Streetsblog New York City

For what possible reason could these businesses be interested in getting rid of the improvements to Gansevoort Plaza? It's not like there was parking spaces there beforehand -- it was just a mess. Now there is a nice place that invites people. You'd think that would be attractive to businesses. I truly do not understand.

The businesses in question are restaurants and bars that want untrammeled drive-up taxi access restored.

Streetsblog, in your followup stories, please name the "business interests" that oppose ped improvements. I need to know their names so I can boycott them. I don't live in the West Village, but I get there fairly often, and I want to make sure those businesses never get another penny of my money. I have a long memory.

I'm pretty sure that Mark is not a cyclist, and that there is something to be said for the obtuseness of business owners in these cases. They act like nothing they do to their customers, directly or indirectly, will matter, then express ever greater outrage as they lose business to chain stores—because of thousands of people having an "emotional one-man boycott." Look at Whole Foods. Everyone knows they are no angels, but the company makes up for it in the public subconscious with marketing and inventory that is tailored to this century, and by running their checkouts like they don't actually want to waste your time. Other chains (CVS?) may operate exactly as poorly in NYC as their locally owned counterparts but they're able to blast sophisticated branding at people once they go home and turn on the television, replacing actual bad store experiences in memory with idealized ones in brightly lit, impecable studio stores.

The sad fact is that businesses anywhere without the benefit of consistently funded national brand uplift have to work twice as hard, but it often seems like they are doing so in the wrong direction. We don't even know who we're talking about here—maybe someone can report back from the meeting—but there's that ridiculous grocer's association that is suicidal enough to publicly take positions against livable streets and antagonize anyone that supports its policies with a regularly updated weblog dedicated to their regressive positions. It's incredibly counter-productive for them to do such a thing, but they can't see past their own immediate driving and parking costs to realize it. So they take their image further into the dirt, such that you can hardly imagine the kind of yuppy archetype that everyone hates but also needs as a customer choosing an independent grocer over WF for a mid-week grocery run. And yet, they blame all their misfortune on the chains, or on the mayor. Sad.

More information is always a good thing. We should know who these business are, and they should know that we are not happy with the position they have taken. Nobody should have to go in to a NY place of business announcing "hey everybody, I WALKED here imagine that!" for them to realize that that is true of most of their customers. Even for restaurants and bars, I woud bet they get a lot more walked-over (from home or subway) vs. cabbed-over customers than they realize. We're not and won't be as visible, but our twenties are just as green.