The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on New York’s West Side cycle path, my heart sank. Now, you might think that any decent human being — I marginally qualify — would be profoundly saddened by the pointless murder of folks merely out enjoying a city’s recreational facilities on a crisp autumn day. But that wasn’t it.
Or you might think — since I spend a fair whack of the year in New York, where as usual I get everywhere by bike — that I might be concerned about becoming a terrorist target myself. I use that bike path constantly in summer. Had the attack occurred earlier in the year, one of those victims could have been me. But that wasn’t it, either.
Maybe this means I don’t qualify as decent after all, but what plunged me into despair was the immediate certainty that the powers-that-be would rush to utterly destroy a vital transportation route in the name of protecting it.
And wasn’t I right. In fact, New York’s heavy-handed security measures for that bike path, under way two days later, have proven even worse than I expected: more clumsy, more poorly thought-out, more visually grotesque, more damaging to the whole purpose of that pathway, and — get this — more dangerous.
Let’s fill in the picture. Running the length of Manhattan alongside the Hudson River, the West Side bikeway is the busiest cycle route in North America. Officially, it’s intermittently mixed use, but in practice it’s entirely mixed use. Runners, the weaving walkers praying over mobiles and the parents with strollers the size of five-bed caravans never notice that the city has built them an entire parallel walkway, replete with comely landscaping, where their dreamy ambling would not impede two-wheelers who actually need to get somewhere.
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