City Hall’s new Park Avenue redesign scheme is a – Latest News
The Department of Transportation has one other iconic metropolis location in its sights to destroy: Park Avenue’s treasured half-mile from East forty sixth to East 57th Street. Although the scheme to widen medians between site visitors lanes at this level is solely within the “proposal” stage, with two designs beneath review, depend on the DOT getting its depressing, ideologically pushed manner as standard.
Why does Park Avenue’s business primary drag — probably the most profitable workplace hall within the nation, home to great firms of many sorts — need grassy little plazas for Big Mac munchers and costumed cartoon characters like those that turned Times Square into a late-night comedians’ joke?
A Park Avenue redesign would eradicate no less than one vehicular site visitors lane, thus diverting vehicles onto different avenues — and provides congestion-pricing advocates trigger to demand even tighter restrictions than those which have performed little to interrupt up Midtown gridlock. Worse, like most current traffic-pattern disruptions, the Park Avenue scheme is a Trojan horse for bike lanes.
If it ain’t broke: Park Avenue doesn’t need to be reimagined — particularly not with bike lanes. Mario Savoia – stock.adobe.com
One design explicitly contains one. Count on the biking fascists to prevail over native needs and common sense.
Like an elephant enraged from years of chained captivity, the DOT is the town’s rogue company. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg unleashed the beast when he tapped bicycle-loving Janette Sadik-Khan as commissioner in 2007.
Under Sadik-Khan, the DOT grew to become the de facto muscle arm of Transportation Alternatives, the bike foyer’s most influential — and ruthless — enforcer, and the foyer’s digital home organ, Streetsblog.org. Cyclists gained more clout beneath former Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, and can certainly have freer rein beneath communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Under bike-loving Sadik-Khan, the DOT grew to become the de facto muscle arm of Transportation Alternatives, the bike foyer’s most influential — and ruthless — enforcer. Bloomberg by way of Getty Images
The company was hijacked by anti-auto ideologues who subscribe to the pipedream that vehicles can at some point be completely eradicated in favor of bicycles. That the proportion of New Yorkers who pedal to work stays beneath six % in accordance with US Census knowledge, is of no account with regards to the cyclists getting their manner.
The two-wheels zeal of a small minority of largely youthful, bodily match New Yorkers has made components of city, particularly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, carefully resemble the Tour de France. Even more harmful e-bikes flip busy avenues and Central Park into one thing akin to NASCAR tracks.
Although the DOT calls the widened medians merely a “people-centered” recreation ground, bike zealots are clamoring for a north-south speedway via Park Avenue’s coronary heart. They’ve argued at group board conferences that with out a bike lane, the avenue will stay a “six-lane highway” and are engaged on metropolis officers to present them their manner.
Bike zealots are clamoring for a north-south speedway via Park Avenue’s coronary heart. inna253 – stock.adobe.com
Mamdani fueled their hopes when he grew to become the primary mayor to experience in final week’s traffic-snarling, pedestrian-terrorizing Five Boro Bike Tour. He promised to create a “bike boulevard” on Bergen and Dean streets in Brooklyn. He not too long ago gave e-bike riders digital license to kill by eradicating legal penalties for errant riders.
Given the lobbyists’ previous victories, betting towards a Park Avenue bike lane could be a idiot’s errand.
Nearly all of the modifications to site visitors patterns over the previous 20 years have been made to scale back or discourage auto use in order to make life simpler for bikers. They included incomprehensible left-turn guidelines, unloved asphalt “plazas,” site visitors indicators re-programmed to carry avenues to a standstill, and new bike lanes the place “protection” for cyclists was offered by vehicles pressured to park within the center of avenues.
Mamdani gave hope to the bike foyer when he grew to become the primary mayor to experience in final week’s traffic-snarling, pedestrian-terrorizing Five Boro Bike Tour.
The lanes have been inflicted on main business corridors corresponding to Midtown Sixth Avenue and residential ones like Prospect Park West — over strident objections from companies and residents. Ugly “plazas” south of thirty fourth Street made a mockery of the title “Broadway,” the place the enduring boulevard was constricted into two lanes.
Setbacks to the cyclist-coddling agenda have been few. Bloomberg axed Sadik-Khan’s dream of turning a lot of West thirty fourth Street into a suburban-style, one-way exit ramp to New Jersey, however a de Blasio-era thirty fourth Street “busway” scheme was blocked solely by the Federal authorities.
It’s about time somebody stands up to the bike foyer and says “No.” UCG/Universal Images Group by way of Getty Images
Adams mercifully yanked a bike lane from a Midtown Fifth Avenue redesign anticipated to begin subsequent yr. The plan requires fewer site visitors lanes to permit wider sidewalks than the very vast ones that exist already — an invitation to low-spending bench-sitters, and a guarantee that the “world’s greatest shopping street” will lose even more high-end shops than it already has misplaced to schlocky ones.
But bike advocates who’re howling over the Fifth Avenue lane removing may but get their manner — as they’ll on Park Avenue until New Yorkers lastly stand up to them and say, “No more!”
