Death By 6,000 Bikes

As soon as I saw a clip of this on The Daily Show last night, I knew I had to find the whole thing. Thank God for You Tube.

The video features Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, sounding every inch like the crabby old lady she looks like, about a new program in New York City that's the equivalent of Toronto's Bixi bike-sharing program. To Ms. Rabinowitz, who has the audacity to compare herself to the "average" New Yorker, the recent addition of these bikes to New York City streets is "dreadful" and "totalitarian," and described Mayor Michael Bloomberg is "autocratic" and "a practiced denier" and that City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is "ideology-maddened."

"Do not ask me to enter the minds of the totalitarians running this government of the city," she said when asked why the Powers-That-Be in NYC decided to move ahead with the program before adding that "the bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise."

Leaving aside the bicyclists and their $3,200 suits driving Porsches, it's worth noting that this did not happen in a void. Point of fact, Citi Bike, like most municipal programs, was in the works for years with hundreds of hours of consultation with the general public and was not some cockamamie idea that Bloomberg had over the weekend. And although, yes, there have been some neighbourhoods in New York less than pleased with the "sudden" appearance of the bright blue two-wheelers, there are also other neighbourhoods who desperately want them. And one would think that a newspaper that prides itself on the promotion of private enterprise might at least be pleased that for its first five years anyway, not one red cent of public money is being spent on Citi Bike. Honestly, this might be the best thing that the program's namesake, Citigroup, has ever done.

As for Dotty, it's highly unlikely that she's going to get on a bike anytime soon. It would be a surrender on par with Yorktown after all, and it would give the ball to that autocratic bike lobby who will spread the gospel of good health and zero carbon emissions from one end of the United State to the other. God save them. Check out the video clip below: