here's the obnoxious letter i sent a couple of weeks before the election. i'm gonna tone it down a little, address some recent events and mail a new version tonight.
Mr. Bloomberg,
The catalyst for your administration’s apparent disgust with cycling in New York City is something that I’ve been curious about for about a year now. I’ve heard the press describe you as a “cyclist,” which is, I guess to say, that you own a bicycle. This I would suspect is not unusual for a billionaire. I’m sure you also own an iron and a clothes washing machine, but that does not make you a laundromat. As an Upper East Side neighbor of yours, I ride across the street from you in Central Park everyday. Never once have I seen you there. I ride on the congested and unsafely landscaped Hudson River Park Greenway with some degree of regularity too. I seem to have missed you there as well. Every day, rain or shine, I commute round-trip 12 miles to my studio. I understand that you prefer the 6 Train. That’s probably wise considering how poorly your administration has acted to see that the DOT maintain 7th avenue and Broadway. It’s also wise seeing as how the NYPD does so little to keep those bike lanes (and those on 6th avenue on the ride home) free from idling black cars, taxis and trucks—which I find ironic since the NYPD has adopted a policy of ticketing cyclists who select to ride as traffic (a policy explained to me as having been handed down directly from your office by several different police officers on several different occasions. They suggested this upcoming election as the best form of recourse for that policy.).
Now, Mr. Bloomberg… Come on. There seems to be either a schism in your administration’s logic or some over-arching need for totalitarian control over marginal issues. Are bikes traffic or are they not?
If we’re not traffic, then we can ride on the sidewalks, ride parallel to parked cars (but in traffic), disregard traffic-flow directions and ignore traffic lights—acts common, yet seldom if ever ticketed when perpetrated by runners or pedestrians.
If we are in fact traffic, then we should be permitted to ride with motorized vehicular traffic as we see fit and deem safe. We should be able to ride together and not have such rides selectively considered “processions” (they would more accurately be described as congested traffic or sometimes, traffic jams—neither state of flow uncommon to New Yorkers. A lot of people leave their jobs by car at 5 PM. Does that make rush hour traffic a premeditated and un-permitted act of procession?) We would be expected to abide by common rules of the road—stopping at red lights, staying off of sidewalks and abiding by directional flow expectations.
If you could catch us, I guess you could enforce whatever set of events isn’t covered by either argument, but you have to pick one and let the public know which it is. Until you reconcile the split personality of your agenda—this picking and choosing between what should be two mutually exclusive scenarios—you put cyclists in a hard-place where there really is no law apart from that which you arbitrarily decide to have enforced.
Right now, your policies with respect to cycling are vague, abusive, overly elastic (in the favor of ticket-generated revenue), backward and a transparent form of regressive taxation (i.e. ticketing those who either depend on a bicycle for their employment (delivery men and couriers) or can afford a bicycle but maybe not taxis, mass transit, a car, fuel, insurance, parking, maintenance, etc).
On a related note, fuel is so costly and its consumption so damaging to the environment of this city you so frequently claim to love. In fact… its consumption damages not just the environment of the city, but also the personal environments of each of this city’s inhabitants. Your administration’s implied anti-cycling stance or confused cycling policies are taking non-polluting vehicles off the road and intimidating potential cyclists from contributing toward a healthier New York. In my estimation, that’s a pretty pathetic position for any administration to adopt.
Good luck on election day. Speaking for everyone I know, with whom I’ve discussed your re-election, I can safely say that we won’t be voting for you or your vision for a “better New York.” I was born in this city and moved back to it to get away from strip malls, political repression and small-minded politics… then the Rudy and Mike shows blew into town and created a larger more vertically scaled version of Greenwich Connecticut. It’s unfortunate that the jaded visions of two men could successfully drain so much creativity, life and energy from what was for so long, the creative capital of the world. Concrete, glass and steel—those words no longer describe just the physical landscape of New York, but also the latest in its dominant psychography. So sad.
C.H.