Michael Bloomberg’s infuriating insistence on staging the New York City Marathon until a grudging last minute retreat was too easily dismissed as just the latest evidence of his estrangement from fellow citizens who happen not to be megabillionaires.
For all his accomplishments, the mayor can be tone deaf on matters from blizzard cleanup to baby formula. But the marathon fiasco speaks to a particular Bloombergian blind spot: our streets.
He understands neither their substance nor symbolism. I mean “streets” not only in the physical sense of paved by ways for the purpose of allowing traffic to flow between certain points, but as the asphalt ether in which New Yorkers grow up, go to work, fight, play and fall in love—in short, where we live.
How can a mayor so out of touch that he confuses “plaza” bench hoggers with actual moving pedestrians grasp the havoc that the marathon inflicts on the 8 million or so New Yorkers who don’t run in it?
And, crucially, that in a time of mortal crisis worsened by the difficulty of getting from point A to point B, what’s normally a nuisance becomes a nightmare?
But then, he wouldn’t have a clue through the windows of a limousine or a helicopter or from the front row of a parade.
Bloomberg is a humane and decent man.But his warped vision of how the streets and sidewalks function is not only elitist but socialistic, embracing the view that only government intervention can save us from a tyranny of autos and their selfish drivers and passengers. He regards our infinitely rich, textured and frenetic street life as a problem to be solved, rather than what makes us NewYork.
This mess he has made of Broadway between 34th and 42nd streets is of a piece with Bloomberg’s marathon myopia. The other day, in an about face less dramatic but no less telling than the last minute race cancellation, the city announced plans to “improve” the jumble of underused, hideously paved and landscaped “pedestrian” “plazas” (and, yes, the quotes belong around both words) and a little-used bike lane.
It won’t be on the scale of a $40 million scheme to beautify the eyesores it dumped on Times Square. But it’s another belated reality check. The bike lane is to be narrowed and moved to the other side of Broadway, among other tinkering.
Of course the Department of Transportation claims it’s to make things even better, when it’s obvious the whole effort’s been a fiasco; it made life hell for drivers, did no great favor to cyclists other than deliverymen and made a sequence of exquisitely varied blocks look all the same.
I walk a lot more than Bloomberg does. It’s a rare day when I don’t log at least two miles. I can attest that his brainstorms to establish a pedestrian paradise make real walking no easier and far less pleasurable.
Cars parked in the middle of Broadway and Columbus Avenue in order to create bike lanes make it hard to see the opposite sidewalk. Ugly plazas populated by shady characters on cell phones diminish the pleasure of purposeful walking.
But to a mayor who believes our streets are inhospitable to the millions who somehow manage to enjoy them on two feet, the “remedy” is to flood them with cheap furniture and extra bodies.
The NewYork City Marathon has been with us much longer than Bloomberg. But even though it wasn’t his idea, he plainly regards the spectacle of 40,000 participants in global plumage speeding through all five boroughs as a world capital’s entitlement— which is why it was so hard for him to give up.
The worst thing wasn’t the deployment of equipment and personnel needed for disaster relief, unconscionable as it would be.
Nor was it the affront to suffering tens of thousands of mounting a 100% commercial event—it’s the ING New York City Marathon—a mere few blocks, in some cases, from demolished homes.
No, what was most obviously wrong was the daylong paralysis the marathon inflicts on the metropolis. It’s a trade off we make for staging a great athletic event in which amateurs can run with the world’s best. But it’s hell for everyone on, near or attempting to get from one side of the course to another—strollers, drivers and mass transit users alike.
No other public spectacle—not the mammoth Puerto Rican Day Parade, not the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration—approaches the marathon’s impact on getting around town.
Buses and taxis are detoured so far as to make them useless. Emergency vehicles become entangled like ordinary vehicles in the race’s traffic convulsing web, which is unpredictably spun many blocks beyond the actual route.
At least the subways are usually running.
But last week they barely were.
Travel between boroughs resembled an Outward Bound trek. As people frantic to reach imperiled loved ones struggled with spotty train service and three-hour waits for gas, the marathon would have closed the Verrazano and Willis Avenue bridges and the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge from dawn till dusk.
Bloomberg abandoned the race only after a New York Post front page story about wasted generators catalyzed public outrage. His unapologetic and graceless backtrack proved he still didn’t get it.
Let nothing stand in the way of happier streets! Just woe to us who actually want to use them.