Square Connection, the business improvement district that helped the DOT research the best rack locations.
Baer said the people who work in the neighborhood's new creative companies — which include designer 3.1 Phillip Lim and co-working space WeWork — are biking in from Brooklyn and elsewhere.
"We now have the young 'digirati' who are savvy, independent, educated and on the cutting edge," she said.
Dave Herman, 43, who rides his $1,000 Gazelle brand bike from Brooklyn to his office on Varick Street, said he saw a definite need for new bike racks in the area, given the spike he noticed in the number of riders in the past year.
"[Sign] poles fill up pretty quickly around here, with about two bikes for every pole," he said.
Graphic designer Florian Mewes, a 35-year-old German who grew accustomed to biking after living in Amsterdam for six years, said he bikes to avoid the crowded L train in the morning.
"It's a good compensation for sitting the whole day in the air-conditioned office," he said. "And the bridge is the best part."
Mewes said he feels safer locking his bike to a rack than to a signpost.
"It's probably just psychological, [though] since thieves crack the locks and not the racks," he said.
The new bike racks can be found on Varick Street between King and Charlon streets and Watts and Canal streets, Charlton Street between Varick and Hudson streets, Vandam Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street and elsewhere.
Ten more racks are on the way, Baer said.
Some cyclists, however, are a little sheepish about their rides when they see the fancy bikes on the racks.
Green buildings consultant Nora Sherman, who commutes on her beat-up Trek from the East Village to her office in Hudson Square, noted the high-end Italian racing bikes she sees outside the offices of WNYC Radio and other creative companies on Varick Street.
"I'm always a little embarrassed about my sad little bike next to all the road bikes and Brooks leather saddles," Sherman, 30, said Wednesday morning as she chained her Trek to a street sign.
West side cyclists could get an extra boost if the DOT creates a protected bike lane on Hudson Street between West 12th and Canal streets, which Community Board 2 backed in November.
The upgrades would create a north-south, continuously parking-protected lane starting on Eighth Avenue at 59th Street and ending on Hudson Street at Canal Street.
