Picture New York City with no bike lanes at all. Today, it feels unimaginable. This is in part because in 1993, the Bicycle Blueprint laid out a 151-point plan to bring bicycling into New York’s mainstream — and in 2017, much of that ambition has been realized. According to the latest counts, cycling in New York City is growing faster than transit ridership, faster than the economy, and faster than the population.

In some ways, that’s great news, and a testament to how successful the Bicycle Blueprint, combined with two decades of Transportation Alternatives advocacy, has been.

In other ways, it keeps TransAlt’s staff up at night.

“There are so many cyclists in New York City right now that during rush hour, there are traffic jams in the bike lane,” explained TransAlt’s Deputy Director Caroline Samponaro. “I worry for us riding out there, because there is not enough bike infrastructure to hold us all.”

If you build it, they will come is a transportation planners’ truism that is known to work both ways: if you build more highways, more people will drive to work, and if you build more bike lanes, more people will bike to work. But in New York City, the growth in cycling has leapfrogged the infrastructure. Today, masses of New Yorkers from every borough are rolling out on their first bicycle ride, and in large part, our streets remain unprepared.

“I put cities into two categories of bike transportation,” explained Jon Orcutt, another coauthor of the Bicycle Blueprint, and a former executive director of Transportation Alternatives. “One is doing the minimum because they’re under pressure to do something, a begrudging and painstaking route to progress. The other made an official decision to embrace bike transportation, and try to make it work. New York flipped from the first category to the second in 2007.”

That year, Janette Sadik-Khan was hired as commissioner of the Department of Transportation, and Orcutt became a senior policy advisor there. What followed was a dramatic expansion of the bike network, a lot of design innovation, and the introduction of Citi Bike, “an accelerant to bike transportation,” according to Orcutt.

“Places that have come late to cycling, like Paris and London and New York, have been able to put a lot more people on bikes using bike share in connection with a program of changes on the streets,” he explained.

Despite that watershed year, and the decade of progress since, Orcutt admitted that there is much more to be done.