a) Improving conditions for New York City's pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders is a Communist plot. Or, b) The change that Sadik-Khan is bringing to New York City's streets is akin to the Russian Revolution.
You be the judge:
On the ideological scale of transportation planning, her policieserr far closer to Trotsky than Reagan. She is decidedly pro-bike andpro-pedestrian, and thus inherently anti-automobile, earning herconstant praise from the normally critical transit advocates.
This raises some obvious questions. If Sadik-Khan is Leon Trotsky does that mean suburban Westchester Assemblyman and congestion pricing foe Richard Brodsky is Josef Stalin? Will Sadik-Khan be exiled to an upstate gulag when Bloomberg is term-limited out of office?
With many of Ms. Sadik-Khan’s keyinitiatives, there is a potential lack of permanency. The same featuresthat allow the DOT’s projects to get in the ground swiftly could alsoseal their fate in a future administration: The city has claimed lanesof Broadway as open space with some epoxy, sand, paint, plants andtables, yet a future administration could just as easily pack up thosetables and put lane markers right back down on the roadway.
This prospect seemed almostincomprehensible to Ms. Sadik-Khan, who seemed to think that publicresistance to it would prove too great, the ease of removalnotwithstanding. “People are very protective about their public space,”she said. “I think it would be very hard to take these spaces back tothe state that they were in before.”
AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.