Rich Mintz  

Taxi medallion owners in NYC are up in arms over a proposal adopted this week to allow the sale of a special class of livery cab medallions that will allow street hails. This sort of thing is probably uninteresting to anyone outside New York, but the gist of it is this:

The supply of NYC taxis (the cabs in the familiar yellow livery) is constrained by the city. To put one into service, you don’t just have to comply with a long list of very specific regulations regarding the equipment; you also have to purchase a medallion giving you the right to own one. New medallions are not being issued, which means there is a speculative market in them, and the going price is several hundred thousand dollars.

NYC taxis cruise the streets of Manhattan (below 96th Street) frequently and are easy to hail. In certain parts of Brooklyn, they’re easy to hail. In the rest of the city (where the vast majority of New Yorkers live), they are few and far between. (This is the market in action; cabbies go where the density of business is.) As a result, people outside Manhattan tend to use livery cabs.

Livery cabs are also regulated by the city, but much more loosely, and no medallion is required. They are enjoined from picking up street hails, although often they do.

The city has adopted a proposal that will sell medallions for livery cabs for $10,000 permitting street hails. Medallion livery cabs will be required to install meters, and will presumably be subject to a range of other normalizing measures to protect consumers in the same way that medallion taxis are.

Taxi medallion owners (who are, on the whole, not taxi drivers or taxi owners, but investment syndicates) are concerned in effect that their rents — the money they receive as a result of owning something, not of doing anything — are being put at risk. But I don’t understand why. The new class of medallion livery cabs won’t be permitted to pick up street hails in Manhattan or at the airports, which is where the yellow cabs all operate anyway. And it’s not as though the market can’t support more supply; have you tried to get a cab at 5pm in Manhattan?

Let the market work, I say. It’s undisputed that there are millions (literally millions) of New Yorkers who can’t hail a cab in their own neighborhoods and would do so if they could. Theoretical (not actual, but theoretical) financial loss to a few dozen speculators should outweigh actual daily inconvenience to millions of people?

Thanks largely to decades of incentive zoning, Manhattan is full of privately owned, municipally owned, and institutionally owned plazas, arcades, and other types of quasi-public space. Some of these spaces are gorgeous (I’m looking at you, Elevated Acre); but many are windswept plazas with a few sad chairs, or cavernous semi-climate-controlled lobbies patrolled by wary security guards.

New Yorkers are desperate for public space, though, and even when we don’t love these places we use them intensely. One of the most frustrating things about Occupy for the other (OK, I’ll say it) 99% of us who live and work in lower Manhattan is that it effectively privatized Zuccotti Park, a surprisingly well-trafficked park, recently renovated and refreshed, occupying a tight square block in this dense neighborhood.

One of my favorite public spaces in the entire city has been open for three years, but I only discovered it recently, and since I did I’ve been back over and over. It’s the grand glass lobby of the 2009-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. As The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger wrote in 2009:

In terms of its configuration and the precision of its details, this is probably the most urbane lobby at Lincoln Center. It avoids the grandiosity of Philip Johnson’s space at the State Theatre and the sappy romanticism of Wallace K. Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera lobby. One wall of the new lobby is covered in muirapiranga, a Brazilian wood, set in narrow tongue-and-groove panels. There is a huge freestanding café bar made of Portuguese limestone, with one end sculpted in the form of a flying wedge. It looks like a model of a building by Zaha Hadid, but more elegant.

Because of the soaring glass curtain walls, this lobby is in effect a grand indoor plaza, feeling fully open to Broadway and to 65th Street on two sides. When you’re there on a sunny afternoon, as I was recently, the sunlight streams in. Half the room is furnished with cafe and bar tables, open to use by anyone (the lobby seems to be open to the public at all hours of the day and evening), and in the afternoon and evening, an excellent cafe/bar counter (from the school of “art institution catering,” i.e., artisanal beet salad, not hot dogs) serves reliable, interesting small plates and stocks a full range of beverages. The other half is the open entrance lobby for Alice Tully Hall, which serves as overflow cafe and sitting space during the day.

Because of my schedule I’m typically there in the late afternoon or early evening, when the daytime crowd is starting to give way to a well-dressed and usually older (depending on the evening’s program) night crowd. You get the full people-watching experience, both inside and out, something to eat, and a cheery public space with a pleasant bustle to read your email or whatever.

That’s what this dude on a fixie said who plowed his bike at about 10 miles an hour into a fat guy in a suit getting into a taxi on 6th Avenue yesterday afternoon. (I was standing about 10 feet away, on the sidewalk, holding my bike handlebars, with a helmet on.) He basically bounced off (fat guy, remember), and nobody was hurt, but everyone involved was embarrassed and pissed off at everyone else.

Not to be uncharitable, but “I don’t have any brakes” isn’t much of an excuse, and neither is “I was going too fast.” The poor cabbie had done his job and stopped in traffic with the bike lane clear; the suit just took a little long to get into the cab, and bike guy wasn’t looking far enough up the road. (LESSON ONE. Enough said.)

