Remember this guy? He's the Council member who made headlines with his idea to make cyclists get licenses. (At the time, he told us, "The people on bicycles brought this on themselves by behaving this way.") Our favorite young Republican, Eric Ulrich, is back with more insights into the city's transportation system. This time his ire aimed at the DOT for planning more pedestrian plazas, which Ulrich says shouldn't be built until every street in NYC (or at least his district in Queens) is in mint condition.
At a City Council hearing yesterday to discuss the pedestrian plazas, the esteemed gentleman from Ozone Park told the committee, "As I was driving to the hearing today, I couldn’t help but think that we’re living in the Twilight Zone, because as I’m driving on the BQE, and the roads are in horrendous condition, I’m driving to a hearing talking about pedestrian plazas, I just say to myself all the time — this is a constant criticism that I’m always applying to the department — is that why can’t we just get back to basics and worry more about paving the streets than we are about installing bike lanes and putting in pedestrian plazas even if people don’t want them."
And for good measure, Ulrich spoke with CBS 2, declaring, "The roads in Baghdad look better than the roads in Queens." We're not sure when Ulrich went on his last fact-finding mission to Iraq, but at this point he's got about as much credibility as Judith Miller. Of course, he's not alone in piling on the DOT for its supposedly anti-motorist agenda. Streetsblog reports that Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca asked the DOT rep at yesterday's meeting if the department was simply trying to “drive car owners crazy.” (As if they needed any help.)
"What traffic-mitigation plans do we have?" Vacca asked. "How do we make sure that we're not just shifting and diverting traffic and that the problem that we had in one spot moves to another? My worry is that when we have instituted pedestrian plazas, we have only moved traffic to other surrounding streets." Assistant DOT Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz maintained that after officials reconfigured the signals near the Times Square and Herald Square pedestrian plazas, traffic moves more efficiently.
Assistant DOT Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz patiently explained that the pedestrian plaza process is "a community-driven, application-driven process." The DOT—which is currently working on constructing 14 plazas around town—actually has more requests than it can fill, and Wiley-Schwartz assured the community board the DOT isn't "flying over at 30,000 feet and plopping them down where a map tells us is a good spot." To put it in terms Ulrich can understand, the DOT isn't carpet-bombing New York—this isn't Iraq or even Vietnam; there are rules.
