You Know, Now That I Think About It, Maybe It Is Worth It To Spend $8 To Drive Below 86th Street

Smug bicyclists are bad enough but smug fashionable bicyclists are another story:

Meet the beautiful bicycle girls of New York, a breed that bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, Spandex-short-wearing species of 20 years ago. Those women were athletes, pumping the pedals, fighting to win. Getting somewhere. Today’s girls — and one always thinks of them as girls, even if they’re well into their 40’s — are more meandering, their long legs flashing along the pot-holed alleys of SoHo and the boutique-lined bike lanes of the West Village. Eco-conscious and ethereal, they wear flowing frocks and gigantic sunglasses but never helmets. Their hair flutters in the breeze as they leave a trail of swooning male pedestrians in their perfumed wake. They’ve been known to weave up the Brooklyn Bridge, holding up traffic as they absent-mindedly chomp on almonds, steering through a stop sign while texting on their BlackBerries.

Local celebrities like the actresses Naomi Watts and Chloë Sevigny and the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen have all championed living the green life in this most public and only incidentally calorie-burning way. “I go every day to work on my bike,” Ms. Bundchen told the Daily News a couple of years ago. “It’s faster than a car, and cheaper.”

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Melissa Broder, 28, senior publicist for Penguin Group books, often gets compliments on her bright pink vintage Columbia Rambler with a matching helmet.

“The whole green thing wasn’t my original intention when I first started, but it’s an added way to feel self-satisfied,” she said, pulling over her bike at the corner of University Place and Ninth Street. “I definitely feel a little snotty about it now.”

She was in a simple cotton black dress with cream-colored embroidery around the collar and snacking on some Soy Crisps while she rode.

“But mainly it’s just the best way to get around,” Ms. Broder said. “I get a lot of comments on the matching helmet, people are surprised.”