Mamdani’s 15 mph speed limit plan threatens to – Latest News
Don’t do it, New York.
Don’t let Zohran Mamdani slash your speed limit to 15 mph.
Take it from a Londoner: We’ve had a 20 mph speed limit on most of our roads for years.
And the impression of this Stalinist car-phobic insanity has been disastrous.
Our once-buzzing metropolis has ground to a halt.
It’s agony driving in London now.
You really feel such as you’re in quicksand as cyclists zoom by.
Even little previous girls with purchasing baggage typically waltz previous.
A 2024 survey of 387 cities in 55 totally different international locations ranked London because the slowest metropolis for drivers.
A 6-mile journey in central London now takes on average 37 minutes and 20 seconds.
You’d be higher off on a scooter.
And woe betide the pissed off driver who places leather-based to the pedal — hefty fines await those that break the commandment of snail-like driving.
Drivers are mere money cows to what one UK columnist calls “the 20-mph gestapo”: In 2024 alone, London rinsed motorists of $3.2 billion for the sin of driving over the limit.
Now Mamdani’s plan threatens to flip the town that by no means sleeps into the town that by no means strikes, similar to London — a famously bustling metropolis introduced to a standstill by a wave of a mayor’s hand.
But his dystopic dream doesn’t shock me.
Because Mamdani simply loves to mimic our loopy mayor, Sadiq Khan.
Khan, now in his third time period, is the pint-sized woke overlord of London.
For 10 years, we’ve suffered below his motorphobia, eco-quackery and toxic identification politics.
And it appears like Khan-clone Mamdani desires to inflict the identical lunacy on NYC.
Alongside importing our state-mandated site visitors jams, Mamdani is eyeing up Khan’s broader inexperienced agenda.
He’s a noisy supporter of congestion pricing, introduced in earlier than he grew to become mayor, which fees drivers $9 or more to enter Manhattan beneath sixtieth St.
It echoes London’s hated congestion charge — an £18 ($24) every day levy to drive within the metropolis heart.
Both Mamdani and Khan fantasize that such insurance policies will “save the planet.”
In reality, they solely irritate and immiserate Joe Motorist.
Mamdani goals of making New York a Net Zero metropolis: He’s launched a priestly campaign to slash carbon emissions.
Khan has an eco-Stalinist Five Year Plan, too: He desires a “Zero Carbon London” by 2030.
That will imply more fines for drivers and companies for his or her “sins” of air pollution.
Can we discuss how loopy it’s to assume you possibly can flip such teeming cities as New York and London into “zero carbon” locations?
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These are sprawling metropolises the place tens of millions journey and work and produce and invent each day.
May I humbly counsel that if you would like to reside in an emission-free zone, it’s best to bugger off to the countryside?
Mamdani’s crime insurance policies — or lack thereof — additionally echo Khan’s catastrophic failures.
Both come from the “Defund the Police” faculty of thought, whereby the silver-spoon little kids of the credentialed lessons primarily give a inexperienced gentle to crime so long because it by no means impinges on their own cozy, gated lives.
As Londoners have seen, crime soars in such situations.
Under Khan, knife crime has risen, phone-snatching by thugs on bikes is rampant and shoplifting is routine.
Being “soft on crime” means being laborious on the law-abiding — it makes life depressing for first rate people.
Khan and Mamdani are as one on identification politics, too.
Both are far more comfy gabbing about trans and race points than they’re with fixing actual issues confronted by working people.
How a lot simpler it’s to smugly yelp “Trans women are women!” than it’s to repair the roads or cut crime.
And one of probably the most placing issues they share is their virulent Israelophobia.
Both continuously transcend their transient and imperiously maintain forth on international coverage — particularly concerning the Jewish homeland.
Both accuse Israel of committing genocide, a libel masquerading as a critique.
Both love to titillate the bourgeois keffiyeh mob with florid condemnations of the “evil” Jewish state.
It’s a harmful recreation: They’re enjoying to the Islamo-left, that unholy union of Islamist nutters and smug socialists.
And in doing in order that they brush apart the authentic security fears of New York’s and London’s Jews.
By anointing themselves as high clergymen of “anti-Zionism,” our narcissistic mayors make that precept the litmus check of morality.
It may not be a literal ghettoization, however it looks like ethical ghettoization — shunting Jews and those that assist them from “decent” society.
And a mayor who’s more focused on profitable brownie factors from intifada-loving hipsters than in representing all constituents is just not worthy of the workplace.
Khan has turned London into his personal fiefdom, a platform for him to roll out woke idiocy, pocket-hitting inexperienced insurance policies and poisonous identitarianism.
I concern New York is about to expertise the identical.
Brendan O’Neill is chief political author for the British online magazine spiked.
