A Manhattan judge heard the first oral arguments against Mayor Bloomberg’s Citi Bike program Tuesday with one attorney ridiculing the city’s claim that a 32-bike kiosk belonged in a tiny Soho park because it is a recreational use.
Attorney Jim Walden used a barnyard analogy to point out the city’s incessant labeling of the bike share program as a transportation alternative primarily geared toward commuters — not recreational riders.
“Funny, you have a duck, and you know it’s a duck because it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it introduced itself as a duck, and it’s wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘I am a duck,’ with a corporate logo emblazoned on it,” Walden said, extending the metaphor, “This is not a cow.”
The courtroom, packed with activists who oppose the rack’s placement in Petrosino Square, a triangular sliver of parkland between Lafayette and Centre streets just south of Spring Street, erupted in laughter.
Measuring less than a third of an acre, Petrosino Square is “a park that is too small for cycling,” Walden told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern.
The park has traditionally been used to showcase art installations.
Walden argued that the fee structure — which allows free rides for subscribers cycling for limited time periods — is geared toward commuters, not bikers out on joy rides.
He said that state law requires legislative action to put a non-park program inside public land. Walden added that 95 percent of the city’s more than 300 Citi Bike racks are outside public parks — and there are no kiosks inside either Central or Prospect parks.
City attorney Sarah Kogel-Smucker said that “bicycling is a common incidence in parks and the infrastructure to support it.”
She added that removing the clunky kiosk would be a “drastic remedy.”
Another attorney, Steven Shore, argued against a rack in the West Village. Shore represents a condo called The Cambridge that is barricaded by a three-building-long bike kiosk, which prevented an elderly man from getting to an ambulance during a medical emergency this past spring.
Justice Kern will release her decision on the two cases at a later date.