More years ago then I care to think about, I co-edited with Chris Cerf and Peter Elbling, a best-selling book called The 80s - a Look Back. (It was published on December 31st 1979). One of our satirical projections was that in the mid-'80s rickshaws would appear in New York City. At the time, despite nationwide efforts to curb urban pollution, a succession of Mayors and City Councils had obstinately refused to reduce its chief cause: the traffic which literally choked the city day and night. A silent, human-powered, zero-pollution vehicle, capable of transporting people faster than your average traffic speed (around 3 mph daytime), seemed like a fairly hilarious impossibility.
To our Nostradamus-like glee, bike-powered rickshaws or pedicabs, began to appear midtown just a few years later. Since then, these clean, safe and 1000% eco-friendly vehicles have proliferated mostly in Manhattan, the epinephrine sloshing around inside their super-fit operators manifested as a cheeriness that's in stark contrast to the murderous dyspepsia of all other drivers.
Yesterday the New York City Council voted overwhelmingly to put a stop to such hippy-dippy, tree-hugging nonsense. It bowed to the usual thuggish cartel of taxi-fleet bosses, "merchant" organizations, hotel and theater-owners, delivery-truck fleets, parking-lot operators et al. who have obstructed any meaningful reduction of internal combustion vehicles in New York City for decades, leeching off our common spaces and resources for their private profit and turning our streets and avenues, especially in Manhattan - into multi-storey sewers of lethal toxins, gasses and particulates.
Instead of encouraging the proliferation of city- and environment-friendly vehicles like pedicabs, the Council voted to "regulate" the industry, going far beyond sensible measures like requiring them to carry proper indicators, signage and insurance. It capped the number of pedicabs allowed in the city to 350, illegally throttling a legitimate industry in its infancy; it absurdly treated pedicabs, in a number of regulations, as if they were identical to taxis and tour-busses; equally absurdly it banned them during certain months from midtown, the area where automotive traffic most urgently needs to be reduced or eliminated. Most ludicrous of all, it gave the police summary powers to ban pedicabs whenever our Finest deem them to be a threat to "heavy vehicular traffic" - which translates as whenever they damn well feel like it.
One irony is that NY City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (and her excellent predecessor Gifford Miller) represent a giant step forward in quality and leadership from the corrupt status-quo-ism that once prevailed. But compared to so many other major metropolises, who for years have been taking aggressive steps to fight the metastasizing cancer of cars and reverse some of the incalculable devastation they've caused, New York City has done very little. Yes we have bike lanes, but no, they're not policed: traffic encroaches on them at will, often at great danger to their legitimate users. Yes, we have a superb system of Parks but cars are still allowed to infest them and menace the lives of their legitimate users. No-go areas and pedestrian precincts, a commonplace in other great cities, are virtually non-existent here; no meaningful steps have been taken to reduce congestion (as has been successfully done for example in London) or to penalize the insane suburban stampede into our city of up to a million vehicles a day, where they belch their egocentric fumes into our lungs, making our children's asthma rates look like those in industrial cities a century ago.
Pedicabs of course are a miniscule element in what has be done to take back New York City from the car, but they're a giant symbol of just how paper-thin the Democrats' commitment to creative eco-change is, once the usual gang of automotive interests gets out its brass knuckles. If this can happen on a city level, you have to wonder what will transpire when Congressional Democrats are faced with a choice between their usual kowtowing to an industry just as entrenched and lethal to our health and wellbeing as Big Tobacco - and the drastic new measures we must have to clamp down on the principal cause of global warming.
For good measure this bully-boy bill reminds us that Mayor Bloomberg who has vowed to sign it, is not above a Giuliani-style curb-bashing of a small, vulnerable and hardworking segment of the city's population. Shame on you Speaker Quinn. You're better than that.