Posted on light posts on First Avenue near 10th Street in the East Village by a Department of Traffic worker alerting citizens to the mayor's ambitious plan to redesign vehicular rules for his subjects. Thursday, July 15, 2010. Study this design carefully. Where once First Avenue had six lanes available to auto traffic, these have been reduced to three. The mysteriously labelled "Floating" parking lanes will reduce the spaces available for parking between 10th and 11th Streets from approximately eight or nine spaces to just two or three. The pattern will be repeated the length of the avenue. If there is any sense in which the lane is floating, it does appear that there are now cars floating in the middle of the street. The opportunities for accidents as car doors swing open either into bike paths or lanes of moving traffic where once they could open safely onto a sidewalk will undoubtedly prove to be ample.
Adjoining the east side parking lane will be a lane restricted to buses. What the plan seems to ignore entirely is that taxis will be forced to take on and discharge passengers in one of the moving lanes and that there is no space alloted for truck deliveries. If this happens on both sides of the avenue simultaneously, the number of actual moving lanes will be reduced to just one.
Parked around the corner on 9th Street, I happened upon this vehicle:
When I inquired of the driver what the vehicle was there for, I was told that it was there to help phase in the new traffic pattern. When I asked if he thought the new traffic pattern made any sense, he just smiled wearily. Note that this huge van, drolly announcing that it is a "Emergency Response Mobile Command Center" (although I have never seen its like at any real emergency), has been placed on struts thereby strongly suggesting that it is actually the Emergency Response Immobile Command Center. Certainly, residents, shoppers and business owners on 9th Street will enjoy having it take up several parking spaces for the foreseeable future, just one more tactic in the overall plan to drive New Yorkers mad.
Meanwhile, back on First Avenue, a traffic officer was threatening to ticket the driver of a moving van because he had parked in the bike path. He and his client were a bit dismayed as to how they should proceed given the vagaries of the new plan. The driver of the grey sedan was similarly confused.
Meanwhile, back on First Avenue, a traffic officer was threatening to ticket the driver of a moving van because he had parked in the bike path. He and his client were a bit dismayed as to how they should proceed given the vagaries of the new plan. The driver of the grey sedan was similarly confused.
When, in the company of another irate citizen, I approached the traffic officer to inquire why she was not ticketing the armored truck at the corner which had been parked in the bike path for a long time, she decided it might be better to look for infractions around the corner. When asked if this new arrangement made any sense to her, she predictably noted that she was just doing her job. Her job, by the way, does not extend to issuing tickets to the many bikers illegally driving against traffic; her main mission is to focus on drivers of private automobiles. The bikers and other law-breakers need to be apprehended by the police, most of whom on this particular summer afternoon were apparently off either frisking Harlemites or undercover seeking out terrorists. Few were in evidence on First Avenue.
Take a close look at the so-called floating parking lane between 10th and 11th Streets. Note that there is barely space for two vehicles and those just happen to be yellow cabs:
Turning for a look downtown, between 9th and 10th Streets, which for some reason provides more floating spaces than the area between 10th and 11th, note that all but one of the five spaces created is occupied by yellow cabs.
And, for a more complete picture, take a look at who is parked in the bike path at the corner of 10th Street. Apparently the new rules will not apply to Department of Sanitation vehicles.
Now, all of this is so insane that it should be amusing, but it is difficult to keep one's sense of humor on the streets of our fair city nowadays. This mayor has virtually thrown up every impediment to the free flow of traffic imaginable short of complete prohibition. Earlier in the day, I needed to drop two passengers off at City Hall and thus had occasion to drive through a good part of lower Manhattan. True, a driver would be detached from reality entirely if he or she believed that the area around City Hall would ever be less than heavily congested. Yet, through the implementation of these so-called floating parking lanes, many streets and avenues are now reduced to one lane for (very, very slowly) moving traffic. This is further exacerbated by the designation on avenues of bus lanes which, in themselves at least, there is some rationale for. But it is not "in themselves." Travel downtown on Broadway, even in non-rush hours and there is barely an accessible lane. Factor in construction, and it is even more difficult to navigate down the one available lane. 34th Street, which serves as the major artery not just for cross-town traffic but as access to the Lincoln Tunnel, now has only one available lane. Similar configurations exist on other approaches to bridges and tunnels. Factor in, too, the absurd open "plazas" such as the one in Times Square where apparently clueless tourists sit on uncomfortable chairs their skin and lungs burning from the exhaust fumes inevitably created by the hundreds of cars forced to a mere idle by the resultant congestion. The mayor may not have gotten his congestion pricing, but he certainly achieved plenty of congestion. The so-called Street Fairs that he seems to have encouraged have made weekend commuting in the city a true nightmare since their clear intent is to hamper traffic and further dissuade the citizenry from driving in Manhattan. The fact that these supposed fairs have absolutely no connection to the communities they are planted in but offer up identical cheap and counterfeit Asian goods and the same greasy food wherever and whenever they occur has not only made our city a dark labyrinth but has cheapened the experience of being a walker in the city.
