(Robert Miller)
City workers swooped in Monday night and yanked out part of a bike-share rack blocking the front of a West Village co-op — just hours after The Post called the Department of Transportation over complaints that an ambulance crew had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress.
A good 15 feet of the 80-foot kiosk — with slots for 31 Citi Bikes — was hauled away, opening up access from the street to the entrance of The Cambridge at 175 W. 13th St. The move took away space for about eight bicycles from the middle of the rack.
“The ambulance couldn’t even come up to the building. These bike racks are a detriment,” victim Edward Liss’ wife had told The Post exclusively about the Sunday afternoon emergency where an ambulance had to park several doors down.
“The ambulance was forced to pull in at the eastern-most portion of the bike rack, where they had a clear shot to the sidewalk,” said co-op board Vice President David Marcus.
His 137-unit building is still pursuing the lawsuit it filed against the city this month, saying the remaining racks still present traffic and safety concerns.
A DOT spokesman yesterday said it notified the co-op that the agency had planned to remove the two sections before the weekend.
Marcus called that claim “unequivocally false.”
The 9 p.m. rack removal came after calls from The Post about the emergency and after attorney Steven Shore threatened to seek a restraining order against the city.
The placement and subsequent removal of some of the 300 racks for the Citi Bike program, which is set to launch Monday, has become a kind of shell game.
The Post identified at least four additional locations where the kiosks have been removed or cut down for safety reasons and under pressure from property owners.
Last month, the city quietly shaved four slots from a rack at 99 Bank St. after residents complained it posed “a serious threat to public safety.”
And a third kiosk, at Barrow and Hudson streets, was relocated from the front of a residential building between last Friday night and Saturday morning diagonally across the street near a vacant lot.
“They moved it across the intersection to the northwest, a perfect location, nobody lives there, begging the question, why didn’t they put it there to begin with?” Manhattan CB2’s district manager Bob Gormely asked.