New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn gets a rough ride in this New York Times piece:
In the past several months, even members of the Bloomberg administration have begun to acknowledge that Ms. Sadik-Khan’s aggressive style, so effective at first, may have morphed into a liability. The mayor, who found himself booed over bicycle lanes at a town hall meeting in Queens in January, spoke with Ms. Sadik-Khan, and they agreed she would solicit more opinions from neighborhood leaders. Since then, she has been making conciliatory phone calls to City Council members, adopting a friendlier tone and proposing more collaboration.
As Mia Birk pointed out in her lecture for the SFU City Program, you only know you’re actually achieving something when you get resistence. But what’s most concerning about the reaction in New York is who’s getting disturbed. The Times artcile starts with this anecdote:
ON a balmy night last June, the city’s Congressional delegation gathered for dinner at Gracie Mansion. Representative Anthony D. Weiner, who aspires to live in the mansion someday, knew he would have only a few minutes with the host, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. So he brought up the hottest topic he could think of: bicycle lanes, and the transportation commissioner who had nearly doubled the number of them, Janette Sadik-Khan.
When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing?” Mr. Weiner said to Mr. Bloomberg, as tablemates listened. “I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes.”
Weiner is one of the American Congress’s more liberal representatives (he was Jon Stewart’s room-mate). So if he figures it’s safe political ground to “tear out” bike lanes, that’s worth paying attention to.
On the other hand, it’s a universal response to the new and different. In this video, engineer Gary Toth notes near the end how even the most mainstream of road-engineering designs, like grade-separated interchanges, were considered too radical and visionary for their time.
Quite frankly, I rather have a “politician” like hers who walks the talk and is willing to anger people than the wishy washy “let’s talk about this until we all forget about it” approach that is so common in politics these days.
Will I like everything that’s getting done? Probably not, but overall we need to get a move on in many aspects and sitting around a campfire trying to reach consensus is really no longer an option.
How was that? “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than asking for permission.”
I don’t think they’ll get ripped up at all. It’s common with controversial initiatives that the people who brought them in lose their power rather quickly, but the people who replace them end up sticking with the plan, and often expanding it. Take the Liberals keeping the GST after beating the PCs or the Socreds keeping ICBC and the ALR following Barrett’s brief tenure as prime examples north of the border.