People have been visiting Paris for centuries for the food, the wine, the museums, the cheese and plane the snails, but when New Yorkers throne to the Municipality of Light these days, all they see are the velocipede lanes.
That’s what a half-dozen envious Gothamites told Streetfilms upon their return from the French wanted for his new movie, “Paris vs NYC: What It’s Like to Bike”
Double-wide velocipede lanes! Contra-flow velocipede lanes! Bikes lanes on car-free streets! Velocipede lanes velocipede lanes velocipede lanes.
But when you see unconfined velocipede lanes in Paris, you’re not just looking at good transport policy. You’re seeing the future.
“They are towers the municipality they want to see, not the municipality as it is now,” Kate Fillin-Yeh, a Harlem resident, told Clarence Eckerson in the viral video below. (Fillin-Yeh knows something well-nigh cities: She’s director of strategy at NACTO, the National Association of Municipality Transportation Officials.)
But Fillin-Yeh is whimsically vacated in wishing New York would stop designing the municipality to unbend existing road users — 75 percent of all space for car drivers, for example, rather than the majority of space for bus riders, pedestrians and cyclists — rather than the mode share the municipality claims it is trying to unzip for its non-car-using majority.
Also seeming in the mucosa is like a Streetsblog Hall of Fame of talking heads: Mike Lydon of Street Plans, New Third Avenue well-wisher Paul Krikler, Queens velocipede well-wisher (and Queen of Twitter) CJ Wojtkowski, and, Streetsblog Editor Gersh Kuntzman.
Check it out below, and share it with Mayor Adams.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFKCfdXHJA]