Pat, I don’t know where you get the “in your face behavior” idea, unless you were there. I mean, a 58-year-old St. Vincent’s nurse concerned about a needless arrest is in the officer’s face? Are you serious? Joking?

You seem to believe that any bicyclist that doesn’t ride a bike too precious to park on the street should be kept off the streets altogether. I ride an inexpensive bike so that I can feel comfortable locking up in whatever neighborhood I care to stop in. Occasionally I will park overnight and rarely, for several days. The freedom to do so is a key virtue of using a bike for transport in NYC. Does that make me “scum”?

Personally, I wouldn’t think of locking my $650 Bianchi to a parking meter for more than a few minutes. I would think that unless you have some junker that you wouldn’t care one way or the other if it got ripped off, you wouldn’t do so either. Maybe the City should franchise a bike locking device contract where you place your bike in a secure devise and swipe a credit card to retrieve it. That would work for me. But it probably wouldn’t work for the majority of cycling scum who think they have a perfect right to do whatever they want, like blowing red lights and stop signs in the opposite direction and terrorizing pedestrians in the process. No rant on my end if there is no Norman Siegel on yours. Deal?

Here’s an example of one of the self-help measures enmployed to address the inadequacy of legal bicycle parking:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43954081@N00/385659996/

NYC living has people in small quarters
no space for the bicycle
not to mention the issue of taking the bicycles in and out of the building

all forcing the cyclists to store their bicycles on the street

sounds like the city could create bicycle lockers or bicycle lock zones

just as there is car parking and motorcycle parking

why is there no legal bicycle parking?

clearly all the car drivers do not have to rent garage space

We have cops arresting journalists for taking pictures of a fire (from The Villager), we have cops spying on peaceful anti-war groups (in all media, here’s a Villager report), and we have cops stealing bikes while their own personal cars are parked illegally on sidewalks using fake parking permits!

And free today only, we have rookie girl-on-girl Cops Gone Wild videos, too! (No, not really, but at least that’s less disgraceful than these other police problems.)

http://5bbc.org/bicycletter/200509/bikeparkingillegal.shtml

Or click on my name here to go there directly. The article has a link to the text of NYC Administrative Code 16-122(b) which outlaws leaving “movable property” on any “street or public place”. As usual, it doesn’t seem to apply to parked cars, even when they are parked on the sidewalk.