Central Park's 6-mile loop drive has been car-free since June 2018, so cyclists now ride the park's real hills, like Harlem Hill, without sharing the road with traffic.
Guided tours typically supply the bikes and helmets, but riders should expect real climbs and to share the drives with runners and pedicabs, and trips are weather-dependent.
Central Park covers 843 acres and was built to the Greensward Plan that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux entered in the 1858 design competition. Two features of that plan matter to anyone on a bike. The four transverse roads carrying crosstown traffic were sunk below grade, so cars cross beneath the park rather than through it. And the loop drive, about six miles of road, was drawn as a pleasure route with grades and curves rather than a straight line. The drives were closed to private vehicles in stages over decades and went entirely car-free in June 2018.
The loop is not the flat spin most people expect. Manhattan schist breaks the surface throughout the park and the road follows the rock: the west side rolls continuously, and the northern end climbs what riders call Harlem Hill, a pull long enough to catch out anyone on a heavy rental bike. Guided trips generally run about two hours at a conversational pace, stopping at Bethesda Terrace, Bow Bridge, the edge of the Ramble and Strawberry Fields rather than trying to race the circuit.
Know where bikes belong. Riding is confined to the park drives; the footpaths, the Ramble's wooded trails and the track around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir are for walkers and runners, and the rule is enforced. On the drives you share the road with runners, pedicabs and a steady stream of other rented bikes, and on a fine weekend the pace is set by the slowest of them.
A guided tour gets you a bike that fits, a helmet, a route and someone explaining what you are looking at. If you already know the park, a rental or a Citi Bike puts you on the same road with the same view and no commentary. Either way the ride depends on the weather, and there is nowhere on the loop to wait one out.
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Central Park is an urban park between the Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City, and the first landscaped park in the United States. It is the sixth-largest park in the city, containing 843 acres (341 ha), and the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually as of 2016. Central Park is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation but has been managed by the Central Park Conservancy since 1998 under a contract with the government of New York City in a public–private partnership. The conservancy, a non-profit organization, sets Central Park's annual operating budget and is responsible for care of the park.
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