The Issue: The locations of the racks needed for the city’s bike-rental program, which starts this weekend.
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Kenan Thompson’s Saturday Night Live skit “What Up With That?” makes me think of city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s misplaced bike-share stations (“Backpedaling,” May 22).
Cars park in traffic lanes, and 30 percent of street parking is taken away. Bike lanes are almost exclusively used by delivery persons going the wrong way.
This woman simply does not understand that Manhattan’s cross-streets are not boulevards with multiple lanes, and that much of Manhattan’s traffic comes from other boroughs and the suburbs and cannot be reduced by a bike-sharing program. What up with that?Bob Shenkman
Manhattan
Are any of the bike-share kiosks located in front of Mayor Bloomberg’s or Sadik-Khan’s homes?
For that matter, are any located in front of any New York City elected official’s residence?
Ed Smith
Atlantic Highlands, NJ
The media’s spreading the anti-bike drama — including the non-story about an ambulance having to park 50 feet away from a building entrance while picking up a 92-year-old man — is the height of stupidity.
All things considered, the bikes are clearly a good thing. The anti-bike thugs’ faux drama, including that of entitled, litigious, bullying co-op boards, is reprehensible.
If the media want to publicize ambulance parking issues, they should be fair and report on real access issues, not just the “it took one hour” garbage from biased anti-bike goons.
Clearly, ambulance personnel who frequently carry patients down stairs and around construction barriers can easily carry a patient on a stretcher over/through the empty bike racks. Michael Sanchez
Manhattan
The wife of the 92-year-old man said: “The ambulance couldn’t get to him. These bike racks are a detriment.”
It’s not only the bike racks, but the bikes. Bikes are some bucolic nonsense that environmental obsessives feel will save the atmosphere. This has shades of Al Gore’s nonsense.
A few bikes will do nothing for the environment and will cause a lot of injuries. We don’t need bikes going the wrong way down a street and mowing us over. Cars are a necessity. Bikers can just as well ride the buses or subways.
These new bike racks are an eyesore, as well. There is no reason to uglify the city just because environmentalists imagine that more bikes will cool global warming.
These are the same idealists who under President Obama’s guidance wasted our money on solar panels, windmills, ethanol, electric cars and failed ideologies.
When I was a boy, I didn’t ride bikes, because I thought they were corny. Now they are in vogue among the nerds. David Lawrence
Manhattan
As a personal-injury lawyer, I was licking my chops thinking of tourists killed by buses because the city was negligent in letting a non-English-reading tourist take a bike out into our deadly traffic.
Then I read the detailed, thorough general release one has to agree to in order to sign up, and getting past that release won’t be easy.
I grew up in Manhattan riding a bike every day and drove a yellow taxi part-time in college. Now I only ride my bike in Central Park before 8 a.m., but I drive my car and Vespa all the time, and it’s crazy out there.
I live on the UWS and appreciate the slam on the Columbus Avenue bike lane (“Rack & Ruin,” Bob McManus, PostScript, May 19).
The fumes from trucks idling at red lights is awful.Erik Jacobs
Manhattan