Now, all of this is so insane that it should be amusing, but it is difficult to keep one's sense of humor on the streets of our fair city nowadays. This mayor has virtually thrown up every impediment to the free flow of traffic imaginable short of complete prohibition. Earlier in the day, I needed to drop two passengers off at City Hall and thus had occasion to drive through a good part of lower Manhattan. True, a driver would be detached from reality entirely if he or she believed that the area around City Hall would ever be less than heavily congested. Yet, through the implementation of these so-called floating parking lanes, many streets and avenues are now reduced to one lane for (very, very slowly) moving traffic. This is further exacerbated by the designation on avenues of bus lanes which, in themselves at least, there is some rationale for. But it is not "in themselves." Travel downtown on Broadway, even in non-rush hours and there is barely an accessible lane. Factor in construction, and it is even more difficult to navigate down the one available lane. 34th Street, which serves as the major artery not just for cross-town traffic but as access to the Lincoln Tunnel, now has only one available lane. Similar configurations exist on other approaches to bridges and tunnels. Factor in, too, the absurd open "plazas" such as the one in Times Square where apparently clueless tourists sit on uncomfortable chairs their skin and lungs burning from the exhaust fumes inevitably created by the hundreds of cars forced to a mere idle by the resultant congestion. The mayor may not have gotten his congestion pricing, but he certainly achieved plenty of congestion. The so-called Street Fairs that he seems to have encouraged have made weekend commuting in the city a true nightmare since their clear intent is to hamper traffic and further dissuade the citizenry from driving in Manhattan. The fact that these supposed fairs have absolutely no connection to the communities they are planted in but offer up identical cheap and counterfeit Asian goods and the same greasy food wherever and whenever they occur has not only made our city a dark labyrinth but has cheapened the experience of being a walker in the city. Our beloved broad ways, our expansive thoroughfares, have been rendered something akin to the chutes in which cattle are led to slaughter in abbatoirs. Try now, as one could in the past, to take visitors on a drive through Manhattan to see the sights. It is not a happy experience. What is more, so much harm has been done, so much more chaos is still being created, that even if a more enlightened civic leader should take office and attempt to undo this madness, the mayor has dug us into so deep a hole that it will take a long time to remedy.
Supposedly, the mayor would have us use public transportation. This, too, is at best disingenouous. We are now in the throes of major cutbacks by the MTA--lines are being taken out of service, station attendants are being phased out; there was even a truly heartless suggestion that the city's school kids be forced to surrender their MTA passes. The sheer crassness of all this should cause public outrage, and although there is some, one has to wonder what it would take to get New Yorkers to really express their outrage and storm City Hall. It is not just traffic that seems paralyzed; it is the voices of the people, people so beaten down by their resignation in the face of a rich, connected, arrogant and imperious little man that they have been rendered impotent in the face of his assault upon us all.
Mike and Janet: Masterminds of Our Brave New World
When Little Mike, a man who had accumulated untold billions and modestly named his empire after himself, wants something, Little Mike gets it--or there is hell to pay. One of the notions held by innocent New Yorkers is that it is good to have a rich man in an office like Mayor, because a rich man can't be bought and is therefore incorrutptible. The larger reality of having rich men serve seems to get lost. That it is they who do the buying, who are themselves the corrupters seems beyond comprehension. The first thing they buy is the office itself, having the ability to outspend any and all opposition. When Little Mike wanted to keep the job of mayor in spite of the fact they he was about to finish his second term and the voters had twice voted in favor of term limits, he simply ignored the wishes of the commoners and bought off enough votes on a joke known here in New York as the City Council, an institution whose only rival for complete and utter superfluousness in improving the lives of the average citizen is the benighted State Legislature, and he went right ahead and ran for a third term. By election day, there were almost enough angry New Yorkers to thwart Little Mike's design, but the Democratic Party bosses (no doubt largely by design) ran a candidate so singularly unqualified and uninspiring that Little Mike eked by, essentially because most voters stayed home.
Little Mike's specialty as Mayor is overdevelopment. He is, by nature, a landlord and he hangs with other landlords. While his buddies had tons of money derived from derivatives during the recent "bubble," billions were invested in real estate. Cranes were everywhere (including, in one instance, a hapless citizen's living room). Once having induced the rich to purchase multi-million dollar apartments and posh office spaces, however, Little Mike felt that it behooved him to give them the kind of setting they deserved. Unfortunately, an uninterrupted illusion of living in a luxury enclave suffers for the presence of all the riff-raff from the outer boroughs many of whom--aghast at the prospect of using a crowded, dirty, unhealthy and often dangerous subway system--take their cars into the city. Little Mike thought he had come up with a brilliant tactic to purge his zona rosa of unclean outer borough types--congestion pricing.
Little Mike's specialty as Mayor is overdevelopment. He is, by nature, a landlord and he hangs with other landlords. While his buddies had tons of money derived from derivatives during the recent "bubble," billions were invested in real estate. Cranes were everywhere (including, in one instance, a hapless citizen's living room). Once having induced the rich to purchase multi-million dollar apartments and posh office spaces, however, Little Mike felt that it behooved him to give them the kind of setting they deserved. Unfortunately, an uninterrupted illusion of living in a luxury enclave suffers for the presence of all the riff-raff from the outer boroughs many of whom--aghast at the prospect of using a crowded, dirty, unhealthy and often dangerous subway system--take their cars into the city. Little Mike thought he had come up with a brilliant tactic to purge his zona rosa of unclean outer borough types--congestion pricing.
The idea was simple. Impose on every vehicle coming into Manhattan an $8.00 charge, an idea that hearkens back to medieval European toll gates on roads leading into the big cities. Of course, one of Mike's ploys is to couch each one of his schemes in Green Rhetoric. No, he is not an elitist building walls around his silk-stocking enclave; he is motivated purely by a desire to have cleaner air and more open spaces. This sophistry, this disingenous bobbing and weaving, was so transparent with regard to the Mayor's real motives that--horror of horrors--he failed to get his way.
Little Mike is truly a little man, however, and, like the spoiled child who, losing at Monopoly, throws over the board and sends the little plastic houses flying across the room, he would seek revenge. If he couldn't win the game legitmately, he would find another way.
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