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NY Post Blames Bike Lanes For Bad Business On Broadway
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jul 14, 2011
Modified Jul 14, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jul 14, 2011
Modified Jul 14, 2011
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The Wall Street Journal may have announced earlier this summer that the bikes have won but don't tell that to the paper's scruffy sibling the Post. That tabloid, like some Upper East Side community boards, thinks the battle is still on and today anti-bicycle zealot Steve Cuozzo has posted another report from the front line: Broadway between Columbus Circle and Times Square, where the bike lanes are supposedly murdering businesses.
Though murder is probably too strong of a word, even if Murdoch's minions used for their headline, as Cuozzo doesn't cite any actual closures. What he does cite are a handful of business owners who tell him "in guarded but passionate terms" of "lost business they may never be able to recoup." For instance Stephen Hanson, whose restaurant group B.R. Guest owns Ruby Foo's at Broadway at 49th Street, complains that the paths and the pedestrian arcade that came with them have "hurt our business there tremendously. There's no walk-by traffic we used to have at night, because everybody's in a mad dash to get to the central arcade area."
Also, y'know, when Cuozzo walked by yesterday he only saw seven bikers in the lanes over a fifteen minute stroll. And if the Cuozz didn't see it, they can't possibly be there. Except that they probably are? According to the DOT—which, yes, does have a horse in this race—biking has increased 91 percent at the corner of Broadway and 50th Street since the lanes were installed in 2009 to an average of 1,411 cyclists-a-day. Further, as Cuozzo points out even if he doesn't agree with it, the lanes have reduced traffic on Broadway. That's why the number of crash injuries on the strip have dropped from an average of 37.7 per year to 23 per year.
Cuozzo slams Bloomberg and clearly-evil DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan for not listening to the merchants on the east side of Broadway. Except, well, maybe when Cuozzo was walking around counting all those bikes he didn't see he might have actually looked at the businesses (beyond the parking lots, Starbucks and shirt shops and the Winter Garden theater) he was fending for. Before blaming bike lanes for their woes maybe some of those businesses might want to do something about how they try and pull in customers. We frequently walk (and bike) down that strip and have noticed that, despite being blocks from one of the most advertising-filled places on earth, the shops there barely make any effort to use clever signage or attractive windows to pull in customers. But whatever, it's the bike lanes' fault!
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