City Hall’s campaign to inflict bicycle lanes on a public that largely has no use for them achieved a new milestone of madness this week: The Department of Transportation unleashed a “proposal” before Manhattan Community Board 7 to extend the Columbus Avenue lane from its current 77th-96th street length to run all the way from 59th to 110th.
That will subject another mile and a half of the avenue to the collateral damage wrought by the existing lane: fewer lanes for cars and trucks, vehicles unattractively parked in the middle of the street and damage to stores and restaurants caused by the impossibility of dropping off passengers.
Those are on top of the pavement jungle of planters, bizarre turning lanes and giant painted arrows, which are equally baffling to drivers, pedestrians and bikers.
All are victims of two streetscape-tinkerers wholly out of touch with the way most of us move about in the city: Mayor Bloomberg, who travels by limo and helicopter (and the token subway ride to work), and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who bikes everywhere except when she relies on motorized wheels to get out of town.
Any Upper West Sider who isn’t one of Sadik-Khan’s true believers will tell you that there are often more bikes on sidewalks than in the dedicated Columbus Avenue lane. (The city’s claim that New Yorkers in the zillions have taken to cycling is baloney: Again, stand on any corner and count.)
Mostly unused bike lanes uglify neighborhoods all over town, but this one is particularly cruel. Columbus Avenue was recently rezoned to let the City Council micro-manage such matters as the permissible width and depth of stores. Longer bike lanes are just what shop owners need to ruin their businesses for good.
And the Columbus bike lane is usually empty. I’ve watched it repeatedly, at all hours and in all weathers, on weekdays and weekends.
I’ve clocked as few as a half-dozen cyclists in 20 minutes — nearly all of them delivering food. Many ride the wrong way, endangering any pedestrian naïve enough to expect them to obey the law: Yesterday, it took me all of one minute observing the corner of West 85th Street to catch a deliveryman illegally speeding north.
The small-but-strident bike-advocacy brigade blames the lane’s under-use on the fact that it isn’t long enough. They won’t be happy until there’s a bike lane on every street in the five boroughs.
Not even that would likely encourage more riding than now exists.
Fortunately, we’ll never know — because Sadik-Khan will be gone in a mere (?) 13 months, at which time our next mayor ought to roll back her reign of terror.
Growing up on Long Island, I lived on a bike. I rarely use one on city streets for the obvious reason: It’s dangerous and impractical on the streets, with or without bike lanes.
It’s intimidating even on off-street thoroughfares where bike riding seems to make sense. Central Park’s inner loop road is closed to vehicular traffic on weekends, but it’s increasingly inhospitable to a cyclist who doesn’t pedal at 40 mph — which is why I haven’t ridden on it in years. It’s grown much worse now that the DOT has emboldened cyclists to regard themselves as untouchable.
Sure, there’s now a traffic signal in the road near East 85th Street where many park-goers and joggers cross to reach the reservoir. But the city could close its budget gap simply by ticketing every sociopath on wheels who whizzes through the red light.
City Hall’s utter leave-taking from its senses is exemplified in its delayed Bike Share program, which is to start in June. The whole concept is wrong, but its details are insane even on the scheme’s own terms.
In all Manhattan, it turns out, the share stand with the most bicycle docks will be on the northbound side of Park Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets, across from Grand Central Terminal. It will have space for 118 bikes.
How irrational is this, at possibly the single location in the whole city least conducive to biking — in Midtown’s congested heart, hemmed in by dense traffic on all sides and remote from any bike lanes that a cyclist might conceivably want to use? But any semblance of logic was left at the curb long ago.
Bloomberg wisely promoted development of tall new buildings soaring skyward — but he may be more remembered for the embarrassingly failed experiment he left beneath our feet.