This weekend was truly gorgeous in New York City. Gone was the rain and gray of the past three weeks, replaced by the promise of May—low humidity, high sun, and a buoyant energy, still far off from mid-summer melancholy. It was perfect weather for the 45th annual Five Boro Bike Tour, the city's longest-running bike tour, which, if now a bit corporate and cop-heavy, still gives riders a glimpse of what life could be like without constantly worrying about death by automobile.
There are many flavors of rare car-free life on the ride, from the starting stretch up Sixth Avenue to Central Park, to taking one of the (too many) Harlem River crossings, to an entire lane on the Queensboro Bridge. There's the wide stretch of 21st Street in Queens, and a suddenly non-lethal McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint. The final stretch of the ride, high above the city aboard the southbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is why people pay the big-ish bucks (over $100) to ride, and the pedal across the lower level of the Verrazzano gives you an actual sense of just how insanely large and long that bridge is—2.5 miles of suspended concrete and steel.
Favorable weather wasn't the only auspicious sign the bike tour had going for it. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Transportation finally signaled that it would sign off on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plan to implement congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan, tolling drivers and cutting down on the number of cars below 59th Street while also raising capital funds for public transit. Now begins a final haggling over the cost of the tolls, as New York's politicians continue to repel broadsides and a possible legal challenge from New Jersey leaders over the plan. The earliest it could be in effect is sometime in 2024.
The Five Boro offers a look at what the city might look like with fewer cars—or if it had the courage to shut down major north-south avenues to vehicular traffic more often than a handful of weekends every summer. Our friends in Paris have made it impossible to drive through the center of town.
If the City were to actually devote a real lane to cyclists on the Queensboro Bridge, or close one the several Harlem River bridges to traffic, or (gasp) fully shut down one of its major downtown avenues, would the city actually suffer in any real way?
Or would we adjust, begin to appreciate life with fewer cars, and strike a blow against an actual deadly scourge?
Some non-vehicular links to traffic in:
- Speaking of cars behaving badly...
- Let's check in with Mayor Adams's pals, via the Daily News: "Zhan and Robert Petrosyants, a pair of criminally convicted twins with close ties to Mayor Adams, are facing a new lawsuit alleging they bilked a Long Island businessman out of a $150,000 restaurant investment—the latest in a string of legal headaches engulfing the siblings." And the Daily News also investigated how another Adams's pal, the NYPD's Jeffrey Maddrey, evaded charges in 2017 that he lied, and kept his job.
- Emboldened by new state laws, the Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz arrested five people for selling marijuana from trucks, one of the rare instances where selling weed has led to an arrest since full legalization in 2021.
- Jacob Garlick, the man who won the auction for the Flatiron Building (but then failed to pay for it), is now possibly on the hook for a lot of money.
- A person who is constantly wrong is somehow wrong once again? Gotta admire the consistency.
- The mayor is preparing the city for a major influx of asylum seekers with the imminent end of pandemic-era restrictions at the southwest border this week. Adams has said he'll begin busing arriving migrants to nearby counties, while the nearby counties (also known as the suburbs, and fresh off their victory over the governor's density proposals) are not handling it well—and are even threatening to send in cops to stop the buses. It's unclear if the end of Title 42 will, in fact, lead to a rise in migrants to New York, but according to an advisory sent out from the Real Estate Board of New York, the mayor has asked property owners to identify possible spaces in the city that can be used to house arriving migrants.
- Jordan Neely's family believes that his killer, Daniel Penny, admitted guilt in a statement released by his lawyer last Friday night. The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will reportedly bring charges against Penny to a grand jury at some point this week.
- And protestors shut down train lines this weekend along the Q line to protest Neely's death and the treatment received by his killer after he was allowed to walk away by police.
