This Would Be a Crime If a Republican Did It

The real reason for New York City's traffic nightmare

City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles, high-level sources told The Post.

Today’s gridlock is the result of an effort by the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations over more than a decade of redesigning streets and ramping up police efforts, the sources said.

“The traffic is being engineered,” a former top NYPD official told The Post, explaining a long-term plan that began under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and hasn’t slowed with Mayor de Blasio.

“The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion, to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians,” the former official said.

“There’s a reduction in capacity through the introduction of bike lanes and streets and lanes being closed down.”

The concerted effort includes:

• Pedestrian plazas that have cut off entire lanes of traffic and created bottlenecks.
• Protected bike lanes on major avenues that eat up a traffic lane and force trucks to double park.
• Cross streets where turns are forbidden on nearly all avenues.
• Intersections where drivers must wait for green arrows to turn onto avenues.
• Ordering traffic agents to focus more on writing tickets and less on directing traffic.

The goal of the jammed traffic is to shift as many drivers as possible to public transit or bicycles.

An added benefit was supposed to be safer streets, but city officials have said that while 45,000 fewer cars and trucks now come into Midtown daily than in 2010, pedestrian deaths are on the uptick this year.

And exactly what is Chris Christie administration under  investigation for? Manipulating traffic for political reasons? The Devil you say!

Yes, Bloomberg is nominally a Republican, but I don't know anyone who actually takes that seriously.

Fairy Tale Creature in the Path of the Purple Line

Purple Line transit project opponents sue to protect tiny species they can’t even find

Kenk's Amphipod

American University professor David Culver spent a week in April hunting through damp spots in the forest floor in Montgomery County in hope of finding rare varieties of tiny, shrimp-like creatures called amphipods.

He didn’t find any. Not a one.

This might have been a major setback for the folks who hired the environmental scientist. They’re paying Culver thousands of dollars with the goal of blocking plans for the light-rail Purple Line in suburban Maryland on grounds that it threatens the critters with extinction.

Hay's Spring Amphipod

But they can’t make their case if the miniature crustaceans aren’t there to protect.

So, did Culver’s failure stop opponents from suing to thwart the project under the Endangered Species Act?

No way! They went right ahead and filed a federal civil complaint on Tuesday.

It’s all just a legal gimmick, of course.

Having failed to kill or reroute the Purple Line despite years of agitation, a small but resolute band of critics is exploiting a pair of amphipod species in what could be the final, serious bid to disrupt the transit project.

I have no specific love for the Hay's Spring or Kenk's Ampipod (who I blogged about in this regard back in December), or the Purple Line of the Metro, but I am amused that this fight sets two members of the environmental coalition at war. The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) crowd is opposed by the likes of the Sierra Club, who would rather see people confined in cattle cars on the Metro than running free on the Beltway:

“Any major project . . . is going to have some negatives,” David Sears, vice chairman of the Sierra Club in Montgomery County, said. “It’s our considered opinion that the net plus is considerable, and the Purple Line is the way we want to go.”

You'd think that after all the fuss they made over the Snail Darter, this might be a bit embarrassing.

As for the importance of the amphipods?

“I do not think that, say, in Rock Creek they’re important in the ecosystem,” said Culver, a leading expert on amphipod habitat.

There you have it.