Oh wow! Last month, while walking along West 4th Street to 7th Avenue, I encountered a whiz bang team swiftly installing a continuous row of bike racks from West 10th to 7th Avenue. “Is this going to be good for business?” I ask a morose newly fenced-in restaurant owner and received, “Not sure.”
This response can sum up West Villagers’ thoughts on the sudden scattering of 50 ft.-long bike stands throughout the narrow West Village streets. One line, on the south east corner of Barrow Street, was instantly ripped up and moved across to Hudson Street, beside the St. Luke’s garden.
Yet Villagers have to thank a fellow Villager for this instant miracle of 10,000 bikes at nearly 300 city stations.
Our Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadit-Kahn, married to an NYU professor, lives in the West Village.
She dislikes cars with the proverbial passion and it is she who has edged the once car-dominated avenues and streets with miles and miles of bike paths and also turned Times Square into a pedestrian mall.
Sadik Kahn received her law degree from Columbia Law School, before working for the city. In April 2007, she was appointed Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation. She is the most ego obsessed city official since Robert Moses. When asked why he didn’t rein her in, Bloomberg rolled his eyes and said something to the effect, “nobody reins in Sadik-Kahn. (The name sounds like Genghis-Kahn.) If you watch her deadpan responses on TV you have the impression that hardened chrome gears are remorselessly clicking.
I write this on Memorial Day weekend when the bikes are, after much delay, to arrive and I can’t wait to see and try them because I am a cyclist.
Years ago, a French colleague persuaded me that a bike was the essential urban shuttle craft and I now find it indispensable to journey between Trader Joe’s, East Village Cheese, Hong Kong Supermarket and Pier 40 (for my car). When I was working in corporate communications at IBM at 590 Madison, I was thrilled to see published one of my agonized-over articles in the Times, only to have a colleague receive the same fortune because she rode her bike to the office (she also had her photo published). That is how rare it was to see a bike in traffic. I can therefore appreciate that Sadik-Kahn’s achievements are enormous; she should be mayor.
In his first term, Koch installed a bike lane on 6th Avenue with a raised concrete curb and the howls with which he was met, forced him to remove it within months. “The greatest mistake I ever made.”
The bikes are here though. Citi Bank has paid for the project, so the critics have lost their best argument – the cost – but they have many more. How you going to clean off the snow? How are you going to sweep? How do you pick up garbage? How do you unload? Where am I going to park? It is parking that arises most. As Andromache and I walked up West 4th, just before parking becomes legal at 11 AM, I view owner after owner sitting in the driver’s seat reading the paper, waiting, waiting (one guy sat with a trumpet to his lips – no kidding).
With monthly parking around $600, it is not surprising that West Village car owners circle and circle for minutes, even an hour or more for that just-vacated spot (the average time it takes to fill a spot is, I am sure, less than 60 seconds). However now, with these 50 ft walls of bikes, precious parking places are lost forever.
We ran a photo of Charles Street in the 1930s and not one parked car was visible. Today, all the city streets of the world have walls of steel. If I had a choice between a line of bikes and a wall of cars, I would take the bikes.
Sadit-Kahn also offered us the pop up café from Europe which removes a few cars to offer outdoor seating.
I suggested to the Charles Street Association a pop up park – remove a few cars for a seating area for exhausted oldsters with seasonal flowering planters to separate traffic but the quick response was, ‘what about parking?’
The furor continues even in the pages of this issue, but bikes are in and it just might work out; fewer cars, less cabs, less pollution, less noise, more calories burned. What I do know though. What Sadit-Kahn has rendered will take another Sadik-Kahn to undo – and the elections are not till September.
If Weiner can jump in, why not Sadit-Kahn; I am sure she would secure us a hospital.
