Is NYC’s “Sustainable Streets” Plan a Communist Plot?

by Aaron Naparstek on August 27, 2008

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This week's Observer is running a profile of DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. It focuses on the speed with which many of DOT's Sustainable Streets projects are moving ahead and seems to suggest either:

a) Improving conditions for New York City's pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders is a Communist plot. Or,
b) The change that Sadik-Khan is bringing to New York City's streets is akin to the Russian Revolution.

You be the judge:

On the ideological scale of transportation planning, her policies err far closer to Trotsky than Reagan. She is decidedly pro-bike and pro-pedestrian, and thus inherently anti-automobile, earning her constant praise from the normally critical transit advocates.

This raises some obvious questions. If Sadik-Khan is Leon Trotsky does that mean suburban Westchester Assemblyman and congestion pricing foe Richard Brodsky is Josef Stalin? Will Sadik-Khan be exiled to an upstate gulag when Bloomberg is term-limited out of office?

All fun and games aside, as we gird ourselves for the Tony Avellafication of the 2009 mayoral race, the last two paragraphs of the article are worth discussing:

With many of Ms. Sadik-Khan’s key initiatives, there is a potential lack of permanency. The same features that allow the DOT’s projects to get in the ground swiftly could also seal their fate in a future administration: The city has claimed lanes of Broadway as open space with some epoxy, sand, paint, plants and tables, yet a future administration could just as easily pack up those tables and put lane markers right back down on the roadway.

This prospect seemed almost incomprehensible to Ms. Sadik-Khan, who seemed to think that public resistance to it would prove too great, the ease of removal notwithstanding. “People are very protective about their public space,” she said. “I think it would be very hard to take these spaces back to the state that they were in before.”