We got back in town to find one of these taking away a 1/2 block of parking on our street. They are Everywhere! Parking was bad before, now its next to impossible. Not to mention all the added congestion the riders will add to the streets.
New York Post – by Bob McManus
Here come Mike’s bikes!
New York’s long-stalled bicycle-share program kicks off next weekend, Memorial Day, with more than 5,000 of rent-by-the-ride two-wheelers standing by for anyone with a valid credit card and an appetite for adventure.
This is very good news for recent law-school grads, as the merry tortsters at Silver Skelos Dewey Cheatem & Howe are gearing up for the rollout; they’re hiring like mad.
Just kidding about the hiring. As is well known, New York already has more ambulance chasers than stray cats have fleas.
So when Pete from Peoria wobbles out into Midtown traffic on one of the mayor’s cobalt blue, three-speed beauties and gets knocked head over handlebars by a speeding taxi, the lawyers will be there — three deep.
Soon Pete will have his payday — and the municipal fisc will be that much lighter. (City Hall and the program’s sponsor, Citibank, say don’t worry about that. But this is a town where a drunk can sashay up a subway tunnel, be hit by a train and roll away with a $2.3 millon jury verdict. So, best to worry about that.)
There are other reasons to be skeptical, too, including the gigantic racks that now blight neighborhoods around the city, blocking sidewalks and businesses. But none of that matters.
That’s because Mike Bloomberg loooooves bikes — and he brings to this affair the invincible confidence of a fellow who started out with not much, but who soon had umpteen billion bucks in the bank. And if you don’t love pedalmobiles as much as Mike, well, too bad about you.
Billionaires hardly ever get bad news, of course, or bad meals; even more rarely do they ever listen. Bloomberg is no exception.
To his credit, he admits it.
“Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself,” the mayor once said. “Pigheaded is more appropriate.”
This is a distinction without a real difference — so let’s stipulate that he can be very mulish, but note that this is not always a bad thing.
His single-mindedness regarding public safety — stop-and-frisk, anti-terrorism surveillance and politicized interference in Fire Department personnel practices — is, in fact, a very good thing. New York is immeasurably safer, and far more prosperous, because of it.
And he’s no kamikaze pilot when others are holding aces.
Once Bloomberg understood that his 2008 congestion-pricing pipe dream was going nowhere in Albany, he dropped the project lock, stock and toll plaza. And when it became clear that his administration simply lacked the political skills to defeat the teachers union, he pretty much lost interest in public-school reform, too.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/rack_ruin
They may just come in handy once the SHTF.