Ten points for honesty, there, but hey, watch out! And if you can’t stop in 50 feet at the speed you’re going with the equipment you have, you either need to get some goddam brakes or, I dunno, maybe not ride so fast in the curb lane on congested 6th Avenue? And before you lay into me (I don’t know what “you” I think I’m talking to, this doesn’t apply to anyone I know personally to be reading this blog, but anyway), yeah, I know the fixie “riding experience” is more authentic, and brakes “are no guarantee of stopping” and so forth, sure. I’ll even buy a fixie eventually (I predict it’ll be my eighth bike). But the whole point of riding in the city is not to plow into things, so, you know, TAKE NOTE.

Okay, so that’s taking it a bit far. Nobody was hit, nobody was hurt. Still, I fell off my bike, on a New York street! On top of a Chinese man!

Here’s what happened: I was on a ride I do often from the Upper West Side downtown, stopped at a light on the far left side of 9th Avenue, in the mid-forties, where the Lincoln Tunnel traffic bunches up. It’s congested along here, but I still prefer it to going anywhere near 7th Avenue in the forties, and if you’re heading south, you’ve got to go somewhere.

I was in the left parking lane, next to a parked car, with a stopped taxi on my right. An apparently-Chinese man on a bike came up on my left, heading into the intersection, apparently thinking he’d clear? Not concerned about why I might be stopped? Oblivious to all the pedestrians? Who knows. In any case, he didn’t clear, and he got wedged in a drainage plate in the corner dip. He fell over to his left onto a bunch of people waiting to cross the street; he reached out to grab onto me (because I was there); I, and my bike, fell over on top of him.

Nobody was hurt, no pedestrians complained, everyone just helped each other up, Chinese guy and I checked to make sure we were both okay, and we all went on our way. But now I can say I’ve been in an accident!

I’ve been wanting to put on some extra miles, so this afternoon I decided to do a Brooklyn loop over two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg. You can see my route here:

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)

OK, sure, I like greenmarkets as much as the next guy, but aren’t these people coming off as a little… whiny?

If you live in Southbridge Towers, not only do you have a (rundown, grungy, crowded, but serviceable) supermarket in your complex, you have Jubilee 2 blocks away, Zeytuna 3 blocks away, and a bright new Gristedes 4 blocks away, all of which are well-run and well-stocked, with lots of local and organic items. Zeytuna alone has about 100 varieties of olive oil. There’s a Whole Foods 5 minutes away by cab (and right on the M22), right near those greenmarkets they’re complaining are too far away.

I get it, farm-to-table is nice to have. But, hello, a record number of New Yorkers are on food stamps — I don’t consider “farmer’s market is 8 blocks away” a serious social problem.

This idea of building a land bridge to Governor’s Island — is it serious? Whether it’s actually a good idea or not, I’ll leave to the experts, but wouldn’t it be awesome to make some more Manhattan and connect it to a great big park?

The governor, prodded by Christine Quinn, has called upon New York City to stop fingerprinting applicants for food benefits, which according to a City Council analysis deters 20,000 people from claiming needed aid they are eligible for. That’s 20,000 families going hungry unnecessarily, for fear of fraud.

But the scale of actual fraud is tiny (as is virtually always the case when fraud is cited). The city says that in the last fiscal year, $4 million was saved through fingerprinting, through 1,200 duplications. 1.8 million people in New York City receive food stamps, meaning that the fraud rate is two-thirds of a tenth of one percent. Or, put another way, the number of families going hungry because of this policy is 17 times the number of fraud cases. Isn’t something wrong here?

I just saw NYC human resources commissioner Robert Doar on NY1 calling fingerprinting a simple and effective measure, but I doubt that the sort of people Doar (and Bloomberg) run with would put up with being fingerprinted so easily. Doar is a good guy, and should have enough sense to understand that New York City’s most vulnerable are the very ones who need fewer hurdles to jump, not more. Not to mention that even hungry people are entitled to a full measure of human dignity. Not being able to afford enough to eat is not a crime.

We all know the yahoo New York press has manufactured a bike lane culture war, because old people don’t like change, and certain of those old people are used to getting their way and go batshit when they don’t. But it’s nice to see the actual facts bearing out what everyone who thinks about it for 30 seconds can figure out for themselves: bike lanes don’t “cause accidents,” and if the data were more complete, it would likely be demonstrated that they reduced them. That, at least, is the on-the-record conclusion of one of the study’s authors, transportation engineer Cindy Chen.

If you’ve ever been on a bike on a city street, trying to ride safely and not get hit by guided missiles 15 times your weight going 8 times your speed, you would intuitively understand that establishing a designated part of the street where drivers and pedestrians should expect to see bicycles would likely reduce bicycle-car and bicycle-pedestrian collisions, because some huge fraction (90%?) of collisions are due to one party “not seeing” the other. (The other 10%: equipment failure, other operator error, and the occasional instance of homicidal or suicidal mania.)

In other words, “duh.” But studies by the DOT are mistrusted by … well, by people with a political agenda, is the polite thing to call them. So it’s nice to see an independent academic study bearing out these common-sense results.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg named five board members for the proposed World Trade Center Performing Arts Center, securing $155 million in funding before the December 31st deadline.

This will be a nice thing to have in the neighborhood, and I’m not griping, exactly; but even in New York, couldn’t a 1,000-seat theatre be built for a lot less than $155 million? That feels like an awful lot of money in tight times. (It’s roughly in the same range as the operating budget for twenty NYC public elementary schools.)