At age 6, Stephanie Yeh was riding a bike with training wheels near her North Carolina home when she suddenly careened down a hill. She squeezed the brakes, flew over her handlebars and landed facedown on the street, narrowly missing a passing car.
Deeply shaken, she didn’t touch a bike for more than 30 years.
On a recent Sunday, Ms. Yeh, now in her late 30s, was standing anxiously in a circle of about 15 adults between the dog run and the tennis courts in McCarren Park, on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border in Brooklyn.
It happened to be Mother’s Day, and another attendee, Rimu Byadya, a mother of two, said she woke up that morning and decided, “I’m going to give myself a gift: falling off a bike.”
She, Ms. Yeh and the rest of the group were about to take a free “Learn to Ride” class run by the nonprofit Bike New York. Helmets strapped securely to their heads, they stared apprehensively at the row of bikes in front of them.
When Ms. Byadya, 35, told the circle that both her husband and a colleague had “successfully failed” at teaching her how to ride, the whole group gave a knowing laugh.
As New York has increasingly become a biking city, adult New Yorkers are turning to Bike New York classes, as well as private instruction, to master a skill that many adults don’t even remember learning. With Citi Bikes on every corner and frequent public transportation delays, many of these students look at cyclists longingly, wishing for the freedom of two wheels. But most are embarrassed to lack such a basic skill and daunted by the prospect of acquiring it.
Not being able to ride “is one of the biggest failures that I’ve probably faced as an adult,” Iroda Kayumova, 39, said. She learned with Bike New York last year and is now training for a triathlon.
To help adults overcome that stigma, Bike New York’s classes provide a low barrier to entry: The classes are free, bicycles and helmets are provided, and the instructors and volunteers are committed to helping as many students as possible go from never having put their foot on a pedal to riding by the end of each two-hour class.
At McCarren Park, as students chose bikes that fit their height, they discovered that there were no pedals. An instructor, Tarah Monn, explained that the first step to learning was to simply sit on the bike and walk it forward. So the students cautiously put one foot in front of the other and wobbled in a loop around a line of colored cones.
As Mauricio Aceves, 59, got on his bike for the first time, he said he felt less nervous seeing other adults in his same situation. Growing up in Mexico City, he “would tell Santa Claus to bring me a bike,” he said, but he never got one. Now, he’s learning as a gift to his wife and 8-year-old son, who want to ride as a family.
Once enough people seemed comfortable walking their bikes, Ms. Monn encouraged them to approach the most difficult part of the day: pushing both feet off the ground to balance into a glide. “Strong pushes!” Ms. Monn yelled. “The faster the bike goes, the easier it is,” she added.
Ms. Byadya, who grew up in Bangladesh, where girls weren’t encouraged to ride, said it felt like a liberating exercise in “letting things go.” Once students started getting the hang of it, they bent their knees, feet dangling behind them as they glided for seconds at a time.
“I see balancing!” Ms. Monn said joyously.
Notably, a majority of adults seeking bike riding lessons in New York City are women. Chantal Hardy, the associate director of education at Bike New York, called this discrepancy the “fender gap.” She hypothesized that women were less likely to have been encouraged to participate in risky activities as children. “I also wonder if women are more open to seeking help,” she said, and to “having a group experience.”
Teaching adults how to overcome their fears in order to bike is a very specific skill — one that Lance Jacobs, a private adult bike instructor and owner of Virtuous Bicycle, has honed by teaching more than 500 adults to ride since 2013. “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know how to ride a bike and those who won’t admit that they can’t,” he said.
Mr. Jacobs, who is seldom without his white bike helmet with attached rearview mirror, has an almost obsessive dedication to the science of teaching adults to ride.
An adult on a bike for the first time is in a constant state of panic, he said. The human instinct is to put your feet on the ground, “but that instinct that is so natural gets you in trouble on a bike,” he said. So he aims to reprogram students’ brains.
At $225 for a two-hour lesson, his classes are pricey, but he tailors them to each student based on an extensive questionnaire that asks about athletic ability, driving experience and klutziness. Yelena Naginsky, 41, who learned to ride with Mr. Jacobs in 2024, said that because she is a dancer, he used dance metaphors to teach her bike concepts. He even names his exercises after specific students: “There’s the Minerva Hand Dance,” he said, “the Hyacinth Go and Stop, the Michael Swerve and Don’t Fall.”
Back at McCarren, about an hour into the class, cheers filled the air as students who had balanced for at least five seconds had pedals attached to their bikes. The next challenge was getting both feet on the pedals and maintaining balance while moving forward.
Brendan DeZalia, 37, hadn’t been on a bike in 25 years, despite looking the part of a stereotypical bike messenger with his “Heavy Metal” T-shirt and arms and legs covered in tattoos. Once he got his pedals, he started working to gain momentum.
“I’m one of those people that wants to be perfect the first time out of the gate,” he said, but added that he was accepting that his goal was out of reach.
Mr. Aceves, though, was frustrated: “Everyone’s doing it and I’m still kind of stuck.” He had to take his pedals off and return to gliding after he kept tipping over.
According to Bike New York, in 2025, 78 percent of students pedaled by the end of class. But for those who struggle, slow progress can be demoralizing.
Yawa Kurkiewicz, a volunteer for Bike New York for more than 10 years, won’t give up on them. Having never learned to ride as a child in her native Ghana, Ms. Kurkiewicz, who is in her 60s, first learned in a Bike New York class in 2014. Cycling is now one of her main modes of transportation.
She coached Mr. Aceves to take a deep breath, slow down and start over when he felt he couldn’t get his balance. “Don’t look at anybody. Do you,” she said. “If you don’t get it today, come back to another class.”
After a few fits and starts, Mr. DeZalia finally got up and managed to ride the entire length of the street for the first time. “We got a rider!” Ms. Monn exclaimed.
Mr. DeZalia was ecstatic. “It’s kind of an emotional moment for me,” he said.
It had taken Ms. Yeh, who had to overcome the trauma of her childhood accident, seven classes before she could even pedal. She arrived to this class, her 11th, terrified that she had forgotten how to ride over the winter, but within the first hour she was confidently biking the loop.
Riding has given her “this sense of freedom I’ve never felt before,” she said. “Like pure, unadulterated joy.”
It had also been a kind of therapy. “There’s so many parallels between biking and learning about yourself as a person,” she said. She recalled that in one class, she kept barreling straight toward a tree, and the instructor told her, “‘The problem is that you’re focusing on where you don’t want to go.’”
Instead, Ms. Yeh said, the teacher advised her, “‘If you start focusing on where you do want to go and you only look at that, that’s where you’re going to end up.’”
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