So if a city believes that biking is part of a better future, it must sometimes muscle through a reluctant, rocky present. That’s precisely what Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan have done, in a fine example of the way the mayor’s frequent imperiousness and imperviousness to criticism can work to the city’s long-term advantage. If anything, the two of them should move even faster and more boldly, but that’s pure fantasy, given the opposition, bordering on hysteria, they’ve met so far.

“There are not only 8.4 million New Yorkers but at times 8.4 million traffic engineers,” Sadik-Khan said in an interview a few weeks after our bike ride. “And we’re, you know, very opinionated.”

Image Frank Bruni Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

I’LL say. Her critics have brutalized her, even making inane schoolyard fun of her surname by calling her Chaka Khan, after the hefty black R&B singer. (Sadik-Khan is white and almost bony, and never belted a tune during any of our meetings.) Before Anthony Weiner’s loins sundered his ambitions, he reportedly taunted Bloomberg with the promise that he would succeed him as mayor and promptly erase all the bike lanes. Additionally, a group of Brooklyn citizens with close ties to Iris Weinshall, the former transportation commissioner and wife of Chuck Schumer, filed a lawsuit against the city — dismissed by a judge last month — for its installation of a protected bike lane along Prospect Park West. And The New York Post was even more truculent, waging a constant, nasty war against Sadik-Khan, who was excoriated in one typical editorial for “turning over vast swaths of city streets to delivery boys on bikes and the occasional cool dude pedaling along in his Day-Glo tights.”

Vast swaths? Day-Glo tights? Those of us on two wheels still get only a sliver of the roads, and my biking shorts are baggy and olive green, with an elastic waist.

By many credible accounts Sadik-Khan has brought some of this misery on herself, with a style that can be impatient, intolerant, moralizing. I’ve gotten to know her a bit, and she has a certainty that borders on righteousness and an intensity in the vicinity of mania. But that’s to her credit — and our benefit. New York needs visionaries who won’t simply let things be.

In the end the resistance that she and the city have encountered has to do mostly with parochialism and selfishness. Some New Yorkers seem offended by the notion that we should be more like such biking havens as Copenhagen, Paris, or for that matter, Portland, Ore.: life here is too urgent and blunt and brutal for such crunchy-granola niceties. Besides which, no one wants to give an inch, literally: not the Prospect Park West gripers who lost parking spaces to the bike lane, not the drivers of delivery trucks whose jobs are sometimes complicated by such lanes, not the Manhattan traditionalists who feel that sharing just a few of Central Park’s transverse paths with cyclists — as the city decided in July they must do — requires too much in the way of vigilance from people ambling among the trees. The complaints were loud and passionate.