(Gabriella Bass)
Bike-lover Bloomberg has 5,000 in racks ready to go —with another 5,000 to come. (New York Post)
Here come Mike’s bikes!
New York’s long-stalled bicycle-share program kicks off next weekend, Memorial Day, with more than 5,000 of rent-by-the-ride two-wheelers standing by for anyone with a valid credit card and an appetite for adventure.
This is very good news for recent law-school grads, as the merry tortsters at Silver Skelos Dewey Cheatem & Howe are gearing up for the rollout; they’re hiring like mad.
Just kidding about the hiring. As is well known, New York already has more ambulance chasers than stray cats have fleas.
So when Pete from Peoria wobbles out into Midtown traffic on one of the mayor’s cobalt blue, three-speed beauties and gets knocked head over handlebars by a speeding taxi, the lawyers will be there — three deep.
Soon Pete will have his payday — and the municipal fisc will be that much lighter. (City Hall and the program’s sponsor, Citibank, say don’t worry about that. But this is a town where a drunk can sashay up a subway tunnel, be hit by a train and roll away with a $2.3 millon jury verdict. So, best to worry about that.)
There are other reasons to be skeptical, too, including the gigantic racks that now blight neighborhoods around the city, blocking sidewalks and businesses. But none of that matters.
That’s because Mike Bloomberg loooooves bikes — and he brings to this affair the invincible confidence of a fellow who started out with not much, but who soon had umpteen billion bucks in the bank. And if you don’t love pedalmobiles as much as Mike, well, too bad about you.
Billionaires hardly ever get bad news, of course, or bad meals; even more rarely do they ever listen. Bloomberg is no exception.
To his credit, he admits it.
“Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself,” the mayor once said. “Pigheaded is more appropriate.”
This is a distinction without a real difference — so let’s stipulate that he can be very mulish, but note that this is not always a bad thing.
His single-mindedness regarding public safety — stop-and-frisk, anti-terrorism surveillance and politicized interference in Fire Department personnel practices — is, in fact, a very good thing. New York is immeasurably safer, and far more prosperous, because of it.
And he’s no kamikaze pilot when others are holding aces.
Once Bloomberg understood that his 2008 congestion-pricing pipe dream was going nowhere in Albany, he dropped the project lock, stock and toll plaza. And when it became clear that his administration simply lacked the political skills to defeat the teachers union, he pretty much lost interest in public-school reform, too.
But when he holds the high cards, it’s all Mike, all the time; compromise is for sissies.
His public-health obsessions have turned him into a late-night comedy show punch line. (For the record, salt doesn’t hurt most people, sugar is not dioxin and prohibition-level cigarette taxation seems to have turned some Palestinian buttleggers, or their causes, a very pretty penny indeed.)
And then there is Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
Bloomberg has played mongoose to Sadik-Khan’s cobra since she took the DOT job in 2007 — he’s simply hypnotized, perhaps by the notion that through force of will the two can transform New York into Copenhagen. How else to explain the Times Square pedestrian plaza, for example, which makes even less sense today than it did when it was imposed on the Crossroads of the World in 2009 — but there it is.
And so are those effetely Europhilic bike lanes.
Bikes are just tools — but whether they are useful tools depends on context. Certainly shoehorning several hundred miles of bike paths into an already impossibly overcrowded streetscape, to no apparent positive result, seems at best a dubious enterprise.
Take the Columbus Avenue bike lane: It’s been there going on three years now — but, never mind all the pro-bike hot air, it seems to be an extraordinarily well-kept secret.
Between 2 and 3 p.m. last Thursday, a glorious spring afternoon, just 12 cyclists negotiated the lane between 84th and 85th streets — all deliverymen, with five lurching along in the wrong direction. That was it — except for one skateborder.
But the daily mid-afternoon Columbus Avenue traffic jam was in full clog, as double-parked delivery trucks further constricted the bike-lane-narrowed thoroughfare and a couple of hundred internal-combustion engines pumped out enough CO2 to give Al Gore the quivering phantogs.
Never mind. Now Mike is expanding the lane from 110th Street down to 59th. While there is something to be said for sharing the pain, this simply makes no sense. This is ideology — force-fed and foolish.
Plus, now comes the bike-share banzai.
No, this is not a crisis. A city that survived the Dinkins administration, 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy won’t even break a sweat as a few thousand clunky rental bikes are folded into the congestion.
As bike propagandist Paul Steely White counseled last week: “Watch and wait: When the program launches on Memorial Day, there may be small bumps in the road. But it will work.”
Well, maybe.
If one of White’s “small bumps” happens to be you, your dog or your 5-year-old — well, then, for you it won’t be working at all.
But if you have a modestly high tolerance for nonsense, then it becomes just one more of those necessary annoyances that come with life in New York.
Necessary because Mike Bloomberg says it is necessary. Necessary because Mike Bloomberg says it is mandatory.
And annoying because Pete from Peoria already has all he can do to set one foot down in front of the other on a New York City sidewalk. Plop him on a rental bike, spin him around in traffic once or twice and Heaven only knows where he’ll wind up.
Don’t expect it to be pretty.
Mayor Mike, on the other hand, will be happy as a clam.
And isn’t that what matters most?
rmcmanus8@gmail.com