Hooray for the plan to turn the Bronx Expressway into a park by decking it over.
Undoing the ills of the Robert Moses car-centric era!
The way of the future is PRO PEDESTRIAN, the world over...
To go against that tide, as the myth says (King Canute and Tide)...results in drowning.
An eco friendly path beckons!
And if you can't walk without assistance, or are very fragile from a medical condition or surgery, or are a parent with children or shopping and you need to have the fewest amount of steps possible in your day, are you left out of this plan? What is the Transportation Alternative for seniors? One statistic has more NYC resident over 60 than under 13. Are we replacing Robert Moses (not a fan) with another kind of eugenics that favors cyclists and able body walkers only?
Hooray for the closure of this particular echo chamber, for our sake.
The more you pushback, the more ravenous the lunatic wing of the OS Brigade becomes. Their hyperbolic ramblings make me long for a more grounded, intelligent and substantive debate based in reality:
My dream? That eventually 34th Ave sounds like an average street in Jakarta, the incessant buzz of dirt bikes, motor scooters and tuk-tuks piercing the calm air like a yoga mat with a bayonet on the end of it, as senior citizens engage in hand-to-crutch combat over who gets the next non-unionized Uber driver to take them to the doctor. A man in an orange work vest (not a Halloween costume) patrols the avenue with arms horizontally outstretched holding a phone in his right hand, screaming "Mine! Mine! Mine!" into his Live Instagram stream. Smoke and fumes from the cheap engines choke the air, melding with the aroma of nasi goreng from the plentiful food carts setup along the median where denizens with thermos wine congregate to toast one another on a job well done. Chain link fences erected around the school "recess zones" have been painted in bright colors with lead-free paint, but the engine fumes cancel out any health benefit to the children, who stare blankly from behind the fence at a changed world, then go back to playing with their Hot Wheels. I walk my bike through a hazy cloud of putrid oily smoke, my burning eyes glazing past vendor stalls selling organic cider donuts. A 68 year old volunteer drags an unnecessary barricade into the street, but the man in the orange vest stops her, puts a hand on her shoulder, focuses his camera on her face and calmly reassures her, "We've won... We've won." But she doesn't speak English.
