Some of us do rely on open streets
Brooklyn: Willoughby Ave. in Brooklyn has been closed since the pandemic started. It supposedly served to give people in the neighborhood more space to get out during those tense months. What it has caused is a clear division between the haves and the have-nots. Those who had to work through the pandemic had to navigate this closure on a daily basis, while an 83-year-old woman with arthritic knees had to hobble outside to move the barricades to let the Access-ARide into the block for her 87-year-old husband to get the medical care he needed. He has since passed away. Another 83-year-old woman had to endure longer trips to Methodist Hospital because Vanderbilt Ave., a major thoroughfare to the hospital, had to be closed off so the haves could dine in the street unencumbered by traffic.
Gersh Kuntzman is the Kellyanne Conway of the anti-car movement. His assessment of street usage (“Reimagine NYC’s streets, now,” op-ed, Sept. 19) is no more than bourgeois phantasmagoria. It is an extremist view seemingly backed by the heavily financed lobby Transportation Alternatives, a lobby that has had, from all appearances, a ridiculously close if not incestuous relationship with both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, as well as the NYC DOT.
It is time for an investigation by the state and federal government into just how much influence the anti-car lobby has had over street usage policy and its implementation in NYC. The closing of streets and the extremism of this lobby belies any reality of the effects these decisions have on the elderly, infirm and those with special needs. Emergency and essential services can not get through the traffic and are being severely compromised.
Oh, that’s right, Gersh, those people don’t matter. Let them eat cake.