The Department of Transportation has another iconic city location in its sights to ruin: Park Avenue’s precious half-mile from East 46th to East 57th Street. Although the scheme to widen medians between traffic lanes at this point is only in the “proposal” stage, with two designs under review, count on the DOT getting its miserable, ideologically driven way as usual.
Why does Park Avenue’s commercial main drag — the most successful office corridor in the nation, home to great companies of many types — need grassy little plazas for Big Mac munchers and costumed cartoon characters like the ones that turned Times Square into a late-night comedians’ joke?
A Park Avenue redesign would eliminate at least one vehicular traffic lane, thus diverting cars onto other avenues — and give congestion-pricing advocates cause to demand even tighter restrictions than the ones that have done little to break up Midtown gridlock. Worse, like most recent traffic-pattern disruptions, the Park Avenue scheme is a Trojan horse for bike lanes.
One design explicitly includes one. Count on the cycling fascists to prevail over local wishes and common sense.
Like an elephant enraged from years of chained captivity, the DOT is the city’s rogue agency. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg unleashed the beast when he tapped bicycle-loving Janette Sadik-Khan as commissioner in 2007.
Under Sadik-Khan, the DOT became the de facto muscle arm of Transportation Alternatives, the bike lobby’s most influential — and ruthless — enforcer, and the lobby’s virtual house organ, Streetsblog.org. Cyclists gained more clout under former Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, and will surely have freer rein under communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The agency was hijacked by anti-auto ideologues who subscribe to the pipedream that cars can one day be entirely eliminated in favor of bicycles. That the percentage of New Yorkers who pedal to work remains under six percent according to US Census data, is of no account when it comes to the cyclists getting their way.
The two-wheels zeal of a small minority of mostly younger, physically fit New Yorkers has made parts of town, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn, closely resemble the Tour de France. Even more dangerous e-bikes turn busy avenues and Central Park into something akin to NASCAR tracks.
Although the DOT calls the widened medians merely a “people-centered” recreation ground, bike zealots are clamoring for a north-south speedway through Park Avenue’s heart. They’ve argued at community board meetings that without a bike lane, the avenue will remain a “six-lane highway” and are working on city officials to give them their way.
Mamdani fueled their hopes when he became the first mayor to ride in last week’s traffic-snarling, pedestrian-terrorizing Five Boro Bike Tour. He promised to create a “bike boulevard” on Bergen and Dean streets in Brooklyn. He recently gave e-bike riders virtual license to kill by removing criminal penalties for errant riders.
Given the lobbyists’ past victories, betting against a Park Avenue bike lane would be a fool’s errand.
Nearly all of the changes to traffic patterns over the past two decades were made to reduce or discourage auto use so as to make life easier for bikers. They included incomprehensible left-turn rules, unloved asphalt “plazas,” traffic signals re-programmed to bring avenues to a standstill, and new bike lanes where “protection” for cyclists was provided by cars forced to park in the middle of avenues.
The lanes were inflicted on major commercial corridors such as Midtown Sixth Avenue and residential ones like Prospect Park West — over strident objections from businesses and residents. Ugly “plazas” south of 34th Street made a mockery of the name “Broadway,” where the iconic boulevard was constricted into two lanes.
Setbacks to the cyclist-coddling agenda were few. Bloomberg axed Sadik-Khan’s dream of turning much of West 34th Street into a suburban-style, one-way exit ramp to New Jersey, but a de Blasio-era 34th Street “busway” scheme was blocked only by the Federal government.
Adams mercifully yanked a bike lane from a Midtown Fifth Avenue redesign expected to start next year. The plan calls for fewer traffic lanes to allow wider sidewalks than the very wide ones that already exist — an invitation to low-spending bench-sitters, and a guarantee that the “world’s greatest shopping street” will lose even more high-end stores than it already has lost to schlocky ones.
But bike advocates who are howling over the Fifth Avenue lane removal might yet get their way — as they will on Park Avenue unless New Yorkers finally stand up to them and say, “No more!”
