Bumper to bumper traffic along Canal Street. Photo: Matt McDermott
Time for some traffic problems in Manhattan!
City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles, high-level sources told The Post.
Today’s gridlock is the result of an effort by the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations over more than a decade of redesigning streets and ramping up police efforts, the sources said.
“The traffic is being engineered,” a former top NYPD official told The Post, explaining a long-term plan that began under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and hasn’t slowed with Mayor de Blasio.
“The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion, to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians,” the former official said.
“There’s a reduction in capacity through the introduction of bike lanes and streets and lanes being closed down.”
The concerted effort includes:
Pedestrian plazas that have cut off entire lanes of traffic and created bottlenecks.
Protected bike lanes on major avenues that eat up a traffic lane and force trucks to double park.
Cross streets where turns are forbidden on nearly all avenues.
Intersections where drivers must wait for green arrows to turn onto avenues.
Ordering traffic agents to focus more on writing tickets and less on directing traffic.
The goal of the jammed traffic is to shift as many drivers as possible to public transit or bicycles.
An added benefit was supposed to be safer streets, but city officials have said that while 45,000 fewer cars and trucks now come into Midtown daily than in 2010, pedestrian deaths are on the uptick this year.
The driver headaches began under Bloomberg in 2003, with his THRU Streets program that prohibits drivers from turning onto most avenues from nine Midtown cross streets during weekday hours.
Bloomberg then tried to drastically cut vehicle traffic with a congestion-pricing program that would have charged drivers to enter Midtown.
Albany nixed that plan in 2007, and the next year, Bloomberg changed tactics.
He again targeted drivers with his ambitious Green Light for Midtown Project, which, starting in 2009, installed roadway-narrowing redesigns of Columbus Circle, Broadway, Times Square and Herald Square.
Green Light includes pedestrian plazas and protected bike lanes that are still being completed under de Blasio, who has further snarled traffic with reduced speed limits, redesigned intersections and aggressive summons-writing as part of his Vision Zero initiative.
“This all goes back to when Bloomberg wasn’t getting his congestion pricing, so they started doing others things,” a second source said.
“They’re not coming out and saying it, but they’re doing other things to cut down on traffic coming into city, things such as taking streets that had four lanes and making them three by creating bike lanes, or putting a plaza in, creating pedestrian islands,” the source said.
“They’re purposefully cutting down on the number of vehicles coming into the city by cutting down the space for vehicles.”
The source said de Blasio “doesn’t care about traffic” and noted that the mayor could now blame congestion on President-elect Donald Trump, whose Trump Tower in Midtown is now ringed with security.
“He really doesn’t care,” the source said. “Instead of working around it and helping it out, he’ll just blame everything on Trump.”
Adding to the gridlock, traffic agents are being ordered to focus more on writing tickets and less on keeping vehicles moving, a former NYPD traffic-safety officer said.
“Almost nobody’s doing traffic direction anymore. Everybody’s focused on enforcement of parking violations,” said the former officer, who was a liaison with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The NYPD declined to comment.
‘The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion, to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians.’
De Blasio spokesman Austin Finan on Friday denied any effort by City Hall to slow down cars.
“The notion that we want or are somehow ‘engineering’ traffic congestion is absurd,” he said.
“Economic growth, record tourism, construction activity and a growing population means our streets are overburdened like never before.
“DOT and NYPD work extremely hard to keep New Yorkers moving on our streets safely and efficiently by foot, bus, car and bike.”
Still, Manhattan has become a vehicular hell where drivers suffer an average speed of 8.2 mph.
Among them was Braulio Cefea, who was stuck in a traffic jam on the Manhattan side of the Queens Midtown Tunnel Friday.
“This is a bad idea,” he said of Midtown’s intentional traffic snarls. “Bad, bad idea!”
Troy Johnson, 29, sitting in the same traffic jam, was furious at the insiders’ allegations of an effort by City Hall to clog traffic.
“If it’s true,” he said, “you are going to see some serious road rage!”
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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