June 9, 2014
In order to maintain our curmudgeon credentials, we must regularly demonstrate a staggering
example of political incorrectness. Here’s our entry for this week: We hate bicycles. Because of a
former mayor who was obviously besotted on a visit to Amsterdam, New York City, the place of our
birth, has been transformed into a two-wheeled free-for-all. Other people go to Amsterdam
and become enamored with the benefits of medical marijuana, but not our guy. Instead, he
sliced up New York’s streets with obscure indecipherable traffic markings and then, to compound the
insult, destroyed hundreds of parking spaces by mounting pedal-for-pay bike racks, which have as much
to do with New York as Citifield has to do with the Mets.
Our brain is too small to handle the complexities of New York auto traffic, New York
pedestrians, New York roads and now, New York idiots on bicycles. Something has to give. City
bikers, who appear to be built solely of attitude, with scarcely a nod to courtesy, believe they own
the roads. They yield to no one and to nothing. Pedestrians are fair game and the direction markings
on their own bike lanes
are merely suggestions, like the traffic signs in Lima, Peru. However, with
no Pisco Sours to make the day bearable, New York’s bicyclists have made this City a transportation
nightmare, at a cost to everyone except themselves, in an homage to the virtue of selfishness.
We pray for snow or a reasonable cost, fender-mounted machine gun. Of course, we could
just learn to fling our car doors open with reckless abandon, which would be cheaper and an
insurable risk, but, that would be wrong. Wear your helmet anyway.
We’ve often warned that MondayMonday is not meant to replace reading the law every now and
then. For that reason, we frequently avoid reviewing obvious cases, like last week’s Eagle Street
offering in Wittorf v. City of New York. Instead, we draw your attention to a case like Quintana v.
TCR, Tennis Club of Riverdale, 2014 NY Slip Op 04062 (1st Dep’t 6/5/14), decided on the same day at
Wittorf.
No one is perfect, least of all our clients who, because of age or the very