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Bike-Lane Litigant Norman Steisel Is Totally Jazzed About NYC Bike-Share

12:43 PM EDT on September 17, 2012

If you haven't seen Norman Steisel's column in today's Daily News, take a gander. Presumably, News readers are to believe that a lead player in the effort to erase safety gains for his cycling neighbors in Brooklyn, the man who to this day is involved in a protracted legal battle that has had a chilling effect on safe streets projects across the city, is excited -- "in a good way" -- about bike-share. Here's a taste:

All New Yorkers who truly want this ambitious, largest-in-the-nation program to succeed (as I do) should be relieved that we now have time to get it right ...

This plan should connect the dots between docking stations with a rational network of bike lanes that carries riders where they want to go ...

This plan cannot be developed piecemeal, with bits of bike lanes that stop and start within one Community District (which might be more-welcoming to bikers), skip the next, then start up again on some distant street that doesn’t lead bikers to where they really want to go anyway.

And so on.

Strange that, in the midst of their bike hate campaign, the editors of the Daily News would run a column calling for more bike lanes. Stranger still that their brother-in-arms Steisel would be the one to write it.

Whatever the endgame is, and whoever the target audience, asking Steisel to weigh in on bike policy is like consulting a fox on how to build a better chicken coop.

Brad Aaron
Brad Aaron began writing for Streetsblog in 2007, after years as a reporter, editor, and publisher in the alternative weekly business. Brad adopted New York'’s dysfunctional traffic justice system as his primary beat for Streetsblog. He lives in Manhattan.

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