In a very short time, New Yorkers will have the opportunity to show the world that they are just as virtuous, well-intentioned and offended by sloth as people in Copenhagen or Geneva or any other of a number of cities where mindful living and wonderful yogurts reign. The city’s long-anticipated bike share program is scheduled to make its debut in May, allowing New Yorkers to pick up and deposit rental bikes at hundreds of locations, most of them, so far, in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods. Anyone waking up on a Sunday morning in TriBeCa, finding nothing in her refrigerator and hankering to go to Smorgasburg in Dumbo, Brooklyn, for instance, will now be able to do that with relative ease.

So is this really the time to complain — this, a moment when progressive policy has had such an obvious victory? Virtually everything about the city’s growing bike culture has prompted vigorous argument and even fury. Now that the metal stalls and kiosks where bikes will be stationed are turning up in parts of Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, the theater of operations in the war among cyclists and drivers and pedestrians has expanded and multiplied and bred new factions, even though the bike share program itself has been shown to have widespread support in polling.

Last week, street vendors in Lower Manhattan protested that racks placed on Broadway and Liberty Street threatened to displace their food carts and would force them to move. Shortly before that, Jacques Capsouto sat down on the curb to protest the placement of a bike rack in front his restaurant, Capsouto Freres on Washington Street, which possibly blocked a service entrance. The Friends of Petrosino Square, in SoHo, have fought the installation of a station close to the park of which they are advocates, believing that it would intensify traffic and impede safety. Such are the tempers in certain quarters that one member of the group created signage that called the Department of Transportation, which began the program, the “Department of Tyranny.”

It is hard to imagine that four decades ago, in early May 1971, fires were set and windows were smashed in the far reaches of Brooklyn in protest of cuts to Medicaid and other social programs, when so often now it is matters of lifestyle and taste that inspire our most expressive displays of contention and ire — our quaint revolutionary gestures.