Michael Grynbaum, in a recent article on Traffic Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, completely missed the point. The people of the city don’t care if Sadik-Khan is nasty, abrasive or hard to work with. Most of them don’t ever, thank God, have to see or hear her. The real problem is that they have to live with the results of her hopelessly misguided efforts.
Okay, so Sadik-Khan doesn’t listen to anybody, okay, so she always thinks she’s right. A little megalomania is sometimes an asset to someone trying to get stuff done in this most difficult city, but does she ever look at the results of what she’s done? How about checking out some of the disasters you’ve created Janette, how about going back to fix them. Lower Broadway, which was always a problem street, is now a massive parking lot and so are all the streets that feed into it. It isn’t so much the bus lane, which would probably work if you hadn’t eliminated another complete lane to put in bus sttops. What possible use do these little traffic blockers have? What’s wrong with stepping off the curb just like we do in the rest of the city? Is it true you have a relative in the concrete business Janette, or are you just so involved in your desire to ride your bike around the city that you don’t care about the other 13 million people who live here?
Then there’s Columbus Avenue, which used to be a great street to make time on and is now just another clogged artery with parking in the middle of the street and a brand new bike lane that no one seems to use. When objections about losing parking spaces were voiced to Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer he questioned Ms Sadik-Khan about them. Her solution was to prohibit left turns on certain blocks to allow for more parking.
So, let’s look at that solution. Columbus Ave. runs downtown. Let’s say, as good old Janette suggests, you prohibit left hand turns onto the one- way Eastbound streets. So if you want to go onto, say, 75th Street between Columbus and CPW you have to go one block further south, make a right onto 74 go one block west, make a right onto Amsterdam, go one block north, make a right onto75th and go two blocks east to your destination. That’s four additional blocks you have to drive to go the one half block you would if you could just make the left off Columbus. This means four blocks of additional traffic, emissions, street use, etc. Is she kidding? This is the solution of the Traffic Commissioner. You create more traffic and more pollution just so we can have a lane for her to ride her bike in? And to top it off Scott Stringer’s moronic reply was; ”What I liked about it was that there was a real response.”
A REAL RESPONSE, Scott? How about a correct response? This idiotic idea is the creation of another, you can’t get there from here, situation, it’s not the solution to anything. This is the incompetent traffic commissioner suggesting that we create more traffic and significant pollution and you think that’s okay? Get your head out of your ass, Scott, try to act like you’re not brain dead.
And lets talk about all the wonderful bike lanes Janette has installed without bothering to promote a campaign on how to actually ride a bike in a busy city. Bike riders in NYC are like some alien plague, ignoring traffic lights, one-way streets, pedestrians and anything else that they can endanger. More bikers are now riding on sidewalks (an offense) than in the bike lanes. Maybe Sadik-Khan should have tried to deal with this before she gave these morons and lawbreakers more lanes in which not to ride.
Maybe if Sadik-Khan had not been a biking enthusiast, other traffic problems would not have been ignored. While she was clogging up Columbus Avenue, she was busy ignoring two exits from the Henry Hudson Parkway that are causing more traffic problems on the West Side than anything even remotely associated with bike lanes.
I am referring to the 72nd St. exit, which due to the greed of Donald Trump and the ineptitude of our politicians has been closed for most of the last four years and the 79th St. exit, which, for forty years, has been used by the city as a revenue producing traffic trap, while the dangers posed by it have been conveniently ignored. I have sent detailed plans for the redesign of that exit to both the Mayor’s and Traffic Commissioner’s office. Both have ignored them, which would be fine if they had some plan of their own, but how many people have to be killed at that corner before the city places safety before revenue and does something about a really dangerous situation. That’s what Ms Sadik-Khan should be concentrating on, the movement of traffic, not her biking hobby.
And now we hear that the city wants to introduce a plan like the Velib plan in Paris where anyone can pay a weekly fee and just pick up a bike at one station, ride it and drop it off at another. This seems to work very well in Paris unless you ask a motorist there and then you hear that there is a bounty on the mayor’s head.
Look, my problem with Sadik-Khan is not her reportedly nasty personality and bed temper, it’s not that she wants to turn NYC into a bicycle Mecca and it’s certainly not that she wants to make the city safer for bikers. My problem with her is that like a politician and not a city commissioner she wants to do all these things without laying any groundwork, without making sure that the people who will be riding all those bicycles know how to do it safely. Right now there is no licensing structure or insurance necessity to ride a bike in NYC. Both should be mandatory. It’s a moving vehicle, it’s dangerous to both the rider and the pedestrians around him.
It’s obvious that Ms Sadik-Khan has shown no ability to rationally deal with the problems of the monster she is creating. It’s equally obvious that the only way any kind of regulation will be implemented is if some gruesome accident occurs that through its utter horror, grabs the attention of our always sensationally directed media. This is a horrible way to have to perceive things but it is the reality of our gruesome society.
I watched an incident that could have been the catalyst, last week on West 77th Street. Fortunately it did not play out that way. A pregnant woman pushing one of those fold up prams with a two or three year old boy in it was hit by a biker coming downtown on Amsterdam (an uptown street) and turning East on 77th (a westbound street). He ran the front wheel of his bike right up the pram, leaving a track across the blanket covering the child and jammed the pram into the stomach of the woman, Fortunately neither the child not the woman was hurt. The biker, a well dressed, (suit & tie) white guy in his late thirties, asked if the woman was okay and when she mumbled something incoherent, just rode away.
As it turned out, the woman was okay, just shaken up a bit but that’s not the point. The point is that this clown should not be allowed to walk the streets let alone ride them.