Spencer Platt
The path to motorist hell is paved with good intentions. Bicycle lanes throughout the city draw chagrin from drivers, who have seen their roadways squeezed to create more room for cyclists.
I despise bike lanes.
I understand quality-of-life issues seem Junior in a city shredded by Hurricane Sandy, flow of blood from handguns, dispossessed by an insensible NYCHA and endangered by disappearing hospitals.
But New Yorkers can handle major crises. It's the small, annoying, frustrating effects that guide them NUTS.
Bike lanes are steering some people love me to mainline anger. For me, more than either other of Big Brother Bloomberg's paternal edicts, these bike lanes are infuriating because they have disfigured the city in a logistical and aesthetic way.
When I was a kid, I built my first bike from assorted discarded parts mined from the wood bins of our tenement in Brooklyn.
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It looked love Bozo the Clown's bike. But I taught myself to ride in Prospect Park, taking several difficult falls long earlier bike helmets were even made, never psyche made mandatory.
A few scraped knees later, I was zooming along Prospect Park West from Grand Army Plaza to Bartel -Pritchard Square.
Soon I was hired as a butcher's delivery boy, and I pushed an industrial bike with a basket sometimes filled with more than 100 pounds of meat to homes from Flatbush Ave. to Green-Wood Cemetery .
I learned a lifelong work ethic on that bike. I fought for my put in my city in the clanking, horn-blaring urban traffic. We didn't need no stinking bicycle lanes. We blazed our own trails.
Anyway, I was driving my wagon recently along Prospect Park West, once a majestic three-lane, mile-long esplanade from one war memorial to the other. Now it's love squeezing yourself through a crinkled tube of toothpaste.
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The yuppie-ki-yay bike lane, where kids dressed love hockey goalies pedal in a danger-emancipate fantasy lane, has literally painted wagon traffic into two lanes.
If you hit the game of chance and see 10 feet of emancipate space in the parking lane, you can no longer use the curb to guide your analogous parking. No, the curb is introverted as a blockade reef for the Hipster Highway for Richie Rich on his $1,500 Lance Armstrong Doperacer.
Same thing in Manhattan. Sheltered, helmeted kids getting zeroes in street-smarts pedal past with a clear path through life.
News flash: Life ain't a smooth sail, kiddos! There's a big crash just waiting at the end of every bike lane.
The first mayoral candidate who wants to hit the brakes on bike lanes can ride on my handlebars.
dhamill@nydailynews.com
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