The Issue: Mayor Bloomberg’s new plan to make 10,000 bikes available for rent across the city.
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Biking is a healthy, pleasurable, time-saving method of reaching your destination in a traffic-tangled city (“Mike’s Bikes: Yikes!” Editorial, Sept. 16).
Having recently been clipped by a cyclist, traveling the wrong way down a one-way street and against the light, I firmly believe that 10,000 additional bikes will prove very unhealthy for the hapless pedestrian.
Mayor Bloomberg, please stop “pedaling” this ill-conceived plan.
S. Silver
Manhattan
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It’s ridiculous to say that all cyclists disobey traffic laws and a falsity to act as if cyclists are the only ones doing so.
I use these bike lanes and stop for every light and stop sign.
Yet I still have to stop for the city’s many impatient cab drivers and jaywalkers who couldn’t care less that they are violating the law.
We should have a different discussion of what New Yorkers believe to be terrorizing, and your characterization of cyclists is grossly inaccurate.
As a physical therapist, I believe that people should stop trying to bring down the Spandex-clad and start trying to bring down their waistlines to fit into a pair themselves.
J. Godsell
Bay Ridge
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Bike riders in this city are rude, abusive scoff-laws. There is no way to soften this statement and still be on the side of truth.
Taxpayer monies have been expended for bike lanes, and sidewalk space has been given up for bike racks.
If we want to civilize these uncivil abusers, we should vote to have bicycles that are operated by adults registered for a fee and the address of the owner kept on file.
Martin Gruenbaum
The Bronx
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Keep hammering away at the mayor’s failure to increase, not reduce, police power to combat a rising violent crime rate and put public safety first.
This madness is compounded, as your editorial states, by pushing thousands of rental bikes onto these congested streets for riders who traditionally show little or no respect for the traffic laws.
This is a kind of reckless endangerment by our government that might even be criminal.
Joe Walters
Manhattan
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The mayor and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan have turned the city’s already dangerous streets into a game of Frogger.
They have made Midtown an impassable nightmare of snarled traffic and crosswalks covered with indistinguishable traffic lines.
As if spending our taxes to mangle the streets weren’t bad enough, the mayor plans to litter our busy sidewalks with bicycle parking stands and unleash 10,000 more marauding bicyclists upon defenseless pedestrians.
Flooding the city with rented bicycles will not decrease the number of cars in the streets, but will simply increase the number of pedestrians in the hospital and bicyclists in the morgue.
Gary Taustine
Manhattan
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Bike-sharing has been a huge success in Paris, Barcelona, Rome and London.
Why is The Post so adverse to Sadik-Khan and Bloomberg’s attempts to make New York City a more manageable city?
Putting more bikes on the streets and opening up pedestrian-only plazas can only help New York City become more inviting.
I agree this city is a special case, but rather than simply knocking all of the plans, why doesn’t The Post make an effort to embrace the changes and promote them?
Step outside of the city once in a while and see how the rest of the world lives; maybe it will work for us, as well.
Shawn Scott
Manhattan
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No one has a problem with bikers. What we have a problem with is blatant disregard for traffic laws.
Crossing at some intersections is a real problem, with bikers speeding through the red light.
Something has to be done before more people are seriously injured.
Sam King
Manhattan