NEW YORKERS, don’t take this lying down! Or stuck behind the wheel.
We’re here in the Crossroads of the World – soon to be known as the Traffic-Choked, Tourist-Loving, New Yorker-Hating, Immovable Crosswalk that Mayor Bloomberg has diabolically envisioned for the middle of this town.
Why does he hate us so?
Fundamentally unable to get past his failure to shove down citizens’ throats congestion pricing – yet another plot that targeted the people who actually live here with a driving tax – the mayor has found another way to get back at those who foolishly voted for him.
Just in time for the long, hot summer, the center of Manhattan is being shut off to motor vehicles, creating a massive, immobile, pedestrian mall surrounding Times Square and Herald Square.
The mayor revealed his plot yesterday with the glee of a teenager test-driving his first muscle car. He displayed a batch of artist’s renderings that showed traffic whizzing up and down Manhattan island. Of course, these pictures were complete fantasy. They contained precious few cars.
For real New Yorkers – those of us who live, work and occasionally indulge in a cab ride home after enjoying a few too many – the plan to close off great swaths of this city from vehicular traffic is punishing, costly and downright mean.
Now, those of us lucky enough to find a cab will be forced to take a puzzling series of detours that will jack up the price, the adrenaline and the blood pressure.
Deliverymen, whom Bloomberg wanted to scar with congestion pricing, will wind up idling their engines in deep traffic to the point where Al Gore would not dare choke on city air.
Most of the language I heard yesterday from people who actually live and work and drive for a living around Times Square dare not be printed. Here are some of the tamer reactions:
“Everybody’s screwed!” exclaimed cabdriver Said Rahman, who dropped an elderly passenger in the middle of Times Square.
“How are people going to go to work every day?”
A woman, Sandy, left me an apoplectic message about this “moronic” plot against New Yorkers.
“Mayor Bloomberg is out of control with stupid ideas,” she said.
“There is no consideration for the elderly or handicapped who want to go to Broadway. It’s payback time because Bloomberg did not get his congestion pricing.”
The plan is designed as an experiment set to last half a year, if we can take it. Let’s not.
I’m loath to suggest an NYU-style snit-in, in which fed-up city dwellers show strength by refusing to move. But we can all complain to 311. Or shout on the street.
The mayor may be out of touch. But if he wants a third term, he must listen.
We love New York. It’s time for the city to love us back.