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Daily News Columnist: "Big Crashes" Await Cyclists Who Use Bike Lanes
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Jan 30, 2013
Modified Jan 30, 2013
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Jan 30, 2013
Modified Jan 30, 2013
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Daily News columnist Denis Hamill won Columbia's prestigious Berger Award for Journalism way back in 1977, when the phrase "doobie" actually meant Brotherhood and "YouTube" meant swiping a color set during the blackout (he's a REAL New Yorker, see?) But given his nuanced column today entitled "I Hate Bike Lanes," it seems Hamill has been using his Berger trophy to weigh down the finicky handle to the toilet in his bathroom.
Editor's note: The author is immeasurably sick of human adults who are paid money by supposedly "serious," august media organizations to publish words about bike lanes that are either demonstrably false or nostalgic glossolalia meant to appeal only to the shrinking population of jaundiced souls who pick up a copy of the News with their Mylanta ("Liquid please, the chewables hurt my gums") and complain that no one "reads" anything anymore. No one reads it because it is diarrhea, the same kind that can be found on a subway seat or discharged from the mouth of a U.S. Senator's spouse. We had resolved to stop writing these screeds, but this is how we eat—our novels about Irish Catholic firefighters and Christmas miracles languish unpublished.
Hamill at least recognizes that bitching about bike lanes is petty considering the litany of problems facing the city.
But New Yorkers can handle major crises. It’s the little, annoying, frustrating things that drive them NUTS.
Bike lanes are steering some people like me to road rage. For me, more than any other of Big Brother Bloomberg’s paternal edicts, these bike lanes are infuriating because they have disfigured the city in a logistical and aesthetic way.
Yes, New York can handle murder, dysfunctional education system, racism, the shrinking of the middle class, and homelessness, but with bike lanes on 4% of the city's streets (Which aren't adequately policed by the largest police force in the world—if only there was a solution to make streets safer!) how will we ever claw back what is ours? Actually, Hamill may have a point: it's amazing how something as small as a Charles Bronson 'stache can completely disfigure someone.
When I was a kid, I built my first bike from assorted discarded parts mined from the wood bins of our tenement in Brooklyn. It looked like Bozo the Clown’s bike. But I taught myself to ride in Prospect Park, taking several hard falls long before bike helmets were even made, never mind made mandatory. A few scraped knees later, I was zooming along Prospect Park West from Grand Army Plaza to Bartel-Pritchard Square. Soon I was hired as a butcher’s delivery boy, and I pushed an industrial bike with a basket sometimes filled with more than 100 pounds of meat to homes from Flatbush Ave. to Green-Wood Cemetery.
Oh, you rode a bike when you were little? Please, tell us how a city of 8 million people should approach its policy with regard to a practice that has exponentially increased in the last several years that you no longer engage in!
I discovered a lifelong work ethic on that bike. I fought for my place in my city in the clanking, horn-blaring urban traffic. We didn’t need no stinking bicycle lanes. We blazed our own trails.
All bikes should be equipped with Taxi-TV-like devices that pump in Mike Lupica columns and The Longest Day on loop.
The yuppie-ki-yay bike lane, where kids dressed like hockey goalies pedal in a danger-free fantasy lane, has literally painted car traffic into two lanes.
What bike lanes have "literally" done is decreased fatal pedestrian crashes by 40% [PDF] and boost local businesses along their routes.
If you hit the lottery and see 10 feet of free space in the parking lane, you can no longer use the curb to guide your parallel parking. No, the curb is reserved as a barrier reef for the Hipster Highway for Richie Rich on his $1,500 Lance Armstrong Doperacer.
Fuck those hipster "barrier reefs" (Williamsburg is just one giant, fragile ecosystem that needs to be destroyed, amirite?). The real elitists are the people who propel themselves like a character in a Frank McCourt book (or Hamill as a child), or veterans, ESL instructors, building supers, real estate brokers, construction workers—not the people sitting in air conditioned bubbles that cost 20 times what a "Doperacer" does and infinitely more to power it and whose reckless behavior is directly responsible for 60% of the deaths on those "danger-free fantasy lanes."
Same thing in Manhattan. Sheltered, helmeted kids getting zeroes in street-smarts pedal past with a clear path through life. News flash: Life ain’t a smooth sail, kiddos! There’s a big crash just waiting at the end of every bike lane.
There's a sad Daily News anti-bike lane column at the end of every bloated journalist's career. Hamill usually talks to actual people and weaves, you know, "facts" into his opinion columns for the news. Guess he was too busy working on the sequel to Turk 182! to do so today.
Tagged
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bike lanes
diarrhea
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daily news
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cycling
utter bullshit
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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