Loved Ones Remember Slain Cyclist As Loving Father, Bike Advocate

BED STUY, NY — Adam Uster was memorialized with a symbol every avid New York City cyclist dreads in the form of a white-painted ghost bike now installed in Bed-Stuy.

Uster, a loving father and safe streets advocate, was honored Thursday on Lexington and Franklin avenues, where he was fatally struck by a flatbed truck on May 1.

"Adam's loss is a loss for all of New York City," said friend Isaac Zal. "He's the best a person could be."

Uster's death also represents a source of anger for the Transportation Alternatives advocates he used to work with, who have long called for a protected bike network on Brooklyn's avenues.

"Adam is not a statistic," said Executive Director Danny Harris. "These are not numbers. You know Adam, we know Adam...Our lives are worth more than inanimate objects."

But it is a grim truth that Uster was the 13th cyclist to die in the streets 2023, a year already set to rapidly outpace cyclist fatalities in 2022.

Said his widow, Frederique Uster-Hug, "Adam's faith [in biking] shows us the real danger of it."

Adam's Memory

Uster never stopped trying to cook food for his coworker Courtney Byron, the friend told Patch — just one example of Uster's extraordinary generosity and kindness, he said.

"Some souls are just too beautiful," Byron said.

When Uster brought his two daughters around, they were confident — both on bikes as soon as they could walk — and showed all the signs of having a loving and supportive dad, Byron said.

"[They were] confident that he had their back," Byron said.

Their dad was known among friends as "Swiss decision" — he was a practical and precise craftsman — and a part of the team that brought a new facade to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Uster's friend Zal said.

"This is not a cavalier human being," Zal said. "This is a man who acted with precision in everything he did. If he wasn't safe on these streets, nobody is."

Biking was one of Uster's core passions since childhood.

Uster grew up in the outskirts of Washington D.C. where riding a bike gave him freedom. He became a bike messenger in D.C. and, once he moved to New York, he became a bike caddy, said his wife.

He loved New York City and adopted Brooklyn as his own neighborhood, and he was passionate about making it a better place, his friends said.

"Adam loved Brooklyn as much as he loved biking," Uster-Hug said. Then she played, over the speaker, Fat Tony's "BKNY."

Preventing More Deaths

Uster knew how dangerous it could be to bike in New York City, because he'd been hit by a car before.

The crash spurred Uster to make a "generous donation" to Transportation Alternatives, cementing his commitment to safer streets.

Harris told those gathered to honor Uster he wished the city had matched the cyclist's commitment to safety and taken steps to protect a Bed-Stuy bike lane he called a "deathtrap."

"We all should be here for a very different reason," Harris said.

"We all should be here because we should be celebrating a groundbreaking, a groundbreaking that Adam and Frederique and so many of you have been demanding for so long."

In a prayer, Uster-Hug asked for the strength to continue biking and living with the tenacity Adam would.

"Please give me the strength," she said. "And give my girls the strength, to continue biking and enjoying life like Adam would have."