Three years since Janette Sadik-Khan left her post as the city’s commissioner of Transportation, what has her ruinous tampering with historic traffic patterns wrought?
If you believe Sadik-Khan’s new book, “Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” (Viking), something wonderful. New York City’s 8.3 million are a happier citizenry, blessed with fewer traffic fatalities and a more humane environment for everyone moving from here to there.
For the rest of us, it’s a streetscape that is more disorderly looking than it was in the crime-wracked decades from the 1970s-’90s. “Plazas” are occupied mainly by tourists and bums. Left-turn lanes are so confusing that no one — walkers, cyclists or drivers — knows what to do!
As a lifelong New Yorker who walks more in a week than self-described “pedestrian advocates” likely do in a year, may I offer a gentle observation: strolling in any part of town cluttered by Sadik-Khan’s plazas and bike lanes is less fun than it was.
Plazas for idle lounging thrust into the teeming urban fabric are suburban. So is ham-handed traffic rerouting, which was implemented, notwithstanding her innumerable additional justifications, for one main purpose: to realize avid, lifelong bicycle enthusiast Sadik-Khan’s dream to turn New York into “one of the world’s great biking cities.” Everyone else be damned.
Sadik-Khan’s account of her six-year DOT ride might win over readers who live in Vancouver, Copenhagen and Medellin — cities whose traffic-taming experiments provided her inspiration. She even taps lessons gleaned from ancient Rome and Athens to help explain why cars in Manhattan should be parked in the middle of the street.
But the hideous results are there for all New Yorkers to see.
To “beautify” the tourist zoo of Times Square “plazas,” which former mayor Michael Bloomberg for some reason allowed Sadik-Khan to impose, the city has spent nearly $50 million on resurfacing — only to see them overrun by costumed hucksters who helped chase Conde Nast downtown. (The job nearly done, they look only marginally better than the originals).
Or walk up Broadway from West 48th to West 59th streets. Confusing bike lanes and “pedestrian plazas” on the eastern side estranged the storefronts from the rest of the boulevard and sucked the life out of them — leaving vacancies everywhere.
Or take any block with a bike lane “protected” by a line of cars parked in the middle of the road. In Sadik-Khan’s telling, this stroke of genius not only created a safe passageway for bikers, it did motorists a favor as well by forcing them to drive more slowly, and thus more safely, through lanes reduced from three or four to two.
It sounds plausible. But our eyes tell a different story. Cars parked far from the curb resemble a parking lot. They make it harder for anyone on foot to see what’s on the other side of the street.
In nearly every case, just about the only riders most times of day are food delivery people. While a boon to Upper East Siders who might have a shorter wait for General Tso’s chicken, it spells slower progress for the zillion cars, trucks and buses trying to inch their way uptown.
The arrogance Sadik-Khan displayed at DOT bleeds through her book. “People are unaware that streets can be a powerful force in urban life,” she writes. Really? New Yorkers historically have a near-religious bond with their streets — places to nosh on the run, make deals, fall in love and take in the human spectacle all around.
Or this howler regarding the Times Square plazas: “We had won the public-relations campaign, as the plazas immediately became as much a part of New York as Central Park or Rockefeller Center.”
So the miserable loitering grounds — not Times Square itself, mind you! — rank with the city’s noblest architectural achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course, once the plazas came, New Yorkers who once only claimed they avoided Times Square now in fact assiduously did so.
“Street Fight” recalls the infamous Prospect Park West bike lane, a war Sadik-Khan won despite strong opposition. Incredibly, a lawsuit over it is still being fought in a Brooklyn court, where a lawyer made her respond to questions raised in a column of mine from 2010. Sorry about that, Janette!
The suit seeking to tear up the bike lane — in retrospect, maybe the least offensive of her works — can’t succeed. But thank the gods of Gotham that an infinitely worse Sadik-Khan scheme never happened.
She had to yank a proposal for a 34th Street “transitway,” which would have made the entire block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues into a mall and turned the great street’s east and west segments into one-way-only, river-bound arteries.
To Sadik-Khan, it was a tragedy that elected officials opposed it, and to press ahead on it would be “political suicide without local support.”
In other words, the tactical retreat was based entirely on expediency — not on urgent objections by politicians, community leaders, stores such as Macy’s, the owners of the Empire State Building, and the Fire Department — that the plan would screw up Manhattan for blocks around, impede emergency access and create another tourist-and-homeless petting zoo.
For once, the good guys won. But the damage done by the rest of Sadik-Khan’s reign is with us to stay.