Just one more edit.
Some classes of cyclists are also being targeted by Vacca.
Classes indeed. He’ll go after the the working poor, sub-citizen class, and most higher class cyclists will cheer him along.
Gale Brewer’s bill is well intentioned but should be opposed by pedestrian and biking advocates. It raises the cost of installing and maintaining plazas and bike lanes without any demonstrable benefit commensurate with the cost? If textured pavement is such a lifesaver, why not also require textured sidewalks at all curb cuts and driveways? Cars coming out of a midblock parking garage are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the edges of pedestrian plazas. Why isn’t this being proposed? It’s because the real estate industry will crush a bill mandating costly retrofitting of thousands of driveways and curb cuts.
It is bad policy to make the cost of proven safety improvements more expensive while doing nothing about proven dangers. Brewer is usually smarter than this.
All this being done to control bikes. What is being done to control cars? What? It’s a joke. And I challenge anyone in the New York City Council to address the issue. I challenge you. Because while you’re taking up issues of bike problems and bike this and bike that, the cars are running wild. Do something about it. It’s your job.
Let’s be clear: Vacca’s media blitz shows that he belives that a person who is ‘almost’ hit by a cyclist is a bigger tragedy than a person who is killed by an automobile.
In May, he turned a hearing in his committee into a televised farce, grilling DOT staff about the Times Square plazas, one of the most successful pedestrian safety initiatives in recent memory. Traffic injuries in the vicinity of Times Square dropped 35 percent after the installation of the new plazas. But James “protection of the pedestrians” Vacca was more interested in whether Seventh Avenue was seeing higher traffic volumes.
With his skeptical reaction to the latest poll showing majority support for cycling infrastructure, James Vacca has established himself as the city’s most authoritative voice for anti-bike nonsense.
We reached out to Vacca’s office to ask him to specify some of the ‘many’ plazas that have hurt small business. So far, there’s been no reply.
He complains that many people don’t have easy enough access to the 6, and then pursues policies that make that access even less easy in the name of a doctrinaire 1950s transportation ideology. And people wonder why I always say New York City Democrats are among the few true conservatives in America. Like most conservatives, he’s no doubt indifferent to his impoverished constituents.
But here’s the bizarro part: Vacca’s bill would compel DOT to estimate, ‘to the extent practicable,’ where every route in the plan would eliminate parking spaces or travel lanes. Safety first.
Increasing parking meter rates will discourage people from going to those mom and pop shops
WHAT PLANET???? Does this clichebot live on? New York City stores are not succeeding or failing based on the number of cents the small portion of customers who arrive by personal auto would pay if they could find a spot, which they can not do because they are all taken, because street parking is underpriced and half our blessed motorists are Doctors or Policemen who (illegally and effectively) don’t have to pay for parking anyway. arrrrrrrrgh.
