The thought of cycling in New York terrifies me. The streets may be wide, the distances small and the hills nonexistent but the 13,000 yellow cabs – those Ford Crown Victorias with their furious V8 engines – devour the road space as hungrily as they consume fuel. Then there’s the combat-ready 4x4s on steroids and the pollution stacking up between the tall buildings. Unlike London, there are no real speed limits – drivers make up the rules as they go along. This is a city that makes even London look bike friendly.

So I was amazed to hear that the city had won an award from the League of American Bicyclists. I rang the mayor’s office, where Janette Sadik-Khan, a keen cyclist, is the new commissioner of the transport department. She told me about the 10,000 bike helmets they’ve given away, the 70 miles of new cycle lanes and the new secure bike parking amenities. And last week the authorities were given approval to impose an $8 (£4) congestion charge on traffic, or “urban acupuncture to relieve the pain”, as Sadik-Khan describes it.

In London, Brother Ken’s congestion charging has probably done more to get people on their bikes than the fear of terrorism and flab combined; so I hope the same thing happens in New York. It is already on the right track: the number of cyclists in Manhattan has doubled since 2000. Now 0.5% of the city gets to work on two wheels, and the powers that be want the proportion to double to 1% by 2015; to put that ambition in perspective, in Copenhagen some 40% of commuters use bicycles as their primary mode of transport.

Paul Steely White, director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York organisation that aims to reclaim the city’s streets from the car, says the mayor’s pride is due to the fact that he is doing more than any previous administration. “But that’s not saying a lot because previously nobody cared about cycling at all. Any kudos they’re getting is down solely to the fact that they are going in the right direction,” says White.

On Ninth Avenue, for nine blocks, there is a peachy protected bike lane, the sort with a concrete buffer between the pedal-powered and the petrol-powered vehicles. That’s not much, you may say, given that there are 6,500 miles of streets in Manhattan. But it’s just the start; the width of New York streets means many more of these are possible.

New York has always been the closest American city to Europe in terms of culture and fashion.

Perhaps last week’s announcement that it will follow London’s lead with the congestion charge and its (admittedly tentative) embrace of cycling heralds a bigger change in the Big Apple.

Perhaps it will be the first big US city to renounce the country’s love affair with the car and instead start courting two-wheelers just as London, Paris and Amsterdam do. Perhaps.