‘Bike supremacy’ is ruining the city
Bicycles account for just a tiny part of how New Yorkers get around, yet somehow the bike-brigade’s land grab goes on and on.
The latest is Mayor de Blasio’s “Green Wave Bicycle Plan,” dedicating $58.4 million to create another 80 miles of bike lines — more turf torn from cars and pedestrians.
The week before, he dropped plans to triple the number of Citi Bikes and more than double the program’s service area, even as other bike-share companies grab yet other parts of town.
And this mayor isn’t even all that bike-obsessed: He’s mainly just imitated the “Bikes Good, Cars Bad” approach of Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
De Blasio now hopes to have added 160 miles of bike lane in his eight years. Bloomberg created nearly 400 miles — while starting Citi Bike (with its sprawling bike racks taking yet more turf) and burning up more street space on pedestrian plazas.
His transportation department turned nearly 180 acres of prime real estate on stately corridors like Columbus Avenue into temples of torture for motorists, herding cars into single lanes and blitzing roadsides with “No Parking Anytime” signs.
Of course, de Blasio’s focus — his Vision Zero safety goals — often targets the same victims, as in his vows last week that the NYPD will “be watching drivers more closely” and that the city will “change the behavior of motorists.”
“Just in the first three weeks of this month . . . the NYPD issued more than 8,600 tickets for blocking bike lanes — double the same period from last year,” he crowed before emphasizing, “And we have juuuuuussst begun.”
Those tickets have mostly gone to drivers of delivery trucks — guys trying to do their jobs, which bike lanes make tougher.
This is a response to an uptick in bike deaths that has advocates up in arms. Yet it isn’t a true safety trend: Over the long term, the number tracks with bicycle use.
The drive to make New York more bike-friendly has more people riding more bikes more miles — which leads to more bicycle accidents, fatal and otherwise.
Safety was also the pretext for City Council passage of a law to let cyclists stopped by red lights start moving along with the pedestrian “walk” signal, before the light turns green. But the real motive was “bike supremacy”: The bill’s sponsor, Councilman Carlos Menchaca (D-Brooklyn), railed at “a culture that continues to privilege cars. ”Even more extreme is Speaker Corey Johnson, who this month complained on WNYC that the city has “too many parking spaces.”
CoJo also reiterated his standard line: “We need to break the car culture” that’s “choking our streets” and “literally killing people.” In late May, he dropped his plan to add even more bike lanes, and to double the city’s pedestrian-plaza acreage, over the next five years. And this is one of the leading candidates to succeed de Blasio.
Ever since Bloomberg, the line’s been that this all about good government: attracting tech companies (who love the cyclist lifestyle), fighting climate change, etc.
Not so: It’s an ideology, pure and simple — a faith in the moral inferiority of car and truck drivers, and in the moral virtue of cyclists.
That’s certainly how the bike-riders themselves view it: You can’t cross town without suffering cyclists’ contempt not just for motorists and pedestrians, but for anything and anyone who gets in their way.
That ideology has conned too many of the city’s leaders into handing over vast swathes of the city’s precious public space to a tiny minority of citizens — albeit an organized, and economically privileged, minority.
What the city really needs are leaders with the guts to stand up to the zealots and support the common good.
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