From the East River to the Hudson, New Yorkers are kicking their bicycles, stomping their cats and asking a burning question:
Is Janette Sadik-Khan, the psycho bike lady who helms the city’s Department of Transportation, nuts?
Or maybe Khan, the hater of the internal-combustion engine, is just an incompetent, overpromoted, overzealous bureaucrat who wields power like a chain saw and fits her widely whispered nickname to a T — Janette “Sadist”-Khan.
Either way, we’re screwed.
At issue is a project bigger than the detested, dangerous bike lanes and despised pedestrian plazas that have sprouted up like a cancer, to applause from Mayor Bloomberg. The new plan is Sadik-Khan’s crowning achievement. Her Taj Mahal. Her Coney Island fun house.
It’s called the 34th Street Transitway. And as plans reveal, it’s a doozy — meant to surrender that main Midtown thoroughfare to buses while preventing passenger cars from traveling it from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Midtown Tunnel.
The project is a budding Titanic — a monstrous muddle of bus routes, bike lanes and pedestrian malls.
According to the plans, eastbound vehicular traffic would start at Fifth Avenue (Lord know how cars would even get there first) and head to the East River. Westbound traffic would start at Sixth Avenue. In the middle of the two avenues would be a pedestrian plaza. So put on your hiking boots and dodge the buses. This mess would make M.C. Escher, famed for drawing nonsensical roads that go absolutely nowhere, proud.
The transitway is set to be completed by 2012. Ironically, that’s the year the Mayans predicted that the world would come to a cataclysmic end.
“She’s nuts!” a government source told me. “The woman’s more dangerous than Robert Moses. At least he had a plan. Mike [Bloomberg] doesn’t give a s- – -. He doesn’t get it.”
And those were some of the tamer thoughts. Residents of 34th Street are apoplectic about the total blackout on cars.
Old folks and moms shopping at Costco will no longer be able to get car services to drop them at their doors.
And Access-a-Ride vans for the disabled can cross into bus lanes — but “vehicles will not be permitted to wait for passengers in the bus lanes,” according to Department of Transportation documents.
“So it’s raining, it’s snowing, it’s January, and Mrs. Smith, who’s 95 years old — you want her waiting outside?” asked an incredulous Tim Hughes, a 34th Street resident who’s not allergic to taking buses himself.
But Hughes crunched DOT numbers on bus speeds — and estimated that bus travel times would improve by a measly one or two minutes in the three-quarter-of-a-mile stretch with which Sadik-Khan is obsessed.
“So I can’t access my front door because it’s blocked 24/7/365 by bus lanes. I’ve lost my curbside access to my door. I can’t get my bottled water, 30 pounds of Goya beans and my 3-year-old and 1-year-old inside because the city has determined that a one-minute improvement is more important for a guy from Ronkonkoma!” Hughes said.
As The Post’s Steve Cuozzo reported last week, the DOT, which has received more than $18 million so far from the feds to study the thing, has zipped its lip.
A transportation source, weary from rotten press hammering his bike-crazy agency, told me he doesn’t want to give a “sneak peek to The Post” but said the transitway will be built by next year.
“It’s definitely moving forward,” said an agency spokesman, Seth Solomonow, who added that the design was still being tweaked.
It should be scrapped.
“Oh, my God! This means all of our side streets will become tunnel-to-tunnel streets,” said Marisa Bulzone, a 35th Street resident. “How many meetings do I have to go to and tell officials that 33rd Street does not go through? You’d think they’d know this. They don’t!”
Lisa Pyle of Manhattan griped, “This is a case of Mayor Bloomberg hiring those he enjoys as dinner guests, like [Schools Chancellor] Cathie Black.
“I bet [Sadik-Khan] doesn’t even own a car — maybe doesn’t even have a license.”
Stop her before it’s too late.
Homecoming heroes slimed by the Times
Marine Sgt. Anica Coate served with an elite unit of female soldiers trained to interact with Afghani women whose culture dictates that “men are not supposed to look at them, let alone touch or search them.” She and her unit confiscated weapons and drugs, dangerous work. Coate, 23, made it home to California late last year in one piece.
Then, she got bashed in the head by The New York Times.
The paper infantilized Coate and her comrades, depicting the brave gals as caffeine-crazy girly-girls and sniping, “They expected tea, not firefights.”
“We all just said, ‘What?’ It was pretty much not even in the same spectrum of what we do,” Coate fumed.
She rejects the Times’ claim that male soldiers resented them: “They received us very well once they realized we were useful.”
Shortly before Coate left Afghanistan, a guy pal was slain by a sniper 5 feet from her. Still, she says, “I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.”
One truth the Times will not print: Anica Coate is an American hero.
Political art of hypocrisy
The National Endowment for the Arts awarded $15,000(!) in the late ’80s to photographer Andres Serrano for a picture of a crucifix submerged in a glass of his urine. Then the Brooklyn Museum displayed a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. That’s freedom of expression.
Now, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens-Brooklyn) wants the city to remove from Queens a “sexist” 89-year-old statue of a naked man standing on the backs of two women who represent “vice.”
Ridding the town of anti-female art is a virtue. Anti-Christian art is untouchable.
It’s all about Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer got his revenge. A lowly prostitute forced him out of the governor’s office. Now, he’s rid his CNN program of its female co-host, Kathleen Parker. A source told Page Six that Spitzer felt she was “holding him back.”
Of course, it wasn’t Spitzer’s fault. Never is.