Mike Bloomberg and Bill Clinton made quite the pair last week, announcing the merger of their respective climate-change initiatives.
Clinton cheered a city Health Department study trumpeting the “fact” that closing down Broadway at Times Square in favor of a pedestrian plaza had cut emissions and improved air quality.
The ex-president declared that, despite the inconvenience to people with cars, “I think [Bloomberg] did the right thing and I think there is no question that New York is better and the tourists are better off.”
Left unsaid is why, exactly, New Yorkers should believe the city’s claims.
Call it guilt by association, but Mayor Mike’s departments have suffered some credibility gaps of late:
* An NYU survey based on Census data contradicts Department of Transportation assertions on bike riding. NYU found that bike riding to work plunged from 2007 to 2009 — even as DOT, to justify its proliferation of bike lanes, told New York magazine that it had doubled over roughly the same period.
* In Brooklyn, local residents conducted a survey of their own that seriously undermined DOT claims that bike usage tripled in a two-block area along Prospect Park after lanes were installed last August.
Residents also showed that the city fudged its own data to hide a post-bike-lane spike in accidents.
* The original reason for shutting down Broadway at Herald and Times squares was to speed crosstown traffic flow. In fact, the city’s own reports show flow barely increasing — and, by one measure, it actually decreased.
Yet the plazas remain — and now New Yorkers should believe it was really about health all along? Right.
If Bloomberg News was as “accurate” as the Bloomberg administration, the company would have gone bankrupt long ago.
And bringing in Bill Clinton to testify to Times Square’s new “atmosphere”?
Please.
The views of the former First Perjurer can hardly be taken as gospel on this — or any other — issue.
Talk about hot air.