This is a guest post by KB Player
I have only visited New York once, for 3 days about 20 years ago. Like everyone I was bowled over by its buzz and beauty. I also remember that the traffic moved very fast and if I saw someone cycling or roller blading along the streets, I thought they were off their heads. I wouldn’t want to cycle in a city where a minute is defined as the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn.
New York has now adopted the Citi Bike scheme, which is like the Boris Bikes in London.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan saw the growing ranks of bicyclists on the streets as a key component of 21st Century transportation, and began building protected bike lanes in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They had studied the success of similar projects in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, noting how to make projects more efficient and aesthetically pleasing.
These “green lanes” and pedestrian plazas were an immediate hit but ignited a noisy reaction from a small group of well-connected people unhappy about projects in their neighborhoods, including Bloomberg’s former transportation commissioner. Lawsuits were filed while New York Post and Daily News columnists thundered about the inconvenience to motorists and supposed dangers to pedestrians. New York magazine declared the situation a “Bikelash” on its cover.
Pressure mounted on Bloomberg to sack Sadik-Khan and rip out the green lanes. …
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Sadik-Khan is still commissioner and bike lanes continue appearing across the city, including 11.3 new miles of green lanes last year alone. She stands as America’s leading champion of reclaiming the streets as a commons for everyone.http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/jay-walljasper-bicycling-surges-across-the-us-outpacing-noisy-critics/”
A bike-sharing scheme extends this commons policy and it has caused fury, in fact total derangement, among some New Yorkers.
First of all, Dorothy Rabinovitz, an editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal. In an interview sensationally titled “Death by Bicycle” she speaks, she says, as a representative cycle-hating New Yorker. How? – Was she elected? and according to this “two-thirds of New Yorkers call bike lanes a good idea in the most recent New York Times poll, compared to only 27 percent who oppose them.”
Rabinovitz complains how the city is now “begrimed by those blazing blue Citi bank bikes. Now, no city which flaunts yellow taxis can really complain about gaudy vehicles.
Mayor Bloomberg, it seems, is up there with Stalin in autocracy and totalitarianism for introducing people-powered transport. “The bike lobby is an all powerful enterprise”. Like members of other lobbies who have been accused of being all-powerful, I can only say, we should be so lucky.
New York, she says, is not London or Paris or Amsterdam. We all know New Yorkers like to boast of their city’s uniqueness, but those three European cities have some claim to urban civilisation.
There’s a fun response to Rabinovitz here. Among various explanations for conservatives hating bikes are:-
Healthy: Bike riding is healthy, especially when the alternative is sitting in a cab, train, or bus. But conservatives hate being told to be healthy. Look at how much scorn they have for Michelle Obama simply for encouraging kids to exercise more and eat more vegetables. As Americans, it is our God-given right to eat as much crap as we want, pass our medical bills onto the government, and then yell at the government for spending too much money on health care. Which brings us to …
Sharing: So central to the concept of bike shares, they put it right in the name. But conservatives hate sharing — tax dollars, calamari, doesn’t matter. True story: Louie Gohmert never shared a toy for the duration of his childhood.
It is a very slippery slope from sharing bikes to sharing everything. You blink and all of a sudden we’re a socialist dystopia, and everyone’s eating Bloomberg Vitamin Mush for every meal. ..
Environmental: Bike are also good for the environment. This will please you if you think the environment actually needs help. But if you think carbon emissions and climate change are conspiracies (like 58 percent of Republicans) perpetrated by Al Gore and a handful of scientists at the University of East Anglia, then bikes are just lies on wheels.
Intellectual honesty dictates that you should always try and rebut the strongest arguments from the sanest people against your beliefs, not the weakest from the nuttiest. Cycling advocates, however, can celebrate the pure barking barminess of their opponents. So next up is FrontPage.
FrontPage is hysterical at the best of times. In this article it really has a herd of mice crawling up its skirt. Apocalyptic is the style of Daniel Greenfield, dark are the motives of those introducing bike share schemes :-
Bicycles are one of the obsessions of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation secretary Janette Sadik-Khan. Khan is the granddaughter of Imam Alimjan Idris, a Nazi collaborator and principle teacher at an SS school for Imams under Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. ….
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In 1933, Idris wrote a letter asking why Allah would have chosen the Jews, whom he described as, “the most despicable, repulsive and corrupting nation on earth.” It’s hard to say what Imam Idris would have made of his granddaughter marrying a Jewish law professor and peddling bikes that no one wants from a nearly bankrupt Montreal government company.
But considering that Imam Idris was at times accused of being a Soviet agent and did some work for Imperial Japan, it seems likely that he would have understood.
In partial revenge, Khan has made many New York streets nearly as impassable as those of her grandfather’s wartime Dresden. Bike lanes have turned two lane streets into one lane streets. Infidels sit in their cars and honk while bike lanes go unused and midtown bus lanes sit empty except for the occasional daring taxi driver braving the bus lane camera and the 150 dollar fine.
So “peddling bikes” (I don’t think a pun was intended) is some kind of Nazi/Islamic conspiracy. That is a new one anyway. Cycling activists are called Luddites, two-wheeled fascists, or smug greenies, but being part of the Soviet-Nazi-Imperial Japan-Islamic axis is not something I’ve heard thrown at us before.
I’m sorry that Sadik-Khan’s Islamic ancestry has come up – I was wanting to make this a Muslim-free article. I have managed not to mention Isra…..
