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Hi @NYCTSubway - will you please tell your staff not to park their personal vehicles on a sidewalk in a place that pushes pedestrians into heavy bicycle traffic next to 6 lanes of heavy car and truck traffic? (You might also mention that seven subway lines service this area.)
If I sound like I’m in a bad mood it’s because I just walked half a mile home in my neighborhood and it was just one enormous SUV on the sidewalk after another heap of garbage on the sidewalk interspersed with taxis rolling into crosswalks and assholes leaning on their horns
I’m increasingly convinced that nothing at the street or sidewalk level will ever get better, because everyone in a position to act either doesn’t care (like @nycmayor), doesn’t have the courage to stand up to anyone (like the DOT), or is actively opposed (like NYPD).
Some asshole gets to drive in from Oyster Bay and park his SUV the size of Mount Rushmore for free in front of his job at DOHMH on Mt Carmel Place, and meanwhile I, who live here, can’t park a bicycle in front of Fairway for 30 minutes without having it stolen.
I just had to walk almost 200 feet along E 25 St before reaching a point where I could cross from street to sidewalk that wasn’t blocked by stored vehicles that rarely move, scaffolding, or a mountain of garbage. Who is the city for again?
My home is 50 yards from that spot. I pay taxes at a rate that verges on confiscatory, and am invested in improving the city and work hard at it. I stayed here through the entire emergency because I live here. But the city is not built to make life pleasant for people like me.
The people the city is optimized for are people like the man I saw maneuvering his 6,000-pound SUV with Staten Island plates around this tree, over a dangerously vaulted sidewalk, in a spot where even on Google Street View there’s some asshole illegally parked.
Today I went through the Queens Plaza bridge approach on foot, where I was trapped in the middle of the street by drivers packed into the crosswalk who couldn’t care less about me. I was almost killed by a taxi that casually ran a red light under the viaduct near Court Square.
The ferry trip was fine, but once I got back to Manhattan, crossing under the FDR at 35th was, as usual, terrible; tunnel traffic was gridlocked at 35/1 and all the drivers were Mad (honk honk honk), and the entire area around Bellevue just a festival of placard fraud.
This is all one systemic problem: our curbside space allocation is a catastrophe, there’s no enforcement against reckless driving or entitled parking by assholes, the city isn’t serious about disincentivizing driving, the police laugh at all of it, and nobody has a plan.
I used to believe in advocacy. I’m not sure I do anymore! I’ve been yelling alongside likeminded people in an organized fashion for three years, and although a few things are better, most things are worse.
Meanwhile, the police have now declared out loud that they’re out of the public safety business, and built walled military bases in our neighborhoods, and Bill De Blasio has pissed away the most significant opportunity in 40 years to effect some real change.
The city *is* unlivable. But it’s not because of the imaginary wave of “OMG Look Over There, A Homeless Man” that the Post is obsessing about. It’s because our leaders do not believe that they have a responsibility to make our public space usable by, or even safe for, the public.
The mayor, the governor, the DOT, the Council, god knows the NYPD—they’ve all abdicated. As terrible as our streets are (dangerous, filthy, anti-human, dominated by assholes in gigantic rolling living rooms), in 12 months they’ll be worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/style/car-buying-new-york-coronavirus.html
