Well, the city has finally taken its bike program to the next, illogical step. No longer satisfied that the citizens of the city have to dodge untrained morons on their own bikes, our Mayor and Traffic Commissioner have now unleashed a new horde of barely able to ride bikers, enabled by the misnamed bike share program. It’s rent a bike, make no mistake about that, and it’s already coming under fire for the thoughtless placement of the rental stations.
New York has always had traffic problems. Back in the horse and buggy days they were far worse than they are today but our Mayor and Jeanette Sadik-Khan, his tough talking but slow thinking traffic commissioner have decided that bicycles are the latest answer to these seemingly unsolvable problems. I’m not trying to be nasty by calling Sadik-Khan slow thinking. She has a lot of progressive ideas, but this one, her biggest, definitely has been launched without fully thinking it through.
To achieve this solution they have covered the city with bike lanes that are rarely used by bikers and turned fairly free flowing streets into instant traffic jams. Have you been on 9th Avenue lately or even tried to drive down Broadway below Houston? How about trying to get to the theatre district any night in the week. This was always an arduous task, now it’s an impossible one. It’s not just because of the loss of vehicular space, it’s also because of the addition of thousands of unskilled and untrained wannabe bikers, weaving or barreling all over the road.
In their haste to put more bikes on the streets, the Mayor and Sadik-Khan didn’t bother to institute a program of training and licensing, they just released the Kracken and those of us who don’t get to run out of our offices and jump into a limos like the big deals at city hall, are stuck with dodging, idiot clowns who are soaring through red lights, running up one way streets the wrong way and hogging the sidewalk. Why, because no one bothered to tell them not to.
These are vehicles and can be pedaled at sufficient speed to do deadly harm to someone they hit. Why aren’t all bikers licensed and forced to carry insurance before they take these things on the road? Because those at city hall that were responsible for putting these programs in action were so hot to get the bikers on the road they just skipped over the significant details.
Bloomberg always refers to the success the program has had in Paris. Actually it’s only half as successful as he makes it out to be because anyone who has been to Paris in the last few years will tell you that although there are many bicycles on the streets of Paris there are far more mopeds and motor scooters and both the motor versions and the regular bikes are licensed.
Besides the difference between the programs, the cities are far from similar. Paris is a city of seven story buildings. There are less than a dozen high rise buildings in the city proper; only one real skyscraper is visible from most of the city. Manhattan is a city of vertical living. There are thousands of enormous buildings constantly engorging waves of people. Walk the streets of Paris and with the exception of a few serious shopping districts they are simply not crowded. Walk any neighborhood in Manhattan and the streets are jammed with pedestrians. Walk any part of Broadway from Columbia to the Battery and you will be constantly dodging people. Adding bicycles to that human wave is asking for trouble.
In hopes of reducing vehicular congestion and maybe adding a few bucks to the city’s coffers we have raised the bridge and tunnel fees to ridiculous highs and still they come. Why, because people make a lot of money in this city, more than they can make just about any place else. They drive their cars in because public transportation runs from inconvenient to absent. We have a couple of subway lines going into Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, we have one train line going into New Jersey at Jersey City and one or two going north into Westchester and beyond. That’s just not enough. Half the cars in Manhattan are commuters and the other half, the half that are parked on the street, are local residents. I have a friend who commutes back and forth from Nyack. It costs him $700 dollars a month before parking and as anyone who parks a car in a garage in the city knows it can cost another $600 a month.
And speaking of parking, the installation of many of the new rent-a-bike racks will severely cut into the number of spots available. Not only do they take up parking spots but they are definitely an eyesore in neighborhoods where they are grotesquely out of sync with the local surroundings. Take a walk through the 19th century architecture of the Village and then stumble over these stainless steel monstrosities, holding bikes that line the streets. It’s a visual atrocity.
We have meters on various streets in the city but the purpose of meters is not to collect revenue, even though they do. The purpose is to keep those spots revolving so shoppers can get to stores. That purpose would be greatly assisted and the city would make some serious money if it charged street parkers a monthly fee. They do it in Boston and from what I hear in London and it seems to work in Boston. I read somewhere that the city would make almost 2 billion dollars a year if they charged $100 per month for a street parking permit in Manhattan and in addition it would get rid of a lot of cars that clog the streets and never get used, except to move them from one side to the other for the street cleaner.
At $1,200 a year, plus the inconvenience of moving it twice a week, it would make sense for many city drivers to get rid of their cars and just rent one when they needed it. Of course there aren’t many mayors with the guts to try to pull that one off. Maybe Mike, who has shown guts in a lot of touchy circumstances, will try it before he leaves.